  Rationalists, unaware of the local origins of the universal principles that they imagine they have identified, reject knowledge gained through experience in favor of something they call reason or science. Whether deductive or computational, this abstract reason is thought to guarantee greater certainty than experience and judgment can provide. The fallacy of Rationalism, in other words, is that the knowledge that it identifies as rational is itself really a product of experience and judgment. It consists of rules, methods, or techniques abstracted from practice—tools that, far from being substitutes for experience and judgment, cannot be effectively used in their absence.