Empiricism Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism

In philosophy, empiricism is a theory that states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience.[1] It is one of several views of epistemology, along with rationalism and skepticism. Empiricism emphasizes the role of empirical evidence in the formation of ideas, rather than innate ideas or traditions.[2] However, empiricists may argue that traditions (or customs) arise due to relations of previous sensory experiences.[3]

Historically, empiricism was associated with the "blank slate" concept (tabula rasa), according to which the human mind is "blank" at birth and develops its thoughts only through experience.[4]


Empiricism, often used by natural scientists, says that "knowledge is based on experience" and that "knowledge is tentative and probabilistic, subject to continued revision and falsification".[5] Empirical research, including experiments and validated measurement tools, guides the scientific method.


The English term empirical derives from the Ancient Greek word ἐμπειρία, empeiria, which is cognate with and translates to the Latin experientia, from which the words experience and experiment are derived.[6]



Philosophical empiricists hold no knowledge to be properly inferred or deduced unless it is derived from one's sense-based experience.[7] This view is commonly contrasted with rationalism, which states that knowledge may be derived from reason independently of the senses. For example, John Locke held that some knowledge (e.g. knowledge of God's existence) could be arrived at through intuition and reasoning alone. Similarly Robert Boyle, a prominent advocate of the experimental method, held that we have innate ideas.[8][9] The main continental rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz) were also advocates of the empirical "scientific method".[10][11]


Early empiricism[edit]

Between 600 and 200 BCE, the Vaisheshika school of Hindu philosophy, founded by the ancient Indian philosopher Kanada, accepted perception and inference as the only two reliable sources of knowledge.[12][13][14] This is enumerated in his work Vaiśeṣika Sūtra. The Charvaka school held similar beliefs, asserting that perception is the only reliable source of knowledge while inference obtains knowledge with uncertainty.

The earliest Western proto-empiricists were the empiric school of ancient Greek medical practitioners, founded in 330 BCE.[15] Its members rejected the doctrines of the dogmatic school, preferring to rely on the observation of phantasiai (i.e., phenomena, the appearances).[16] The Empiric school was closely allied with the Pyrrhonist school of philosophy, which made the philosophical case for their proto-empiricism.

The notion of tabula rasa ("clean slate" or "blank tablet") connotes a view of mind as an originally blank or empty recorder (Locke used the words "white paper") on which experience leaves marks. This denies that humans have innate ideas. The notion dates back to Aristotle, c. 350 BC:



This idea was later developed in ancient philosophy by the Stoic school, from about 330 BCE. Stoic epistemology generally emphasized that the mind starts blank, but acquires knowledge as the outside world is impressed upon it.[17] The doxographer Aetius summarizes this view as "When a man is born, the Stoics say, he has the commanding part of his soul like a sheet of paper ready for writing upon."[18]

A drawing of Ibn Sina (Avicenna) from 1271

Islamic Golden Age and Pre-Renaissance (5th to 15th centuries CE)[edit]

During the Middle Ages (from the 5th to the 15th century CE) Aristotle's theory of tabula rasa was developed by Islamic philosophers starting with Al Farabi (c. 872 – 951 CE), developing into an elaborate theory by Avicenna (c. 980 – 1037)[19] and demonstrated as a thought experiment by Ibn Tufail.[20] For Avicenna (Ibn Sina), for example, the tabula rasa is a pure potentiality that is actualized through education, and knowledge is attained through "empirical familiarity with objects in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts" developed through a "syllogistic method of reasoning in which observations lead to propositional statements which when compounded lead to further abstract concepts". The intellect itself develops from a material intellect (al-'aql al-hayulani), which is a 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".[19] So the immaterial "active intellect", separate from any individual person, is still essential for understanding to occur.



During the 13th century Thomas Aquinas adopted into scholasticism the Aristotelian position that the senses are essential to the mind. Bonaventure (1221–1274), one of Aquinas' strongest intellectual opponents, offered some of the strongest arguments in favour of the Platonic idea of the mind.

Renaissance Italy[edit]

In the late renaissance various writers began to question the medieval and classical understanding of knowledge acquisition in a more fundamental way. In political and historical writing Niccolò Machiavelli and his friend Francesco Guicciardini initiated a new realistic style of writing. Machiavelli in particular was scornful of writers on politics who judged everything in comparison to mental ideals and demanded that people should study the "effectual truth" instead. Their contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) said, "If you find from your own experience that something is a fact and it contradicts what some authority has written down, then you must abandon the authority and base your reasoning on your own findings."[22]

Significantly, an empirical metaphysical system was developed by the Italian philosopher Bernardino Telesio which had an enormous impact on the development of later Italian thinkers, including Telesio's students Antonio Persio and Sertorio Quattromani, his contemporaries Thomas Campanella and Giordano Bruno, and later British philosophers such as Francis Bacon, who regarded Telesio as "the first of the moderns.” [23] Telesio's influence can also be seen on the French philosophers René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi.[23]


British empiricism[edit]

Thomas Hobbes

British empiricism, a retrospective characterization, emerged during the 17th century as an approach to early modern philosophy and modern science. Although both integral to this overarching transition, Francis Bacon, in England, advised empiricism at 1620, whereas René Descartes, in France, upheld rationalism around 1640, a distinction drawn by Immanuel Kant, in Germany, near 1780. (Bacon's natural philosophy was influenced by Italian philosopher Bernardino Telesio and by Swiss physician Paracelsus.)[23] Contributing later in the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza are retrospectively identified likewise as an empiricist and a rationalist, respectively. In the Enlightenment during the 18th century, both George Berkeley, in England, and David Hume, in Scotland, became leading exponents of empiricism, a lead precedented in the late 17th century by John Locke, also in England, hence the dominance of empiricism in British philosophy.

In response to the early-to-mid-17th century "continental rationalism," John Locke (1632–1704) proposed in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) 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. Primary qualities are essential for the object in question to be what it is. Without specific primary qualities, an object would not be what it is. For example, an apple is an apple because of the arrangement of its atomic structure. If an apple were structured differently, it would cease to be an apple. Secondary qualities are the sensory information we can perceive from its primary qualities. For example, an apple can be perceived in various colours, sizes, and textures but it is still identified as an apple. Therefore, its primary qualities dictate what the object essentially is, while its secondary qualities define its attributes. 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) an important challenge to 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.[24] Berkeley's approach to empiricism would later come to be called subjective idealism.[25][26]



— Hume, Section XIV, "Of the idea of necessary connexion", in A Treatise of Human Nature


David Hume's empiricism led to numerous philosophical schools.








Logical empiricism[edit]


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 (1848–1925) 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).[38] 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.[39]

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".[40] The central theses of logical positivism (verificationism, the analytic–synthetic distinction, reductionism, etc.) came under sharp attack after World War II 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[who?] 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 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.[43][44]

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 needs ... no extraneous trans-empirical connective support",[45] by which he meant to rule out the perception that there can be any value added by seeking supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. James' "radical empiricism" 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 experientially and scientifically, and the results of such tests generate ideas that serve as instruments for future experimentation,[46] in physical sciences as in ethics.[47] Thus, ideas in Dewey's system retain their empiricist flavour in that they are only known a posteriori.

See also[edit]


  1. ^ Psillos, Stathis; Curd, Martin (2010). The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science (1. publ. in paperback ed.). London: Routledge. pp. 129–38. ISBN 978-0415546133.
  3. ^ a b c d Hume, D. "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding", in Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 2nd edition, L.A. Selby-Bigge (ed.), Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 1902 [1748].[page needed]
  4. ^ Scheibe, Erhard. (2001). Between rationalism and empiricism : selected papers in the philosophy of physics. Springer. ISBN 0-387-98520-4. OCLC 45888831.
  5. ^ Shelley, M. (2006). Empiricism. In F. English (Ed.), Encyclopedia of educational leadership and administration. (pp. 338–39). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.
  6. ^ "Definition of EMPIRIC". www.merriam-webster.com.
  11. ^ Peter Anstey, "ESP is best Archived 2013-12-31 at the Wayback Machine", Early Modern Experimental Philosophy, 2010.
  15. ^ "Greek Medicine: Alexander the Great". www.greekmedicine.net.
  18. ^ Diels-Kranz 4.11 translated by Long, A. A.; Sedley, D. N. (1987). The Hellenistic Philosophers: Vol. 1. Cambridge, Ma: Cambridge. p. 238.
  21. ^ Dr. Abu Shadi Al-Roubi (1982), "Ibn Al-Nafis as a philosopher", Symposium on Ibn al-Nafis, Second International Conference on Islamic Medicine: Islamic Medical Organization, Kuwait (cf. Ibn al-Nafis As a Philosopher Archived February 6, 2008, at the Wayback Machine, Encyclopedia of Islamic World)
  22. ^ "Seeing the Body: The Divergence of Ancient Chineseand Western Medical Illustration", Camillia Matuk, Journal of Biocommunication, Vol. 32, No. 1, 2006, [1]
  23. ^ a b c Boenke, Michaela, "Bernardino Telesio", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/telesio/>.
  30. ^ Marconi, Diego (2004), "Fenomenismo"', in Gianni Vattimo and Gaetano Chiurazzi (eds.), L'Enciclopedia Garzanti di Filosofia, 3rd edition, Garzanti, Milan, Italy.
  34. ^ Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1969), "Axiomatic Method", vol. 5, pp. 188–89, 191ff.
  37. ^ Chisholm, Roderick M. (September 9, 1948). "The Problem of Empiricism". The Journal of Philosophy. 45 (19): 512–17. doi:10.2307/2019108. JSTOR 2019108.
  41. ^ Burch, Robert (2017). Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
  42. ^ Ward, Teddy (n.d.), "Empiricism", Eprint Archived 2012-07-14 at archive.today.
  43. ^ Rock, Irvin (1983), The Logic of Perception, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.[page needed]
  44. ^ Rock, Irvin, (1997) Indirect Perception, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.[page needed]
  45. ^ James, William (1911), The Meaning of Truth.
  47. ^ Weber, Eric Thomas (2011). "What Experimentalism Means in Ethics". The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. 25: 98–115. doi:10.1353/jsp.2011.0000. S2CID 144868257.


  • Aristotle, Posterior Analytics.
  • Hume, David. "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding", in Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 2nd edition, L.A. Selby-Bigge (ed.), Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 1902. Gutenberg press full-text
  • Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1969), "Development of Aristotle's Thought", vol. 1, pp. 153ff.
  • Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1969), "Mathematics, Foundations of", vol. 5, pp. 188–89.
  • Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1969), "Axiomatic Method", vol. 5, pp. 192ff.
  • Sorabji, Richard (1972), Aristotle on Memory.
  • Vanzo, Alberto (2014), "From Empirics to Empiricists", Intellectual History Review, 2014, Eprint available here and here.

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