Rationalist philosophers including Descartes and Leibniz documented innate ideas and a priori concepts that resist reduction to sensory impressions, constituting independent counterevidence.
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Thinkers who believed that human reason and logic are the most reliable ways to discover truth, rather than relying mainly on what we learn through our five senses.
a priori concepts(A93–94/B126)
Concepts that serve as conditions of the possibility of experience, applying either to the intuition encountered in experience or to the thinking involved in experience.
innate ideas(Leibniz's rationalist account of the source of necessary knowledge)
Ideas and principles present in the mind prior to and independent of sensory experience, enabling grasp of necessary truths.
reduction (in philosophy)(used in this statement about whether one question can be reduced to another)
A claim that something complex can be completely explained or replaced by something simpler—the idea that one thing really just boils down to another.
sensory impressions(the source material that ideas are supposedly copied from)
The raw, direct experiences you have through your five senses—like the redness you see when looking at an apple or the heat you feel from a fire.