Basics
and Meaning :
Usually defined as the thesis
that all knowledge or at least all knowledge of matters of fact as disctinct
from that of purely logical relations between concepts – is based on
experience.
The popular appeal of
empiricism depends in interpreting the key xord ‘experience’ in tis everyday
understanding, in which a claim to have had dealings with mind-independent
realities down on the farm. But philosophers often so construed this key term
that merely to have dreams or hallucinations of cows would constitue having
experience of cows.
Empiricism
vs rationalism :
Empiricism can perhaps be
better characterized in terms of what it denies. To begin with, it is a
rejection of platonism and idealism (forms of rationalism), that when the human
mind first encounters the world it is already furnished with a range of ideas
or concepts, that accordingly owe nothing to experience.
By contrast, empiricists
maintain that at birth the mind is, as Locke put is, “white papaer, void of all
characters” (tabula rasa), and that only experience can provide it with ideas.
Granted that ideas, the raw material of knowledge, originate thus, some
epmiricists, though not all, have claimed that the thruth of factual statements
can only be established inductively from particular experiences, and have
denied any intuition or cartesian “natural light” which enables us to grasp
general thruths about rality independantly of experience. The inductive method
can, in its turn, be variously interpreted either, more liberally as justifying
claims to thruth and knowledge for statements about a mind-independant reality,
or more strictly, as justifying only statements about the immediate data of
experience. Understood in this latter fashion, empiricism leads to a radical
scepticism about many of our ordinary claims to knowledge, as is manifested in
Hume and the logical positivist school.
Forms
of empiricism
The development in the 17th
and the 18th centuries of what became known as the british empiricist school of
philosophy, with Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, was closely linked with the
steadily increasing success and importance of experimental science, and its
gradual discovery of its own identity as something distinct from pure
mathematics and other disciplines.
As a result, empiricism has
seen the acquisition of knowledge as a slow, piecemeal process, endlessly
self-correcting and limited by the possibilities of experiment and
observations, and has been sceptical about the claims of all-embracing
metaphysical systems.
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