Empiricism

Empiricism, in philosophy, a doctrine that affirms that all ideas and knowledge are a posteriori, that is, derived from and based on experience, and denies that they can ever be a priori, that is, discoverable without having to rely on the senses. In particular, empiricists oppose the view that people are born with certain innate ideas and argue that at birth the mind is a complete blank. Until the 20th century the term “empiricism” was applied to the views held chiefly by the British philosophers of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. John Locke was the first of these philosophers to give it systematic expression, although his compatriot, the philosopher Francis Bacon, had anticipated some of its characteristic conclusions. Other empiricists include David Hume and George Berkeley. Directly opposed to empiricism was rationalism, represented by such thinkers as the French philosopher René Descartes; the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza; and the 17th- and 18th-century German philosophers Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian Wolff. Rationalists asserted that the mind is capable of recognizing reality by means of its capacity for reason, a faculty that exists independent of experience. Empiricists generally looked to the experimental natural sciences to illustrate their view of how knowledge is acquired, while rationalists often pointed to pure mathematics to illustrate their own view. Empiricists had particular difficulty in explaining how it is possible ever to acquire pure mathematical concepts and knowledge, if all concepts and knowledge had to come from the senses.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant attempted a synthesis of empiricism and rationalism, restricting knowledge to the domain of experience, a posteriori, and thus agreeing with the empiricists, but attributing to the mind a structure of categories into which all sensations had to be incorporated in order for human beings to make sense of them. This structure could be known a priori without resorting to empirical methods, and in this respect Kant agreed with the rationalists.

During the 20th century the term “empiricism” took on a broader meaning, and came to be used in connection with any philosophical system or any method of scientific enquiry that finds all of its materials in experience. In the United States, William James called his philosophy radical empiricism, and John Dewey coined the term “immediate empiricism” for his view of experience.

In its extreme form, empiricism leads to the conclusion not just that all knowledge has to start from experience, but that it can never get beyond experience. That is, it is not possible to know anything other than that which comes from experience. This view is a form of scepticism, according to which, for example, claims about subatomic particles or physical forces are just as doubtful as claims about supernatural entities or ethical truths. Science then has to be seen as nothing more than the discovery of regular relationships between the phenomena of experience. Laws that express such relationships between phenomena, without making any claims about the underlying causes of the phenomena, are called empirical laws.