EMPIRICISM

EMPALMADO, JOICE BERNADETTE C.

YABES, MA. LOURDES C.
Empiricism
 Empiricism, in philosophy, the view that all
concepts originate in experience, that all
concepts are about or applicable to things that
can be experienced, or that all rationally
acceptable beliefs or propositions are justifiable
or knowable only through experience. This
broad definition accords with the derivation of
the term empiricism from the ancient Greek
word empeiria, “experience.”
 Empiricism is the theory that the origin of all
knowledge is sense experience. It emphasizes
the role of experience and evidence, especially
sensory perception, in the formation of ideas,
and argues that the only knowledge humans
can have is a posteriori (i.e. based on
experience). Most empiricists also discount the
notion of innate ideas or innatism
 Empiricism is contrasted with Rationalism, the
theory that the mind may apprehend some
truths directly, without requiring the medium of
the senses.
 The term "empiricism" has a dual etymology,
stemming both from the Greek word for
"experience" and from the 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 (this was its first usage).
Various Meanings Of Empiricism
 Broader senses
 In both everyday attitudes and philosophical
theories, the experiences referred to by
empiricists are principally those arising from the
stimulation of the sense organs—i.e., from visual,
auditory, tactile, olfactory, and
gustatory sensation.
 A crucial consideration is that, as the scope of
“experience” is broadened, it becomes increasingly
difficult to distinguish a domain of genuinely a priori
propositions
 When describing an everyday attitude, the
word empiricism sometimes conveys an
unfavourable implication of ignorance of or indifference
to relevant theory.
Fundamental distinctions
 A distinction that has the potential to create confusion is
the one that contrasts the a posteriori not with the a
priori but with the innate. Since logical problems are
easily confused with psychological problems, it is difficult
to disentangle the question of the causal origin
of concepts and beliefs from the question of their
content and justification.
Degrees of empiricism
 Empiricism, whether concerned with concepts
or knowledge, can be held with varying degrees
of strength. On this basis, absolute, substantive,
and partial empiricisms can be distinguished.
Absolute empiricism
 Absolute empiricists hold that there are no a
priori concepts, either formal or categorial, and
no a priori beliefs or propositions. Absolute
empiricism about the former is more common
than that about the latter, however.
Substantive empiricism
 A more moderate form of empiricism is that of
the substantive empiricists, who are unconvinced by
attempts that have been made to interpret formal
concepts empirically and who therefore concede that
formal concepts are a priori, though they deny that
status to categorial concepts and to the theoretical
concepts of physics, which they hold are a posteriori.
Partial empiricism
 The least thoroughgoing type of empiricism here
distinguished, ranking third in degree, can be
termed partial empiricism. According to this view, the
realm of the a priori includes some concepts that are not
formal and some propositions that are substantially
informative about the world.
 History of Empiricism
 The concept of a "tabula rasa" (or "clean slate") had
been developed as early as the 11th Century by the
Persian philosopher Avicenna, who further argued that
knowledge is attained through empirical familiarity with
objects in this world, from which one abstracts universal
concepts, which can then be further developed through
a syllogistic method of reasoning. The 12th
Century Arabic philosopher Abubacer (or Ibn Tufail: 1105
- 1185) demonstrated the theory of tabula rasa as
a thought experiment in which the mind of a feral child
develops from a clean slate to that of an adult, in
complete isolation from society on a desert island,
through experience alone.
 Sir Francis Bacon can be considered an early Empiricist, through his
popularization of an inductive methodology for scientific inquiry,
which has since become known as the scientific method.
 In the 17th and 18th Century, the members of the British
Empiricism school John Locke, George Berkeley and David
Hume were the primary exponents of Empiricism. They vigorously
defended Empiricism against
the Rationalism of Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza.
 The doctrine of Empiricism was first explicitly formulated by the British
philosopher John Locke in the late 17th Century. Locke argued in
his "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" of 1690 that the
mind is a tabula rasa on which experiences leave their marks, and
therefore denied that humans have innate ideas or that anything
is knowable without reference to experience. However, he also held
that some knowledge (e.g. knowledge of God's existence) could
be arrived at through intuition and reasoning alone.
 The Irish philosopher Bishop George
Berkeley, concerned that Locke's view opened a door
that could lead to eventual Atheism, put forth in
his "Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human
Knowledge" of 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. He argued that
the continued existence of things results from the
perception of God, regardless of whether there are
humans around or not, and any order humans may see
in nature is effectively just the handwriting of
God. Berkeley's approach to Empiricism would later
come to be called Subjective Idealism.
 The Scottish philosopher David Hume brought to the Empiricist
viewpoint an extreme Skepticism. He argued that all of human
knowledge can be divided into two categories: relations of
ideas (e.g. propositions involving some contingent observation of
the world, such as "the sun rises in the East") and matters of fact (e.g.
mathematical and logical propositions), and that ideas are derived
from our "impressions" or sensations. In the face of this, he argued
that even the most basic beliefs about the natural world, or even in
the existence of the self, cannot be conclusively established
by reason, but we accept them anyway because of their basis
in instinct and custom.
 John Stuart Mill, in the mid-19th Century, took Hume and Berkeley's
reasoning a step further in maintaining that inductive reasoning is
necessary for all meaningful knowledge (including mathematics),
and that matter is merely the "permanent possibility of sensation" as
he put it. This is an extreme form of Empiricism known
as Phenomenalism (the view that physical objects, properties and
events are completely reducible to mental objects, properties and
events).
 In the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, several forms
of Pragmatism arose, which attempted to integrate the
apparently mutually-exclusive insights of Empiricism (experience-
based thinking) and Rationalism (concept-based thinking). C. S.
Peirce and William James (who coined the term "radical
empiricism" to describe an offshoot of his form of Pragmatism) were
particularly important in this endeavor.
 The next step in the development of Empiricism was Logical
Empiricism (or Logical Positivism), an early 20th Century attempt to
synthesize the essential ideas of British Empiricism (a strong emphasis
on sensory experience as the basis for knowledge) with certain
insights from mathematical logic that had been developed
by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This
resulted in a kind of extreme Empiricism which held that any
genuinely synthetic assertion must be reducible to an ultimate
assertion (or set of ultimate assertions) which expresses direct
observations or perceptions.