The two sides disagree sharply — yet both presuppose the same divide between what is and how it is known.
The old divide
Empiricism roots knowledge in the immediacy of perception. Rationalism roots knowledge in the necessity of reason. One leans outward toward the world, the other inward toward the mind.
The struggle depends on imagining two separate sources: “raw data” of experience on the one hand, “pure logic” on the other. But can either ever be found apart from meaning?
The relational shift
If being is meaning, then both “raw sense data” and “pure reason” are illusions.
There is no uninterpreted sensory input: perception is already construed as meaningful.
There is no reason operating outside construal: rational inference is itself a mode of meaning, reflexively aligning phenomena.
A relational ontology reframes the debate:
Ontology = the systemic potential of meaning-being, in which perception and reason are not separate sources but complementary modalities.
Epistemology = the reflexive construal that phases between phenomenal immediacy (experience) and metaphenomenal alignment (reasoning).
Why this matters
The empiricism–rationalism debate survives only so long as we imagine a split between the world’s givenness and the mind’s activity. Once we recognise that phenomena are always already construed, and that reason is itself a symbolic construal, the opposition evaporates.
Both experience and reason are phases of the same process: the unfolding of meaning-being.
The pay-off
Empiricism misleads by positing data before meaning; rationalism misleads by positing reason beyond meaning. Both replicate the ontology/epistemology divide in miniature.
In a universe where being is meaning, knowledge is neither extracted from sensory givens nor deduced from abstract principles. It is the reflexive movement of construal itself, phasing between immediacy and abstraction, phenomena and metaphenomena.
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