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Empiricism

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Philosophy

   In philosophy generally, empiricism is a theory of knowledge
   emphasizing the role of experience.

   In the philosophy of science, empiricism is a theory of knowledge which
   emphasizes those aspects of scientific knowledge that are closely
   related to experience, especially as formed through deliberate
   experimental arrangements. It is a fundamental requirement of
   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 εμπειρισμός, the Latin translation of which is 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.

Philosophical usage

   John Locke, founder of British empiricism
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   John Locke, founder of British empiricism

   Originally, "empirical" was used by the skeptic Sextus Empiricus to
   refer to those ancient Greek practitioners of medicine who rejected
   adherence to the dogmatic doctrines of the day, preferring instead to
   rely on the observation of phenomena as perceived in experience. The
   doctrine of empiricism was first explicitly formulated by John Locke in
   the 17th century. Locke argued that the mind is a tabula rasa ("clean
   slate" or "blank tablet") on which experiences leave their marks. Such
   empiricism denies that humans have innate ideas or that anything is
   knowable without reference to experience.

   It is worth remembering that empiricism does not hold that we have
   empirical knowledge automatically. Rather, 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. 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, Thomas Aquinas, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke,
   George Berkeley, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill.

Scientific usage

   A central concept in science and the scientific method is that all
   evidence must be empirical, or empirically based, that describe
   theoretical methods which make use of basic axioms, established
   scientific laws, and previous experimental results in order to engage
   in reasoned model building and theoretical inquiry.

History

Early forms of empiricism

   Early forms of empiricism include the epistemological work of
   Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon, among others.

   Probably the first empiricists in Western philosophy were the Sophists
   (c. 5th Century BC), who rejected the rationalistic speculations about
   the nature of the world common among other their predecessors, in
   favour of focusing "on such relatively concrete entities as man and
   society". The Sophists invoked skeptical semantic arguments, using
   examples that could be readily seen and observed by others, to
   undermine the claims of pure reason.
   Aristotle stressed the importance of induction based on experience.
   Enlarge
   Aristotle stressed the importance of induction based on experience.

   About a century later, reacting against the deeply rationalistic and
   highly speculative approach of Plato (427–347 BC), Aristotle (384–322
   BC) in his later years placed an increasingly strong emphasis on what
   is received by the senses, that is, on a posteriori observations.
   Aristotle applied the term natural philosophy to the task of making
   sense of the natural world, using what would much later become known as
   inductive reasoning to arrive at categories and principles based upon
   sense data. This was in sharp opposition to Plato's theory of forms,
   which was very heavily dependent on a priori assumptions (ibid). In his
   "middle" and "late" periods, Aristotle became increasingly dissatisfied
   with Plato's views, and developed an increasingly strict expectation
   for more explicit empirical confirmations for all inductions. Aristotle
   also stated the core empiricist tenet that human knowledge of reality
   is grounded in sense experience.

   A generation after Aristotle, both the Stoics and the Epicureans
   formulated more explicitly empiricist explanations of the formation of
   ideas and concepts. The Stoics, anticipating Locke by some thousands of
   years, claimed that the human mind is a clean slate which came to be
   filled up with ideas by way of the perceptions of the senses. However
   they also maintained that there were certain "common notions" which are
   present in the minds of all persons a-priori. The Epicureans held an
   even more strongly empirical a posteriori view. For them, mental
   concepts are memory images or copies of previous sense experience, and
   sensations are invariably good evidence of their causes. They worked
   out a complex account of how objects produce sense impressions and
   explained error by positing the disruption of causal "effluences" in
   transit.

   Among the medieval Scholastics, Thomas Aquinas derived from Aristotle
   the famous peripatetic axiom: "Nothing is in the intellect which was
   not first in the senses". Aquinas argued that the existence of God
   could be proved by reasoning from sense data. He used a variation on
   the Aristotelian notion of the "active intellect" which he interpreted
   as the ability to abstract universal meanings from particular empirical
   data.

British empiricism

   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 type of philosophical approach which 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 new, and ultimately 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 is written the experiences
   derived from sense impressions as a person's life proceeds. 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 are those which combine simple ones and are divided 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.
   Bishop George Berkeley
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   Bishop George Berkeley

   A generation later, the Irish 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. (Thornton, 1987)
   Berkeley's approach to empiricism would later come to be called
   subjective idealism.

   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. Mathematical and logical propositions (e.g. "that
   the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the square 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 man's "ideas", in turn , are derived
   from his "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.
   David Hume's empiricism led to numerous philosophical schools
   Enlarge
   David Hume's empiricism led to numerous philosophical schools

   Via his skeptical arguments (which became famous for the tenacity of
   their logic) 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. 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.

   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.

Phenomenalism

   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. 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. 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 which
   belongs to 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".
   J.S. Mill
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   J.S. Mill

   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 which logical
     and mathematical propositions assert. This is perhaps the most
     extreme version of empiricism known, but it has not found many
     defenders.

   Mill's empiricism thus held that knowledge of any kind is not from
   direct experience but an inductive inference from direct experience.
   The problems other philosophers have had with Mill's position centre
   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 such as 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 Secondly, Mill's formulation leaves
   open the unsettling possibility that the "gap-filling entities are
   purely possibilities and not actualities at all". 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

   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. 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 which 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.

Logical empiricism

   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 which
   could be used to rationally reconstruct all scientific discourse into
   an ideal, logically perfect, language which would be free of the
   ambiguities and deformations of natural language which 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 two-fold
   classification of all propositions: the analytic (a priori) and the
   synthetic (a posteriori). On this basis, they formulated a strong
   principle of demarcation between sentences which have sense and those
   which do not: the so-called verification principle. Any sentence which
   is not purely logical or for which there is no method of verification
   was to be considered devoid of meaning. As a result, most metaphysical,
   ethical, aesthetic and other traditional philosophical problems came to
   be considered pseudoproblems.

   The extreme empiricism of the neopositivists was expressed, at least
   before the 1930s, in the idea that any genuinely synthetic assertion
   must be reducible to an ultimate assertion (or set of ultimate
   assertions) which expresses direct observations or perceptions. In
   later years, Carnap and Neurath abandoned this sort of phenomenalism in
   favour 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." 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 1960's, 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.

Integration of empiricism and rationalism

   In the late 19th Century 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 1870's.
   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 Sanders Peirce
   Enlarge
   Charles Sanders Peirce

   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".

   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.
   William James
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   William James

   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", 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 which
   serve as instruments for future experimentation. Thus, ideas in Dewey's
   system retain their empiricist flavour in that they are only known a
   posteriori.
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