EmpiricismUmm-e-Rooman Yaqoob

Empiricism:• Empiricism is a theory which states that knowledge comes only or

primarily from sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism and scepticism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory experience, in the formation of ideas, over the notion of innate ideas or traditions; empiricists may argue however that traditions (or customs) arise due to relations of previous sense experiences.

• 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 (the idea that the mind is born with ideas or knowledge and is not a "blank slate" at birth).

Etymology:• The English term "empirical" derives from the Greek word which is cognate

with and translates to the Latin experientia, from which we derive the word "experience" and the related "experiment". The term was used by the Empiric school of ancient Greek medical practitioners, who rejected the three doctrines of the Dogmatic school, preferring to rely on the observation of "phenomena“.

• 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 it's first usage).

• The term "empirical" (rather than "empiricism") also refers to the method of observation and experiment used in the natural and social sciences. It is a fundamental requirement 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.

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 Abu acer (or Ibn Tu fail: 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.

The Centrality of Experience:• Empiricists claim that all ideas that a mind can entertain have been formed

through some experiences or – to use a slightly more technical term – through some impressions;

• Here is how David Hume expressed this creed:

"it must be some one impression that gives rise to every real idea" .

• Indeed – Hume continues in Book II –

"all our ideas or more feeble perceptions are copies of our impressions or more lively ones".

• Under this characterization, empiricism is the claim that all human ideas are less detailed copies of some experience or other.

DEGREES OF EMPIRICISM:

• Empiricism, whether concerned with concepts or knowledge, can be held with varying degrees of strength.

• On this basis , these three forms can be distinguished:

absolute empiricisms

substantive empiricisms

partial empiricisms

ABSOLUTE EMPIRICISM:• Absolute empiricists hold that there are no a priori concepts, either

formal or categorical, and no a priori beliefs or propositions. Absolute empiricism about the former is more common than that about the latter, however. Although nearly all Western philosophers admit that obvious tautologies (e.g., “all red things are red”) and definitional truisms (e.g., “all triangles have three sides”) are a priori, many of them would add that these represent a degenerate case.

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 categorical concepts and to the theoretical concepts of physics, which they hold are a posteriori. According to this view, allegedly a priori categorical and theoretical concepts are either defective, reducible to empirical concepts, or merely useful “fictions” for the prediction and organization of experience.

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. The theses of the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant (1720–1804), the general scientific conservation laws, the basic principles of morality and theology, and the causal laws of nature have all been held by partial empiricists to be both “synthetic” and a priori. At any rate, in all versions of partial empiricism there remain a great many straightforwardly a posteriori concepts and propositions: ordinary singular propositions about matters of fact and the concepts that figure in them are held to fall in this domain.

THE BRITISH EMPIRICISTS:

• 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.

o John Locke:• John Locke was an empiricist in roughly the same sense

that Aquinas was, and he set the tone for his successors. His "new way of ideas," as it was called, had as its purpose "to inquire into the original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent. "Locke wanted to assess the certainty of our knowledge as well as its extent.

o Berkeley:• Berkeley's main aim was to produce a metaphysical view which

would show the glory of God. According to this view, there is nothing which our understanding cannot grasp, and our perceptions can be regarded as a kind of divine language by which God speaks to us; for God is the cause of our perceptions. There exist, therefore, only sensations or ideas and spirits which are their cause. God is the cause of our sensations, and we ourselves can be the cause of ideas of the imagination.

o Hume:• Hume distinguished first between impressions and ideas. He

further subdivided ideas into those of sense and those of reflection, and again, into those which are simple and those which are complex. He denied the existence of anything behind impressions, and a cardinal point of his empiricism, to which he returned again and again, was that every simple idea is a copy of a corresponding impression. Hume's main method in philosophy was what he called the "experimental method“.

o John Stuart Mill: • He claimed that mathematical truths were merely very highly

confirmed generalizations from experience , he 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.

20th CENTURY EMPIRICISM:

• 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 endeavour

• Empiricists in the twentieth century have generally reverted to the radical distinction between necessary truths, as found in logic and mathematics, and empirical truths, as found elsewhere. Necessity is confined by them, however, to logic and mathematics, and all other truths are held to be merely contingent. Partly for this reason and partly because it has been held that the apparatus of modern logic may be relevant to philosophical problems, twentieth-century empiricists have tended to call them-selves "Logical Empiricists“.

Development of Empiricism :• 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.

Skepticism:• The Scottish philosopher David Hume brought to the Empiricist viewpoint an

extreme Scepticism. 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.

Rationalism and Empiricism:• The dispute between rationalism and empiricism concerns the

extent to which we are dependent upon sense experience in our effort to gain knowledge. Rationalists claim that there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience. Empiricists claim that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge.

• Rationalists generally develop their view in two ways. First, they argue that there are cases where the content of our concepts or knowledge outstrips the information that sense experience can provide. Second, they construct accounts of how reason in some form or other provides that additional information about the world.

• Empiricists present complementary lines of thought. First, they develop accounts of how experience provides the information that rationalists cite, insofar as we have it in the first place. Second, empiricists attack the rationalists' accounts of how reason is a source of concepts or knowledge.

Conclusion:• Empiricism is the philosophical stance according to which the

senses are the ultimate source of human knowledge. It rivals rationalism according to which reason is the ultimate source of knowledge. In a form or another, empiricism is a chapter of most philosophical tradition. In Western philosophy, empiricism boasts a long and distinguished list of followers in all ages; probably the most fertile moment for this trend happened during the early modernity, with the so-called British empiricists, whose rank includes authors of the calibre of John Locke and David Hume.