Two competing philosophical perspectives used in science are rationalism and empiricism. Each is a type of epistemology that is a theory of knowledge for understanding how to uncover the answer to a question. Gale (1979) labeled these alternative epistemologies as centrally concerned with the power of reason and the power of sensory experience. Gale noted similarity in the divergent views of science in the time of the classical Greeks. For example, Aristotle believed that advances in biological science would develop through systematic observation of objects and events in the natural world, whereas Pythagoras believed that knowledge of the natural world would develop from mathematical reasoning (Brown, 1977; Gale, 1979).
