Empiricism

References

• Empiricism Wikipedia Article

Definitions

• Epistemology
• • The branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. It studies the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues.
  • Epistemology aims to answer questions such as What do people know?, What does it mean to say that people know something?, What makes justified beliefs justified?, and How do people know that they know?
  • How do people know together is a question asked in social epistemology.
• Empirical Evidence
• • Empirical evidence for a proposition is evidence, i.e. what supports or counters this proposition, that is constituted by or accessible to sense experience or experimental procedure. Empirical evidence is of central importance to the sciences and plays a role in various other field, like epistemology and law.
• Proposition
• • A proposition is a central concept in the philosophy of language, semantics, logic, and related fields, often characterized as the primary bearer of truth or falsity. Propositions are also characterized as being the kind of thing that declarative sentences denote. For instance the sentence The sky is blue denotes the proposition that the sky is blue.
  • Formally, propositions are often modeled as functions which map a possible world to a truth value. For instance, the proposition that the sky is blue can be modeled as a function which would return the truth value if given the actual world as input, but would return if given some alternative world where the sky is green.
• Cognitive Bias
• • A cognitive bias is a systemic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individual can create their own subjective reality from their perception of an input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, and irrationality.
• a priori and a posteriori
• • From the earlier and from the later are Latin phrases used in philosophy to distinguish types of knowledge, justification, or argument by their reliance on experience. A priori knowledge is independent from any experience. A posteriri knowledge depends on empirical evidence.
• sine qua non
• • Without which, not
  • An essential condition; a thing that is absolutely necessary

Notes

In philosophy, empiricism is an epistemological view which holds that true knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience and empirical evidence. it is one of several competing views within epistemology, along with rationalism and skepticism. Empiricists argue that empiricism is a more reliable method of finding the truth rather than purely using logical reasoning, because humans have cognitive biases and limitations which leads to errors of judgement. Empiricism emphasizes the central role of empirical evidence in the formation of ideas, rather than innate ideas or traditions. Empiricists may argue that traditions arise due to relations of previous sensory experiences.

• Empiricism has been historically associated with the blank slate concept (tabula rasa), according to which the human mind is blank at birth and develops its thoughts only though later experience.
• Empiricism in the philosophy of science emphasizes 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 in the natural world rather than resting solely on a prori reasoning, intuition, or revelation.
• Empiricism often believes that knowledge is based on experience and that knowledge is tentative and probabilistic, subject to continued revision and falsification.
• The word empiricism comes from an Ancient Greek word.
• Philosophical empiricists hold no knowledge to be properly inferred or deduced unless it is derived from one's sense-based experience. In epistemology, empiricism is typically contrasted with rationalism, which holds that knowledge may be derived from reason independently of the senses, and in the philosophy of the mind, it if often contrasted with innatism, which holds that some knowledge and ideas are already present in the mind at birth.

History

• The earliest Western proto-empiricists were the empiric school of ancient Greek medical practitioners, founded in 3330 B.C.E. Its members preferred to rely on the observation of phantasiai (phenomena, the appearances).
• The tabula rasa idea connoted a view of the mind as an originally blank or empty recorder on which experience leaves marks. This dates back to Aristotle, 350 BC:

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).

• Aristotle was considered to give a more important position to sense perception than Plato
• This idea of the tabula rasa was later developed by the stoics in 330BCE, when they emphasized that the mind starts blank, but acquires knowledge as the outside world is impressed upon it.
• Italian philosopher Bernardino Telesio developed an empirical metaphysical system in Renaissance Italy. He is regarded as the first of the moderns by Francis Bacon. Telesio's influence can also be seen on the French philosophers Rene Descartes and Pierre Gassendi.
• Galileo regarded experience and demonstration as the sine qua non of valid rational enquiry.
• British empiricism (a retrospective characterization) emerged during the 17^th century as an approach to early modern philosophy and modern science.
• Francis Bacon advocated for empiricism in 1620 and Rene Descartes laid the groundwork for upholding rationalism in France around 1640.
• Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza identified as an empiricist and a rationalist, respectively.
• In the Enlightenment of the 17^th century, John Locke in England and in the 18^th century, both George Berkeley in England and David Hume in Scotland, all became leasing exponents of empiricism, hence the dominance of empiricism in British philosophy.
• • The distinction between rationalism and empiricism was not formally made until Immanuel Kant, in Germany around 1780, who sought to merge the two views.
• John Locke proposed in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) a vey influential worldview wherein the only knowledge humans can have is a posteiori (based upon experience).
• • There are two sources of our ideas: sensation and reflection. I both cases, a distinction is made between simple and complex ideas.
  • Simple ideas are unanalyzable and are broken down into primary and secondary quantities, Primary qualities are essential for the object in question to be what it is. Secondary qualities are the sensory information we can perceive from its primary qualities. Primary qualities define what an object is, while secondary qualities define its attributes.
• David Hume moved empiricism to a new level of skepticism. Hume divided all human knowledge into two categories: relations of ideas and matters of fact.
• • Mathematical and logical propositions are examples of the first, while propositions involving some contingent observation of the world are examples of the second.
  • 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 the extreme empiricist theory known as phenomenalism, anticipated by the argument of Hume and Berkeley, a physical object is a kind of construction out of our experiences.
• John Stuart Mill's empiricist beliefs went beyond Hume's. He claimed that all mathematical truths were merely very highly confirmed generalizations from experience.
• Logical Empiricism was an early 20^th century attempt to synthesize the essential ideas of British empiricism (with its strong emphasis on sensory experience as the basis of knowledge) with certain aspects from mathematical logic that had been developed by Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
• The neopositivists saw in the logical symbolism a powerful instrument that could rationally reconstruct all scientific discourse into an ideal, logically perfect, language that would be free of ambiguities and deformations of natural language.
• In the early 19^th and early 20^th century, several forms of pragmatic philosophy, which integrates the basic ideas of empiricism (evidence-based) and rational (concepts-based) thinking, arose.
• • Charles Pierce and Williams James popularized this philosophy.