Alternative to Human Understanding Through a Critique

Both Descartes and Hume insisted on an absolute either-or approach in terms of how true knowledge is acquired, though they failed to realize that they both used reasoning and experience to make their claims. Hume used reasoning within his assertions, saying that there is a problem due to an absence of reasoning. Without the use of reason, it would not matter if reason was used to justify something or not. One example includes an infant learning through experience; Hume then reasons that the infant would need to know something that the rest of “us” do not know if he/she learned from reasoning. Descartes, too, used experience; in an example of his, he asserted that his senses can and have deceived him, and therefore decided that he could not rely on experience (because it involves senses), even though it was experience that caused him to come to this conclusion. Obviously, both experience and reasoning are needed to “know” anything.