= Empiricism =

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

Empiricism in the philosophy of science emphasises evidence,
especially as discovered in experiments. It is a fundamental part 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.

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".
Empirical research, including experiments and validated measurement
tools, guides the scientific method.

Etymology
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The English term 'empirical' derives from the Ancient Greek word
�μ�ει�ία, 'empeiria' (roughly �in test�), which is cognate with and
translates to the Latin 'experientia', from which the words
'experience' and 'experiment' are derived .

Background
============
A central concept in science and the scientific method is that
conclusions must be 'empirically' based on the evidence of the senses.
Both natural and social sciences use working hypotheses that are
testable by observation and experiment. The term 'semi-empirical' is
sometimes used to describe theoretical methods that make use of basic
axioms, established scientific laws, and previous experimental results
in order to engage in reasoned model building and theoretical inquiry.

Philosophical empiricists hold no knowledge to be properly inferred or
deduced unless it is derived from one's sense-based experience. 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. The main continental
rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz) were also advocates of
the empirical "scientific method".

Early empiricism
==================
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. This is enumerated in his work
'Vai�eṣika Sūtra'.

The earliest Western proto-empiricists were the Empiric school of
ancient Greek medical practitioners, who rejected the three doctrines
of the Dogmatic school, preferring to rely on the observation of
phantasiai (i.e., phenomena, the appearances). The Empiric school was
closely allied with 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 image dates back to Aristotle:

What the mind ('nous') thinks must be in it in the same sense as
letters are on a tablet ('grammateion') which bears no actual writing
('grammenon'); this is just what happens in the case of the mind.
(Aristotle, 'On the Soul', 3.4.430a1).

Aristotle's explanation of how this was possible was not strictly
empiricist in a modern sense, but rather based on his theory of
potentiality and actuality, and experience of sense perceptions still
requires the help of the active 'nous'. These notions contrasted with
Platonic notions of the human mind as an entity that pre-existed
somewhere in the heavens, before being sent down to join a body on
Earth (see Plato's 'Phaedo' and 'Apology', as well as others).
Aristotle was considered to give a more important position to sense
perception than Plato, and commentators in the Middle Ages summarized
one of his positions as "'nihil in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in
sensu'" (Latin for "nothing in the intellect without first being in
the senses").

This idea was later developed in ancient philosophy by the Stoic
school. Stoic epistemology generally emphasized that the mind starts
blank, but acquires knowledge as the outside world is impressed upon
it. 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."

During the Middle Ages Aristotle's theory of 'tabula rasa' was
developed by Islamic philosophers starting with Al Farabi, developing
into an elaborate theory by Avicenna and demonstrated as a thought
experiment by Ibn Tufail. 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". So the immaterial "active
intellect", separate from any individual person, is still essential
for understanding to occur.

In the 12th century CE the Andalusian Muslim philosopher and novelist
Abu Bakr Ibn Tufail (known as "Abubacer" or "Ebn Tophail" in the West)
included the theory of 'tabula rasa' as a thought experiment in his
Arabic philosophical novel, 'Hayy ibn Yaqdhan' in which he depicted
the development of the mind of a feral child "from a 'tabula rasa' to
that of an adult, in complete isolation from society" on a desert
island, through experience alone. The Latin translation of his
philosophical novel, entitled 'Philosophus Autodidactus', published by
Edward Pococke the Younger in 1671, had an influence on John Locke's
formulation of 'tabula rasa' in 'An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding'.

A similar Islamic theological novel, 'Theologus Autodidactus', was
written by the Arab theologian and physician Ibn al-Nafis in the 13th
century. It also dealt with the theme of empiricism through the story
of a feral child on a desert island, but departed from its predecessor
by depicting the development of the protagonist's mind through contact
with society rather than in isolation from society.

During the 13th century Thomas Aquinas adopted the Aristotelian
position that the senses are essential to mind into scholasticism.
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
===================
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."

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.� Telesio's influence can also be seen on the French
philosophers René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi.

The decidedly anti-Aristotelian and anti-clerical music theorist
Vincenzo Galilei (c. 1520 - 1591), father of Galileo and the inventor
of monody, made use of the method in successfully solving musical
problems, firstly, of tuning such as the relationship of pitch to
string tension and mass in stringed instruments, and to volume of air
in wind instruments; and secondly to composition, by his various
suggestions to composers in his 'Dialogo della musica antica e
moderna' (Florence, 1581). The Italian word he used for "experiment"
was 'esperienza'. It is known that he was the essential pedagogical
influence upon the young Galileo, his eldest son (cf. Coelho, ed.
'Music and Science in the Age of Galileo Galilei'), arguably one of
the most influential empiricists in history. Vincenzo, through his
tuning research, found the underlying truth at the heart of the
misunderstood myth of 'Pythagoras' hammers' (the square of the numbers
concerned yielded those musical intervals, not the actual numbers, as
believed), and through this and other discoveries that demonstrated
the fallibility of traditional authorities, a radically empirical
attitude developed, passed on to Galileo, which regarded "experience
and demonstration" as the 'sine qua non' of valid rational enquiry.

British empiricism
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British empiricism, though it was not a term used at the time, derives
from the 17th century period of early modern philosophy and modern
science. The term became useful in order to describe differences
perceived between two of its founders Francis Bacon, described as an
"empiricist", and René Descartes, who is described as a "rationalist".
Bacon's philosophy of nature was heavily derived from the works of the
Italian philosopher Bernardino Telesio and the Swiss physician
Paracelsus. Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza, in the next
generation, are often also described as an empiricist and a
rationalist respectively. John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume
were the primary exponents of empiricism in the 18th century
Enlightenment, with Locke being normally known as the founder of
empiricism as such.

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. Berkeley's approach to empiricism would later come to be
called subjective idealism.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) responded to
Berkeley's criticisms of Locke, as well as other differences between
early modern philosophers, and moved empiricism to a new level of
skepticism. Hume argued in keeping with the empiricist view that all
knowledge derives from sense experience, but he accepted that this has
implications not normally acceptable to philosophers. He wrote for
example, "Locke divides all arguments into demonstrative and probable.
On this view, we must say that it is only probable that all men must
die or that the sun will rise to-morrow, because neither of these can
be demonstrated. But to conform our language more to common use, we
ought to divide arguments into demonstrations, proofs, and
probabilities�by �proofs� meaning arguments from experience that leave
no room for doubt or opposition." And,

Hume divided all of human knowledge into two categories: 'relations of
ideas' and 'matters of fact' (see also Kant's analytic-synthetic
distinction). Mathematical and logical propositions (e.g. "that the
square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares 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 people's "ideas", in turn, are
derived from their "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.

Hume maintained that no knowledge, even the most basic beliefs about
the natural world, can 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 of 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".
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'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 center
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 of 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. 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 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 (also see the third man).

Logical empiricism
====================
Logical empiricism (also '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
(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). 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.

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." 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 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.

Pragmatism
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In the late 19th and early 20th century several forms of pragmatic
philosophy arose. The ideas of pragmatism, in its various forms,
developed mainly from discussions between Charles Sanders Peirce and
William James when both men were at Harvard in the 1870s. 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 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'.

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", 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,
in physical sciences as in ethics. Thus, ideas in Dewey's system
retain their empiricist flavour in that they are only known 'a
posteriori'.

See also
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References
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External links
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* [http://chaospet.com/250 Empiricist Man]

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