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em·pir·i·cism (ĕm-pîr'ĭ-sĭz'əm) 
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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:
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Geography Dictionary:
empiricism |
The theory that all concepts emanate from experience and that all statements claiming to express knowledge must be based on experience rather than on theory. Valid statements must be based on what can be proved to exist, not on what appears to exist. This is known as ontological privilege since ontology relates to the being or essence of things. Such statements must be able to be declared true or false without reference to theoretical statements. This is epistemological privilege since epistemology is the study of knowledge. Knowledge is held to be substantiated by justification derived from observed facts.
Empiricism is the basis of scientific knowledge, in geography as in many other disciplines, and many human geographers search for general principles and laws in the light of the data which they have accumulated. It has, however, been attacked by
Literary Dictionary:
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empiricism
Philosophy Dictionary:
empiricism |
The permanent strand in philosophy that attempts to tie knowledge to experience. Experience is thought of either as the sensory contents of consciousness, or as whatever is expressed in some designated class of statements that can be observed to be true by the use of the senses. Empiricism denies that there is any knowledge outside this class, or at least outside whatever is given by legitimate theorizing on the basis of this class. It may take the form of denying that there is any a priori knowledge, or knowledge of necessary truths, or any innate or intuitive knowledge or general principles gaining credibility simply through the use of reason; it is thus principally contrasted with rationalism. An empiricist account of our concepts will hold that they depend upon experience: ‘nihil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu’ (nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses). Some philosophers such as Aquinas have held this principle without denying that reason can apprehend knowledge, provided it uses the materials afforded by the senses. One of the main problems for empiricism is to accommodate the way in which thought does not just derive from experience, but provides us with categories with which to organize it. The necessity for such addition (and its legitimacy) is the central theme of the Critique of Pure Reason of Kant. Radical empiricism, as espoused by James, holds that the relations between experiences that are implied in their organization are themselves objects of observation. The key problems for empiricism include avoiding a picture according to which the subject knows nothing but experiences of the present moment (scepticism), demarcating the legitimate basis of theory in observation, defending the view that observation is itself free of non-empirical elements, describing legitimate ways of using observation in building a picture of the world, and explaining or explaining away knowledge that appears to have no basis in experience, notably mathematical, logical, or other a priori knowledge. See also myth of the given.
Archaeology Dictionary:
empiricism |
The theory that all knowledge derives from the senses, and that the data will speak for themselves without the benefit of any explicit theoretical perspective. In the traditional view of empiricism it is believed that the mind of the observer plays no role whatsoever in forming knowledge, and that it somehow comes about as more and more ‘facts’ are discovered. Following the work of Kant and others, this view was modified to allow some role to be given to the mind in forming knowledge, though the problem has always been how to relate the two adequately. In positivism this is solved by the idea of inductivism: the ability to infer general knowledge from particular sensory data. Empiricism of various forms is the dominant epistemology in archaeology; empirical data, achieved mainly through controlled observation, provide the basis of knowledge and are generally kept separate from the distortions of subjectivity and any interpretations made.
Sports Science and Medicine:
empiricism |
Philosophy of science that regards experience as the only source of knowledge. Empiricists seek evidence through direct experience rather than through reasoning or intuition. Their standard method of investigation consists of observations made via the senses, although the observations may be mediated by scientific instruments.
Columbia Encyclopedia:
empiricism |
Bibliography
See L. Bonjour, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (1985); A. H. Goodman, Empirical Knowledge (1988).
History 1450-1789:
Empiricism |
In broad terms, empiricism is the view that experience is the most important or even the only source of knowledge or sound belief. The term itself is of nineteenth-century origin, but the history of empiricism can be traced at least as far back as the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 B.C.E.). With the emergence of Christian civilization, however, belief in the cognitive importance of the senses was no more encouraged than was the pursuit of their pleasures. The Greek philosopher who seemed most consistent with religious belief was Plato, who thought that we needed to escape from the senses in order to achieve true knowledge or, for that matter, happiness. Though it was Aristotle who became "the Philosopher" in the medieval universities and monastic institutions, the empiricist strands in Aristotle's thought were not taken up in any systematic way. One of the best known empiricist maxims, Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit prius in sensu ('There is nothing in the mind that was not previously in the senses') seems to have been first stated by the great medieval Aristotelian and theologian Thomas Aquinas (1224/1225–1274). But empiricism formed no part of his enterprise of reconciling revealed religion with an Aristotelian philosophy.
At the beginning of the early modern period empiricism was not generally regarded as an intellectually defensible position. The word empiric, indeed, was used as a term of abuse, one that referred particularly to quack doctors who rejected the medical orthodoxies of their day, preferring remedies that they claimed worked in experience. While it was acknowledged that everyone has to rely, to some extent, on their sense experiences, many philosophers believed that humans have a faculty of reason that enables them to avoid the errors of the senses. Well into the early modern period the prevalent theories of knowledge and the sciences were ones that have appropriately been called "rationalist" to reflect their stress on reason and abstract argument.
These "rationalist" philosophers were sometimes important figures in the history of the mathematical sciences. This was true of the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), whose view that the essence of matter consists of its geometrical properties was highly influential in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), co-inventor of the differential calculus, could also be counted among the "rationalists." Leibniz accepted that animals learn from experience but thought that the "simple empiric" was no better than they were, insofar as he did not use his reason. For Leibniz, as for many "rationalist" philosophers, reason was the "divine spark" in humankind that set it apart from the rest of creation as capable of knowing the truths not only of mathematics but of morality and religion.
Empiricism was not an organized philosophical point of view at the beginning of the early modern period. It seems remarkable indeed that it developed at all, given the religiously motivated bias and the intellectual contempt felt for it. Yet not only did it develop, but by the eighteenth century it had become and was to remain the most widely accepted philosophy of the sciences.
Francis Bacon and His Influence
The first early modern defender of what would now be called an organized "empiricism" was the English statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626). Bacon maintained that the true philosopher should be neither an empiricist nor a rationalist. The empiricist, he complained, is like an ant that collects much of value but does not put it into a coherent system. The rationalist, on the other hand, was like a spider, who spun wonderful constructions from within itself but whose thoughts did not connect with external reality. The true philosopher, Bacon wrote, should be like the bee that both collects much of value and puts it into an organized system.
What Bacon proposed were empirical methods of "induction," the process of arguing from a collection of instances of a phenomenon to a general conclusion. In his Novum Organum of 1620, Bacon already went beyond the method Leibniz was to dismiss as that of the "simple empiric," who notices resemblances between sequences of events (for instance, thunder repeatedly followed by rain) and arrives at a general conclusion on that basis (for instance, that thunder causes rain). Bacon stressed the importance of observing differences as well as similarities between sequences of events.
Bacon's view of science was in many ways ahead of his time, for his critical empiricism was combined with the view that knowledge would gradually increase and that its pursuit should be cooperative and free of sectarianism. His ideas were taken up by some of the founders of the Royal Society in England, such as Robert Boyle (1627–1691), who is sometimes called "the founder of modern chemistry," and Robert Hooke (1635–1703). Indeed the very aims of the Royal Society as articulated by its first secretary, Henry Oldenburg, sound highly Baconian, especially in their opposition to mere speculation and commitment to exact observations and experiments. The achievements of the great English physicist Isaac Newton (1642–1727) added to the prestige not only of the Royal Society but also of the new "experimental philosophy" with which he was associated.
Bacon had an immense influence on the self-perception of British scientists well into the nineteenth century, and he was also held in wide esteem elsewhere in Europe, for instance by the editors of the Encyclopédie (1751–1765). In his Discours préliminaire (1751; Preliminary discourse) to the Encyclopédie, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (1717–1783), an editor and leading contributor of scientific articles, referred to Bacon as the virtual founder of an experimental natural philosophy, and the Encyclopédie as a whole followed Bacon's tripartite scheme of knowledge.
Empiricism was revived, to some extent independently, by Bacon's younger French contemporary, Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655). Like Bacon, Gassendi was dissatisfied with the philosophical systems of his day, but he sought to avoid the extreme skepticism to which others were driven. Gassendi was inspired to a constructive philosophy by his study of Epicurus, whose philosophy he modified to cut out the points of conflict with Christianity (Gassendi was a priest). Gassendi insisted that our knowledge of the world comes only from experience, and he put forward a form of atomism as a hypothesis for explaining the world. This atomism was taken up by Robert Boyle, among others, and it was important in the development of seventeenth-century science.
John Locke and His Influence
Gassendi's empiricism also influenced the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704). In his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke provided a sustained defense of the empiricist principle that all our ideas come from experience. Prior to Locke it was widely assumed that humans were born with an innate knowledge of certain principles, for instance of right and wrong. His critique of such innate principles was particularly valued as a corrective to the kind of dogmatism that had tended to prevail in moral and religious matters.
The empiricism of Locke was criticized from two different quarters, from followers who thought he had not gone far enough and from critics who thought he had gone too far. To some of his followers the Essay, although it seemed to point in the right direction, was not empirical enough. Locke had included a "rationalist" defense of moral truths and of the existence of God, for instance, claiming for them the kind of knowledge reserved for mathematics. He also, against empiricist principles, allowed that the mind was capable of forming abstract general ideas. To some of his empiricist successors this seemed to reinstate some of the metaphysical abstractions Locke's method and principles had managed to exclude. The Irish freethinker John Toland (1670–1722), for instance, attacked those mathematicians who turned to metaphysics in proposing such concepts as absolute space and time. For Toland the concept of a soul as an immaterial substance was another such untenable abstraction. Toland's radical interpretation of Locke brought out the natural association of empiricism with materialism. Locke sought to dissociate himself from Toland, but he was not entirely able to do so.
Locke was by some measures the most influential philosopher of the eighteenth century, at any rate in Britain and France. There was some controversy between those who supported an empiricism like Locke's and those who favored the more rationalist philosophies of Leibniz or the French priest Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715). But for many the decision was not whether to be for or against Locke, but whether to support a more radical or a more conservative interpretation of his empiricism.
The more radical reading of Locke became very influential in France, where skepticism and materialism were attractive to a number of intellectuals or philosophes, as they were called. These included the aristocratic Voltaire (1694–1778), who was noted for his hostility to the ecclesiastical establishment and for his slogan Écrasez l'infâme! ('Crush the infamous thing!'). In his Lettres philosophiques (1734; Letters on the English) Voltaire praised the new experimental method of Bacon, Locke, and Newton. This English trio was also adulated by many of those involved in the Encyclopédie project. The chief editor, Denis Diderot (1713–1784), was a freethinking empiricist and materialist.
Most British philosophers who followed Locke sought to interpret or modify his philosophy so that it would be compatible with religious belief. This was true of the Irish clergyman George Berkeley (1685–1753), who argued, in effect, that a more consistent empiricism than Locke's would undermine materialism. Berkeley argued that there were no "abstract general ideas," as Locke had allowed, but that the ideas we have are always particular. The concept of "matter" was a scholastic abstraction that was not needed in order to make sense of our experience. Berkeley's conclusion that the only substances in the world were God and spirits like ourselves was generally thought to be unbelievable. His analysis of the mathematical sciences foreshadows the "instrumentalism" common in twentieth century philosophies of physics. He allowed abstractions like "force" and "gravity" into theoretical formulae that were useful for making predictions, even though he did not think it should be supposed that anything answering to these abstractions exists in reality.
Berkeley's philosophy of the mathematical sciences was hardly acknowledged in the eighteenth century. This is surprising in view of the complaint, commonly made against empiricism, that it fails to do justice to the mathematical sciences. On an empiricist account, mathematical truths are only truths about the necessary relations between our ideas and not substantial truths about the world. Empiricism seemed for this reason an unsuccessful philosophy. The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) accepted that our ideas arise in experience and that most of our knowledge is based on our senses. In his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781; Critique of pure reason), however, he argued that the truths of arithmetic and geometry were both necessary and substantial truths about the world, although empiricism cannot strictly allow them. Kant left a highly influential legacy of criticism of empiricism to subsequent philosophy.
The Extreme Empiricism of David Hume
The empiricist philosopher to whom Kant was responding in his first Critique was the Scottish skeptic David Hume (1711–1776). Hume is generally regarded as the most thoroughgoing defender of empiricism and critic of abstract metaphysics of the early modern period. He accepted Berkeley's argument that we have no reason to believe in "material substances" that exist independently of our senses. But similar arguments, he thought, also brought into question the spiritual substances to which Berkeley gave pride of place. All we actually experience, according to Hume, are fleeting impressions. We are not strictly aware of the self. Hume's empiricism thus led him even further than Berkeley had gone from a commonsense position, though he sought to save the situation by arguing that we are bound to hold beliefs that are not strictly warranted by experience.
Hume claimed that he was extending the same experimental method to the sciences of human nature that Newton had shown to be so fruitful in natural philosophy. There is some dispute about how to interpret his deeply probing arguments. On the one hand, his empiricism seemed to lead him to undermine the fundamental principles of scientific inquiry. For instance, it is fundamental to empirical science to be able to assume that the future will be like the past—that we learn things from experience (such as that food nourishes us) and thus gain knowledge of the future or at least very strong grounds for belief about it. But what is the rational basis for such an assumption? An empiricist has to say that it is based on experience. But this simply begs the question. For it does not follow that, just because past experience has been a good guide to the future, it will continue to be reliable. Thus a rigorous empiricism, far from underpinning a scientific philosophy, appears to actually undermine it. Put another way, a rigorous empiricism appears to lead to skepticism. And this was an important part of Hume's legacy. At the same time Hume himself offered a way of avoiding a skeptical conclusion, maintaining that we are so constituted that we are bound to expect the future to be like the past. He even suggested, though perhaps not seriously, that nature was guiding us to the truth.
During the early modern period empiricism, despite the difficulties it entailed, gradually became the dominant theory of scientific rationality. The increased status of empirical science meant that philosophers began to frame their arguments in new ways. For instance, philosophers in the seventeenth century did not generally base their arguments for the existence of God or the immortality of the soul on experience. This was partly because they wished their conclusions to be demonstrated and not merely accepted as hypotheses. In the eighteenth century it became commonplace to accept that the existence of God was at best probable. The arguments for it were based on experience—in particular the experience of order in the universe, from which it was widely thought to be possible to infer the existence of an intelligent designer. These empirical arguments were increasingly favored by theologians. Hume himself took them seriously and examined them critically in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779). He suggested, however, that there were other, less obvious but equally plausible hypotheses that could be advanced to explain the evidence of order than the hypothesis of an intelligent creator.
A common commitment to empiricism did not lead everyone to the same conclusions, but it did settle the terms of debate, at least for many. One of the most widely read works of fiction of the eighteenth century was Voltaire's Candide (1759), whose hero perseveres in his "optimistic" belief that God has created the best of all possible worlds despite all the terrible misfortunes that befall him and those around him. In the book, Candide has been taught some theoretical basis (which he has forgotten) for his optimism by the German rationalist Pangloss. To those whose sympathies were on the side of Pangloss and who believed in a perfect providence, Candide would have been regarded as in very poor taste. It succeeded as a satire partly because the sympathies of enough readers were on the side of the author with regard to the existence, as an empirical fact, of massive unjustifiable evil in the world.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Alembert, Jean Le Rond d'. Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot. Translated by Richard N. Schwab. Indianapolis, 1963. Translation of the Discours préliminaire.
Bacon, Francis. The New Organon. Edited by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2000. Translation of Novum Organum.
Brush, Craig B., ed. and trans. Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi. New York, 1972.
Diderot, Denis, and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, eds. Encyclopedia: Selections. Translated by Nelly S. Hoyt and Thomas Cassirer. New York, 1965. Translation of selections from the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, eds. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1998. Translation of Kritik der reinen Vernunft.
Taylor, Richard, ed. The Empiricists. Garden City, N.Y., 1961. Includes an abridged version of John Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding, George Berkeley's Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, and David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet). Candide, or, Optimism: A Fresh Translation, Backgrounds, Criticism. Edited by Robert M. Adams. 2nd ed. New York, 1991. Translation of Candide, ou, Optimisme.
——. Letters Concerning the English Nation. Edited by Nicholas Cronk. Oxford and New York, 1994. Translation of part of his Lettres philosophiques.
Secondary Sources
Brown, Stuart, ed. British Philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment. Routledge History of Philosophy, vol. 5. London and New York, 1996. Provides chapters on most of the empiricist philosophers of the early modern period.
Cottingham, John. Rationalism. Edited by Justin Wintle. London, 1984. Puts empiricism in the context of the rationalist philosophers, their criticisms, and alternatives.
Garrett, Don, and Edward Barnabell, eds. Encyclopedia of Empiricism. Westport, Conn., 1997. The definitive reference work on this topic.
—STUART BROWN
Veterinary Dictionary:
empiricism |
Skill or knowledge based entirely on experience; compare with rationalism.
Wikipedia:
Empiricism |
In philosophy, "empiricism" is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge arises from sense experience. Empiricism is one of several competing views about how we know "things", part of the branch of philosophy called epistemology, or "the Theory of Knowledge". Empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, while discounting the notion of innate ideas (except in so far as these might be inferred from empirical reasoning, as in the case of genetic predisposition).[1]
In the philosophy of science, empiricism emphasizes those aspects of scientific knowledge that are closely related to evidence, especially as discovered in experiments. It is a fundamental part of the scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the natural world, rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation. Hence, science is considered to be methodologically empirical in nature.
The term "empiricism" has a dual etymology. It comes from the Greek word ἐμπειρία, which translates to the Latin experientia, from which we derive the word experience. It also derives from a more specific classical Greek and Roman usage of empiric, referring to a physician whose skill derives from practical experience as opposed to instruction in theory.[2]
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The term "empirical" was originally used to refer to certain ancient Greek practitioners of medicine (Empiric school) who rejected adherence to the dogmatic doctrines of the day (Dogmatic school), preferring instead to rely on the observation of phenomena as perceived in experience.[2] The notion of tabula rasa ("clean slate" or "blank tablet") dates back to Aristotle, and was developed into an elaborate theory by Avicenna[3] and demonstrated as a thought experiment by Ibn Tufail.[4] The doctrine of empiricism was later explicitly formulated by John Locke in the 17th century. He argued that the mind is a tabula rasa (Locke used the words "white paper") on which experiences leave their marks. Such empiricism denies that humans have innate ideas or that anything is knowable without reference to experience.
According to the empiricist view, for any knowledge to be properly inferred or deduced, it is to be gained ultimately from one's sense-based experience.[5] As a historical matter, philosophical empiricism is commonly contrasted with the philosophical school of thought known as "rationalism" which, in very broad terms, asserts that much knowledge is attributable to reason independently of the senses. However, this contrast is today considered to be an extreme oversimplification of the issues involved, because the main continental rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz) were also advocates of the empirical "scientific method" of their day. Furthermore, Locke, for his part, held that some knowledge (e.g. knowledge of God's existence) could be arrived at through intuition and reasoning alone.
Some important philosophers commonly associated with empiricism include Aristotle, Alhazen, Avicenna, Ibn Tufail, Robert Grosseteste, William of Ockham, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
A central concept in science and the scientific method is that all evidence must be empirical, or empirically based, that is, dependent on evidence that is observable by the senses. It is differentiated from the philosophic usage of empiricism by the use of the adjective "empirical" or the adverb "empirically". Empirical is used in conjunction with both the natural and social sciences, and refers to the use of working hypotheses that are testable using observation or experiment. In this sense of the word, scientific statements are subject to and derived from our experiences or observations.
In a second sense "empirical" in science and statistics may be synonymous with "experimental". In this sense, an empirical result is an experimental observation. The term semi-empirical is sometimes used to describe theoretical methods that make use of basic axioms, established scientific laws, and previous experimental results in order to engage in reasoned model building and theoretical inquiry.
Aristotle writes of the unscribed tablet, or tabula rasa, in his treatise Περὶ Ψυχῆς (De Anima or On the Soul).
What the mind thinks must be in it in the same sense as letters are on a tablet (grammateion) which bears no actual writing (grammenon); this is just what happens in the case of the mind. (Aristotle, On the Soul, 3.4.430a1).
Besides some arguments by the Stoics and Peripatetics, the Aristotelian notion of the mind as a blank slate went much unnoticed for more than 1000 years.
During the 11th century, the theory of tabula rasa was developed more clearly by the Persian philosopher and physician, Ibn Sina (known as "Avicenna" in the Western world). He argued that the "human intellect at birth is rather like a tabula rasa, a pure potentiality that is actualized through education, and that knowledge is attained through "empirical familiarity with objects in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts" which is developed through a "syllogistic method of reasoning; observations lead to propositional statements, which when compounded lead to further abstract concepts." He further argued that the intellect itself "possesses levels of development from the material intellect (al-‘aql al-hayulani), that potentiality that can acquire knowledge to the active intellect (al-‘aql al-fa‘il), the state of the human intellect in conjunction with the perfect source of knowledge."[3]
During the 12th century, the Andalusian-Arabian philosopher and novelist Ibn Tufail (known as "Abubacer" or "Ebn Tophail" in the West) demonstrated the theory of tabula rasa as a thought experiment through his Arabic philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, in which he depicted the development of the mind of a feral child "from a tabula rasa to that of an adult, in complete isolation from society" on a desert island, through experience alone. The Latin translation of his philosophical novel, entitled Philosophus Autodidactus, published by Edward Pococke the Younger in 1671, had an influence on John Locke's formulation of tabula rasa in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.[4]
During the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas brought the Aristotelian and Avicennian notions to the forefront of Christian thought. These notions sharply contrasted with the previously held Platonic notions of the human mind as an entity that pre-existed somewhere in the heavens, before being sent down to join a body here on Earth (see Plato's Phaedo and Apology, as well as others). St. Bonaventure (also 13th century) was one of Aquinas' fiercest intellectual opponents, offering some of the strongest arguments towards the Platonic idea of the mind.
However, it was the decidedly anti-Aristotelian and anti-clerical music theorist Vincenzo Galilei, father of Galileo, inventor of monody, who, significantly, made use of the method in successfully solving musical problems, firstly, of tuning such as the relationship of pitch to string tension and mass in stringed instruments, and to volume of air in wind instruments; and secondly to composition, by his various suggestions to composers in his Dialogo della musica antica e moderna (Florence, 1581). The Italian word he used in place of 'experiment' was 'esperienza'. It is known that he was the essential pedagogical influence upon the young Galileo, his eldest son (cf. Coelho, ed. Music and Science in the Age of Galileo Galilei), who, as the Father of Modern Science, may be considered the most influential empiricist in history. Vincenzo, through his tuning research, found the underlying truth at the heart of the misunderstood myth of 'Pythagoras' hammers' (it was the square of the numbers concerned that yielded those musical intervals, not the actual numbers, as believed), and through this and other discoveries that demonstrated fallibility of traditional authorities, a radically empirical attitude developed, passed on to Galileo, which regarded 'experience and demonstration' to be the sine qua non of valid rational enquiry.
In the early 17th century, the Polish alchemist and philosopher Michał Sędziwój, who died four years after John Locke was born, asserted in one of his treatises that "experience is the sole teacher of truth".[6]
Earlier concepts of the existence of "innate ideas" were the subject of debate between the Continental rationalists and the British empiricists in the 17th century through the late 18th century. John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume were the primary exponents of empiricism.
Responding to the continental "rationalism" most prominently defended by René Descartes (a philosophical approach that should not be confused with rationalism generally), John Locke (1632-1704), writing in the late 17th century, in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), proposed a very influential view wherein the only knowledge humans can have is a posteriori, i.e., based upon experience. Locke is famously attributed with holding the proposition that the human mind is a tabula rasa, a "blank tablet," in Locke's words "white paper," on which the experiences derived from sense impressions as a person's life proceeds are written. There are two sources of our ideas: sensation and reflection. In both cases, a distinction is made between simple and complex ideas. The former are unanalysable, and are broken down into primary and secondary qualities. Complex ideas combine simple ones, and divide into substances, modes, and relations. According to Locke, our knowledge of things is a perception of ideas that are in accordance or discordance with each other, which is very different from the quest for certainty of Descartes.
A generation later, the Irish Anglican bishop, George Berkeley (1685-1753), determined that Locke's view immediately opened a door that would lead to eventual atheism. In response to Locke, he put forth in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) a different, very extreme form of empiricism in which things only exist either as a result of their being perceived, or by virtue of the fact that they are an entity doing the perceiving. (For Berkeley, God fills in for humans by doing the perceiving whenever humans are not around to do it). In his text Alciphron, Berkeley maintained that any order humans may see in nature is the language or handwriting of God.[7] Berkeley's approach to empiricism would later come to be called subjective idealism.[8][9]
The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) added to the empiricist viewpoint an extreme skepticism that he brought to bear against the accumulated arguments and counterarguments of Descartes, Locke and Berkeley, among others. Hume argued in keeping with the empiricist view that all knowledge derives from sense experience. In particular, he divided all of human knowledge into two categories: relations of ideas and matters of fact (see also Kant's analytic-synthetic distinction). Mathematical and logical propositions (e.g. "that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides") are examples of the first, while propositions involving some contingent observation of the world (e.g. "the sun rises in the East") are examples of the second. All of people's "ideas", in turn, are derived from their "impressions". For Hume, an "impression" corresponds roughly with what we call a sensation. To remember or to imagine such impressions is to have an "idea". Ideas are therefore the faint copies of sensations.[10]
Via his skeptical arguments he maintained that all knowledge, even the most basic beliefs about the natural world, cannot be conclusively established by reason. Rather, he maintained, our beliefs are more a result of accumulated habits, developed in response to accumulated sense experiences. Among his many arguments Hume also added another important slant to the debate about scientific method — that of the problem of induction. Hume argued that it requires inductive reasoning to arrive at the premises for the principle of inductive reasoning, and therefore the justification for inductive reasoning is a circular argument.[10] Among Hume's conclusions regarding the problem of induction is that there is no certainty that the future will resemble the past. Thus, as a simple instance posed by Hume, we cannot know with certainty by inductive reasoning that the sun will continue to rise in the East, but instead come to expect it to do so because it has repeatedly done so in the past.[10]
Hume concluded that such things as belief in an external world and belief in the existence of the self were not rationally justifiable. According to Hume these beliefs were to be accepted nonetheless because of their profound basis in instinct and custom. Hume's lasting legacy, however, was the doubt that his skeptical arguments cast on the legitimacy of inductive reasoning, allowing many skeptics who followed to cast similar doubt.
Most of Hume's followers have disagreed with his conclusion that belief in an external world is rationally unjustifiable, contending that Hume's own principles implicitly contained the rational justification for such a belief, that is, beyond being content to let the issue rest on human instinct, custom and habit.[11] According to an extreme empiricist theory known as Phenomenalism, anticipated by the arguments of both Hume and George Berkeley, a physical object is a kind of construction out of our experiences.[12] Phenomenalism is the view that physical objects, properties, events (whatever is physical) are reducible to mental objects, properties, events. Ultimately, only mental objects, properties, events, exist — hence the closely related term subjective idealism. By the phenomenalistic line of thinking, to have a visual experience of a real physical thing is to have an experience of a certain kind of group of experiences. This type of set of experiences possesses a constancy and coherence that is lacking in the set of experiences of which hallucinations, for example, are a part. As John Stuart Mill put it in the mid-19th century, matter is the "permanent possibility of sensation".[13] Mill's empiricism went a significant step beyond Hume in still another respect: in maintaining that induction is necessary for all meaningful knowledge including mathematics. As summarized by D.W. Hamlin:
| “ | [Mill] claimed that mathematical truths were merely very highly confirmed generalizations from experience; mathematical inference, generally conceived as deductive [and a priori] in nature, Mill set down as founded on induction. Thus, in Mill's philosophy there was no real place for knowledge based on relations of ideas. In his view logical and mathematical necessity is psychological; we are merely unable to conceive any other possibilities than those that logical and mathematical propositions assert. This is perhaps the most extreme version of empiricism known, but it has not found many defenders.[9] | ” |
Mill's empiricism thus held that knowledge of any kind is not from direct experience but an inductive inference from direct experience.[14] The problems other philosophers have had with Mill's position center around the following issues: Firstly, Mill's formulation encounters difficulty when it describes what direct experience is by differentiating only between actual and possible sensations. This misses some key discussion concerning conditions under which such "groups of permanent possibilities of sensation" might exist in the first place. Berkeley put God in that gap; the phenomenalists, including Mill, essentially left the question unanswered. In the end, lacking an acknowledgement of an aspect of "reality" that goes beyond mere "possibilities of sensation", such a position leads to a version of subjective idealism. Questions of how floor beams continue to support a floor while unobserved, how trees continue to grow while unobserved and untouched by human hands, etc, remain unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable in these terms.[9][15] Secondly, Mill's formulation leaves open the unsettling possibility that the "gap-filling entities are purely possibilities and not actualities at all".[15] Thirdly, Mill's position, by calling mathematics merely another species of inductive inference, misapprehends mathematics. It fails to fully consider the structure and method of mathematical science, the products of which are arrived at through an internally consistent deductive set of procedures which do not, either today or at the time Mill wrote, fall under the agreed meaning of induction.[9][15][16]
The phenomenalist phase of post-Humean empiricism ended by the 1940s, for by that time it had become obvious that statements about physical things could not be translated into statements about actual and possible sense data.[17] If a physical object statement is to be translatable into a sense-data statement, the former must be at least deducible from the latter. But it came to be realized that there is no finite set of statements about actual and possible sense-data from which we can deduce even a single physical-object statement. Remember that the translating or paraphrasing statement must be couched in terms of normal observers in normal conditions of observation. There is, however, no finite set of statements that are couched in purely sensory terms and can express the satisfaction of the condition of the presence of a normal observer. According to phenomenalism, to say that a normal observer is present is to make the hypothetical statement that were a doctor to inspect the observer, the observer would appear to the doctor to be normal. But, of course, the doctor himself must be a normal observer. If we are to specify this doctor's normality in sensory terms, we must make reference to a second doctor who, when inspecting the sense organs of the first doctor, would himself have to have the sense data a normal observer has when inspecting the sense organs of a subject who is a normal observer. And if we are to specify in sensory terms that the second doctor is a normal observer, we must refer to a third doctor, and so on (also see the third man).[18][19]
Logical empiricism (aka logical positivism or neopositivism) was an early 20th century attempt to synthesize the essential ideas of British empiricism (e.g. a strong emphasis on sensory experience as the basis for knowledge) with certain insights from mathematical logic that had been developed by Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Some of the key figures in this movement were Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick and the rest of the Vienna Circle, along with A.J. Ayer, Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach. The neopositivists subscribed to a notion of philosophy as the conceptual clarification of the methods, insights and discoveries of the sciences. They saw in the logical symbolism elaborated by Frege (d. 1925) and Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) a powerful instrument that could rationally reconstruct all scientific discourse into an ideal, logically perfect, language that would be free of the ambiguities and deformations of natural language. This gave rise to what they saw as metaphysical pseudoproblems and other conceptual confusions. By combining Frege's thesis that all mathematical truths are logical with the early Wittgenstein's idea that all logical truths are mere linguistic tautologies, they arrived at a twofold classification of all propositions: the analytic (a priori) and the synthetic (a posteriori).[20] On this basis, they formulated a strong principle of demarcation between sentences that have sense and those that do not: the so-called verification principle. Any sentence that is not purely logical, or is unverifiable is devoid of meaning. As a result, most metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic and other traditional philosophical problems came to be considered pseudoproblems.[21]
In the extreme empiricism of the neopositivists—at least before the 1930s—any genuinely synthetic assertion must be reducible to an ultimate assertion (or set of ultimate assertions) that expresses direct observations or perceptions. In later years, Carnap and Neurath abandoned this sort of phenomenalism in favor of a rational reconstruction of knowledge into the language of an objective spatio-temporal physics. That is, instead of translating sentences about physical objects into sense-data, such sentences were to be translated into so-called protocol sentences, for example, "X at location Y and at time T observes such and such."[22] The central theses of logical positivism (verificationism, the analytic-synthetic distinction, reductionism, etc.) came under sharp attack after World War 2 by thinkers such as Nelson Goodman, W.V. Quine, Hilary Putnam, Karl Popper, and Richard Rorty. By the late 1960s, it had become evident to most philosophers that the movement had pretty much run its course, though its influence is still significant among contemporary analytic philosophers such as Michael Dummett and other anti-realists.
In the late 19th and early 20th century several forms of pragmatic philosophy arose. The ideas of pragmatism, in its various forms, developed mainly from discussions that took place while Charles Sanders Peirce and William James were both at Harvard in the 1870s. James popularized the term "pragmatism", giving Peirce full credit for its patrimony, but Peirce later demurred from the tangents that the movement was taking, and redubbed what he regarded as the original idea with the name of "pragmaticism". Along with its pragmatic theory of truth, this perspective integrates the basic insights of empirical (experience-based) and rational (concept-based) thinking.
Charles Peirce (1839–1914) was highly influential in laying the groundwork for today's empirical scientific method. Although Peirce severely criticized many elements of Descartes' peculiar brand of rationalism, he did not reject rationalism outright. Indeed, he concurred with the main ideas of rationalism, most importantly the idea that rational concepts can be meaningful and the idea that rational concepts necessarily go beyond the data given by empirical observation. In later years he even emphasized the concept-driven side of the then ongoing debate between strict empiricism and strict rationalism, in part to counterbalance the excesses to which some of his cohorts had taken pragmatism under the "data-driven" strict-empiricist view. Among Peirce's major contributions was to place inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning in a complementary rather than competitive mode, the latter of which had been the primary trend among the educated since David Hume wrote a century before. To this, Peirce added the concept of abductive reasoning. The combined three forms of reasoning serve as a primary conceptual foundation for the empirically based scientific method today. Peirce's approach "presupposes that (1) the objects of knowledge are real things, (2) the characters (properties) of real things do not depend on our perceptions of them, and (3) everyone who has sufficient experience of real things will agree on the truth about them. According to Peirce's doctrine of fallibilism, the conclusions of science are always tentative. The rationality of the scientific method does not depend on the certainty of its conclusions, but on its self-corrective character: by continued application of the method science can detect and correct its own mistakes, and thus eventually lead to the discovery of truth".[23]
In his Harvard "Lectures on Pragmatism" (1903), Peirce enumerated what he called the "three cotary propositions of pragmatism" (L: cos, cotis whetstone), saying that they "put the edge on the maxim of pragmatism". First among these he listed the peripatetic-thomist observation mentioned above, but he further observed that this link between sensory perception and intellectual conception is a two-way street. That is, it can be taken to say that whatever we find in the intellect is also incipiently in the senses. Hence, if theories are theory-laden then so are the senses, and perception itself can be seen as a species of abductive inference, its difference being that it is beyond control and hence beyond critique — in a word, incorrigible. This in no way conflicts with the fallibility and revisability of scientific concepts, since it is only the immediate percept in its unique individuality or "thisness" — what the Scholastics called its haecceity — that stands beyond control and correction. Scientific concepts, on the other hand, are general in nature, and transient sensations do in another sense find correction within them. This notion of perception as abduction has received periodic revivals in artificial intelligence and cognitive science research, most recently for instance with the work of Irvin Rock on indirect perception.[24][25]
Around the beginning of the 20th century, William James (1842-1910) coined the term "radical empiricism" to describe an offshoot of his form of pragmatism, which he argued could be dealt with separately from his pragmatism - though in fact the two concepts are intertwined in James's published lectures. James maintained that the empirically observed "directly apprehended universe, requires no extraneous trans-empirical connective support",[26] by which he meant to rule out the perception that there can be any value added by seeking supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. James's "radical empricism" is thus not radical in the context of the term "empiricism", but is instead fairly consistent with the modern use of the term "empirical". (His method of argument in arriving at this view, however, still readily encounters debate within philosophy even today.)
John Dewey (1859-1952) modified James' pragmatism to form a theory known as instrumentalism. The role of sense experience in Dewey's theory is crucial, in that he saw experience as unified totality of things through which everything else is interrelated. Dewey's basic thought, in accordance with empiricism was that reality is determined by past experience. Therefore, humans adapt their past experiences of things to perform experiments upon and test the pragmatic values of such experience. The value of such experience is measured by scientific instruments, and the results of such measurements generate ideas that serve as instruments for future experimentation.[27] Thus, ideas in Dewey's system retain their empiricist flavour in that they are only known a posteriori.
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Translations:
empiricism |
Dansk (Danish)
n. - empirisme, erfaringsfilosofi
Nederlands (Dutch)
empirisme, kwakzalverij
Français (French)
n. - empirisme
Deutsch (German)
n. - Empirie, Empirismus
Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - εμπειρισμός
Português (Portuguese)
n. - empirismo (m) (Filos.)
Русский (Russian)
эмпиризм, эмпирический подход
Español (Spanish)
n. - empirismo
Svenska (Swedish)
n. - empirism
中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
经验主义, 经验论, 庸医的医术
中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 經驗主義, 經驗論, 庸醫的醫術
한국어 (Korean)
n. - 경험주의, 경험적 치료법
العربيه (Arabic)
(الاسم) التجريبيه
עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ניסיוניות, תיאוריה פילוסופית לפיה כל הידע מבוסס על תחושת החושים
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