email sez: “ As someone who answered questions about Philosophy before, can you help Zyra Fabella? Zyra Fabella wants an answer to: What is the age of empiricism?”

varies from one group to another, from as young as a few days on up; It’s the age

you get your empiri cut off! “ZETZ!”

The Empiricist movement is credited to John Locke, although his inspirations can be traced back to Democritus.
Empiricism holds that we know by learning through observation and experimentally, as contrasted with Rationalism which holds we can know by reason and logic.
Rene Descartes is accepted as an early Rationalist.

The British Empiricist tradition led directly to our age of scientific discovery and innovation, hence, in my opinion, we are still in the age of Empiricism.

It interests me that Locke’s contemporary Baruch Spinoza was a supposed Rationalist, yet they agreed on their philosophy of Liberalism.
I think the supposed distinctions between some early Empiricists and Rationalists are not so distinct, but later thinkers took the early thinker’s thinking further.

To acquire knowledge we must Empirically observe and experiment, and to sift through meaningless knowledge and false beliefs that can seem like knowledge Reason and Logic are required.

The Empiricist approach Contains Logic as a means for analyzing Empirical observations and experiments, but Rationalism has creeped away from its original mission of helping us to know by devoting too much trust to pure reason, by uprooting thought from observation, which is using our senses.

Rationalism as an “ism” was a transition in how humans approached how we come to know things. While using reason has always been a part of the Western approach to knowledge, I believe a transition happened when humans moved from an authoritarian approach to how things are known to an individualistic approach. The philosophy of French mathematician Rene Descartes is as good a place as any to earmark the beginning of this transition.

Prior to Descartes, knowledge largely was passed “down” from authorities (primarily the church and scholars). Descartes, using reason alone, claimed to have come to some fundamental truths about the world and existence. Many of his peers believe he succeeded and in doing so, changed the way humans thought about truth and knowledge—one’s mind using reason became its own authority.

Rationalism really started to come under serious criticism through the work of Immanuel Kant and later, Frederich Nietzsche. Kant question whether it’s possible to know the “real world” at all and Nietzsche attempted to put the final stake into the heart of Rationalism by claiming that knowledge isn’t about getting to some truth “out there” but is more about acquiring power.

A conundrum wherein you doubt whether your observational experience is accurate.

You know, I’m not sure I’ve ever been a skeptical empiricist. I thought I was, but that’s just an ideal, isn’t it?

Skeptiholics Anonymous

Empiricists don’t actually exist.

They’re merely sets of physical stimuli that you idealise, since you just so happen to correlate frequencies of sound, wavelengths of light, and various other energies in certain arrays with a theoretical category you call a ‘person’, and project your own experience onto.

Hence, empirically, there are no ‘empiricists’. You just imagine there are, according to the same sensorium that gives you tinnitus, vertigo, and conveniently induces you to ignore both blind spots.

The modern Dutch philosopher Clement has much more to say about the Functional Solipsism solution to this ironic conundrum, but I might leave it to him to represent his own ideas.

The parallel postulate. A good way to think about the geometry of minds in a common space.

Empiricists or materialists refuse, to a greater or lesser degree, the concepts and principles of the intellect. For them, ideas are discontinuous, static, and symbolic, while reality is continuous, dynamic, and actual. For instance, the idea ‘justice’ is an abstraction that has no exact equivalent as such in the extramental world. There are people who give to others what is owed them, courts deciding that certain behaviours are just and others are not, but no living, tangible justice, some personification of the concept ‘justice’. Isn’t it foolish, then, to claim that ideas like justice can supply any true knowledge of concrete reality? Sense data imposes its truth upon us by its immediacy, but the cold realm of the intellect is unable to get us into touch with the outside world.

This epistemology is impressed by the vividness and sheer impact of sense life, and wants the life of the intellect to impose itself on us with the same force. ‘If you are real, hit me!’ demands the sensualist of his thinking faculty. The mind, however, being wholly spiritual, does not of itself exercise any material effect. Thus, it is impossible for it to ‘prove’ itself to us in such a way.

To deny completely the ability of the intellect to provide truth, one must refuse what are called the ‘first principles’. These are self-evident truths, the basic propositions that must hold true for any reasoning to be valid, propositions that are grasped and held to be certain by the intellect by its very nature. The first principles include the following:

• the principle of non-contradiction: ‘It is impossible for a thing to be and not-be at the same time, in the same respect.’
• the principle of identity: ‘A thing is what it is.’
• the principle of sufficient reason: ‘A thing must have a sufficient reason for its existence either in itself or in another.’
• the principle of causality: ‘Every effect has a cause.’

Someone asserting that ‘there is no such thing as absolute truth’, for instance, is implicitly denying the principle of non-contradiction. He is proposing as a truth that truth does not exist; he is effectively saying, ‘Truth is and is not at the same time.’ This position in turn undermines all reasoning processes, which seek to establish that something is or is not. ‘Is’ has to be ‘is’ and completely separate from ‘is not’ for a statement using one of them to be valid. A person denying the principle of non-contradiction, then, must logically:

• conclude that the intellect is useless for knowing reality, and
• leave off seeking to find truth by means of it.

A more anti-intellectual position can hardly be imagined. It might be a surprise to find that the empiricist is as much of a subjectivist as the idealist. He insists that only hard, factual data are to be accepted as true: the brightness of the sun, the green of the grass, the smell of the smoke. Meanwhile, he claims that the ideas which we form about those facts are pure inventions of the mind: they don’t correspond to reality and so are not true. We cannot, however, keep ourselves from forming ideas about things and using those ideas as the basis for what we consider to be true about reality. Thus, the empiricist is forced to say that each of us have our own ideas and our own truth, that is, he is forced by the logic of his position to be a subjectivist. Empiricist materialists likewise destroy the value of words. Words are signs of ideas, and if ideas say nothing about reality, then words seeking to express ideas to others are useless. This is why materialists end up questioning the value of words themselves, as Bertrand Russell did constantly in his famous 1948 debate with Fr Copleston on the existence of God. Empiricists attempting to communicate would be more consistent to howl, grunt, or snarl.

The empiricist, in short, like the idealist:

• leaves each person to form his own subjective ideas about reality
• renders words useless by his epistemology, and so
• has no justification to communicate through language.

(This is an excerpt from my book The Realist Guide to Religion and Science, pp. 18–21).

www.therealistguide.com

Empiricism can no more prove itself than rationalism can prove itself or any epistemology can prove itself. However, while no epistemology can prove itself (for such would be circular reasoning) different epistemologies can be examined internally to determine which is the simplest and most sophisticated. Let us examine how the classical empiricism of John Locke stands up to the skepticism proposed by David Hume. Suppose first that my perceptions do in fact correspond to objects in the real world; the universe exists and so do all the people I perceive. Now suppose my perceptions do not correspond to objects in the real world; all that exists is my conscious self and my own thoughts and perceptions of objects that are not really there.

In the first system, if I turn my attention to the other 7 billion people on the planet, I will find that, like me, every one of them conforms to the notion that one’s perceptions correspond to objects in a real, physical world. How can I know this? I make this claim because every living person is biologically alive; in order to keep oneself biologically alive one must be able to locate food, avoid danger, and seek shelter. Accomplishing these primal tasks requires comprehensive coordination with one’s physical environment. Such synchronization requires knowledge of the physical world, and the only way to acquire such knowledge is by means of the bodily senses. Hence, the bodily senses are necessary to keep any human being alive. To doubt the veracity of the input of the bodily senses is to refuse to respond to every environmental stimulus. It is not hard to imagine why this makes it very difficult for one to remain biologically alive; if one ignores the optical stimulus of a bus speeding through a red light, the olfactory stimulus of methane, or the somatosensory stimulus of a fire, one will not survive very long in this world of danger. However, even the nihilist who touts his skepticism with complete and utter confidence is, without question, biologically alive; to keep oneself alive, one must respond to the stimuli of the bodily senses; the only consistent nihilist is a dead nihilist. It is for this reason that nearly every human being trusts his bodily senses without question. Those who do attempt the radical skepticism advocated by Hume will, before long, either give into trusting the senses again (which is far more likely) or die for failure to respond to environmental stimuli. In fact, Hume himself lived to the age of 65. He did this by ignoring his own philosophy and trusting his senses to keep him out of harm’s way. Furthermore, still assuming the first system, I can know that every living person affirms the validity of inductive reasoning. I refer to the same argument as before: keeping oneself biologically alive requires the environmental coordination afforded by the senses. I believe that the sun will rise tomorrow not because I have been to tomorrow and witnessed it rise, but because it has risen every day since my birth. This is an inductive argument. But without induction, the fact that the sun has risen every day of our lives gives us no consolation that it will do the same tomorrow. We ought all be running around in a panic at midnight expending every resource to try and keep ourselves insulated should the sun not rise the next day. Without induction, the fact that gravity has always held us to the earth gives us no consolation that we will not spontaneously fly off into the vacuum of space; we ought all be walking around in spacesuits with oxygen tanks in expectation of such a catastrophe. The money and resources that would be wasted on these precautions and on thousands more like them would devastate the economy of every nation making society impossible. Even Hume spent very little time worrying about such things, because he too could not help but affirm through his actions the validity of induction.

What then, if we assume the second system, the skeptical view of the universe? In this instance, all that exists is my own consciousness and perceptions. If such is the case, no one else exists; there is no one to confirm that I have reasoned correctly to reach my skeptical conclusions. This is not to say that my conclusions are wrong for, as I have mentioned already, the skeptical worldview contains no contradictions. At this point I cannot resist pointing out a quite humorous irony: if Hume was right, then he did not exist. If Hume was right, the reader, being a conscious entity can be the only knowable thing in existence. The reader can know the existence of nothing else, not even David Hume. What are thought to be Hume’s teachings are really just constructs of the reader’s own mind. If the skeptical view of reality is the correct one, there can be only one skeptic in this perceived reality, and that skeptic is the reader himself, since the reader is conscious and everyone he perceives is a perception only and corresponds to no real object. And yet, even in the skeptic’s perceptions, it would appear as though everyone were indeed alive and responded to the stimulation of his senses. In fact, the skeptic would not find a single living person who did not trust their senses, as far as he looked.

Let us summarize our findings thus far. In system one, the 7 billion inhabitants on earth all agree that our perceptions correspond to reality. Not only this, but anyone who claims otherwise is simply incapable of living in consistency with said claim. It is as Thomas Reid puts it, “I never heard that any skeptic runs his head against a post, or stepped into a kernel, because he did not believe his eyes.” This system is both simple and sophisticated, simple because it requires only the presumption of correlation between perception and object, and sophisticated because 7 billion corroborate it, none being physically capable of believing differently. System two, on the other hand, is neither simple nor sophisticated, complicated because it offers no explanation for our surprisingly detailed perceptions, and crude because there is only one mind in existence that conforms to it, with no others even having examined it. On top of this, the skeptic has no explanation as to why everybody in his perceptions seems to think and act as though the universe were real. And whenever what appear to be people appear to decide to become skeptical and stop responding to environmental stimuli, they appear to die. Although reason cannot judge between these two systems, and although neither contains contradictions, system one is clearly the superior system. And is it really so incredible that the one presumption we all seem to share— the one presumption without which we could not remain alive— could, in fact, be true after all and that no further justification ought to be required for one to submit one’s full credence?

I believe with utter confidence that my sensory perceptions do indeed correspond to objects in a real, physical environment. I also believe, as does every other human being, that induction is a valid form of argument. It is helpful for the sake of clarity to phrase these universally accepted beliefs in a distinct statement. This statement must include some notion of the personal existence and the capacity for what Locke calls reflection, as the most extreme of skeptics will deny even this. Furthermore, it must incorporate the ability to know the universe through perception, as we have discussed. Finally, it must verify that induction, upon which all humans depend for survival, is a valid form of argument. The statement in mind may be phrased most succinctly and most eloquently as follows: I am able to make empirical inductions about the universe. In this simple affirmation is contained the reader’s own conscious existence and capacity for reflection (I am), the existence of reality (the universe), and the reader’s ability to know the universe both through sensory perception (empirical) and through reasoning inductively from those perceptions (inductions). This presumption is not innate, but we all learn to accept it, consciously or not, very early on in our lives, because as biological beings we have no choice but to accept it. I have done my best to show that this presumption makes the most sense of our perceptions and that every living person conforms to it whether they affirm it verbally or not. Thus, classical empiricism is both simple and sophisticated.

In a sense, yes. I use that word very carefully, because Empiricism is utterly dependent upon the truth of senses. Just so we can be sure I’m making sense, the Oxford dictionaries define Empiricism using the following photonic array:

empiricism /ɛmˈpɪrɪsɪz(ə)m /

▸ noun [mass noun] Philosophy the theory that all knowledge is based on experience derived from the senses. Stimulated by the rise of experimental science, it developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, expounded in particular by John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. Compare with phenomenalism.

Now, the catch here is derivation. Do senses derive themselves? Are experiences self-evident? Prof. Victor Felix has a great method of exposing the assumptions often made here:

I use the “if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Koan to demonstrate the difference between a physical sound wave with frequency and amplitude, versus our perception of the pitch and loudness.

The former objectively exists, the latter only in our consciousness. My answer to the riddle would get me kicked out of the Shaolin Monastery on the first day. “What do you mean when you say ‘sound,’ Sensei?” A sound wave exists regardless of whether any entity is aware of it or not, and can be measured independently of consciousness. But that sound wave has no pitch, no tone, no meaning, other than our subjective perception.

So, in class I do a little demonstration, pretending to blow a dog whistle. If there is no dog to hear it, did it make a sound? Then I pretend to blow the imaginary dog whistle louder, puffing up my cheeks. The sound wave has more intensity, greater amplitude. Is it louder?

According to purely empirical thought there is not necessarily any association between any observations. That would require rationalism. Inductions and deductions simply are not empirical - empirikos means only ‘experience’. What is an experience? When we start to say that we ‘experience’ consciousness and that logic is part of that ‘experience’ then we might as well say that empiricism is existential rationalism. Once you do that you can say anything you feel is true.

So, if illusions are illusions then Empiricism is false, because there is no sense in which those experiences can be falsified - they belong to senses! However, the fact is that we do not allow experiences to define their meaning - which is why Empiricism has a rational definition in a dictionary, ironically.

They are both manmade fallacies that not conform to facts.

1. First let us see this “rationalism”:

The traditional definition of rationalism is it does not need direct factual evidence but can depend on pure logical inference to produce conclusion. That is logically impossible --- any inference has to be based on evidence regardless it is direct evidence or indirect evidence. Inference without evidence is mere imagination. And the kind of imagination that without natural law base and known knowledge ground is just an illusion. Even though indirect evidence can be derived from former indirect evidence, but it inevitably will be traced down to the original direct factual evidence it ultimately based on. So, 1) all indirect evidences have to be based on the original direct evidence. 2) Also the inferenced out result have to be checked by the direct evidence from experiment or applications.

Logical inference is just the processing process, it need evidence input to be processed to produce logical conclusion output. A process cannot work on nothing to produce something. And all evidences are intrinsically based on the original direct factual evidence. Evidence has to “touch ground”.

Even mathematics need data and conditions to work out solution.

Pure logical inference based “rationalism” does not exist.

1. Let us see this “empiricism”:

Any experience starts from the signals our sensing organs received from environment. These signals is data but not information, they cannot form experience. They have to be pre-processed by our nerve systems to become information, and these pieces of information in turn will be further logically processed to form simple logical organization of information which we can call “experience”.

1)

So, even in a direct experience, there already inevitably involved logical inference on both subconscious level and conscious level they have to pre-process and further organize out these ”information” for us to experience with.

2)

What we see not necessarily is the true reality due to our sensing ability and processing ability is limited.

3)

And what we see is the phenomenon but what that really means has to be inferenced out by our logical ability our intuitive cognitive ability may not always enough to decide that. For instances, when we see the red shift, our instinctive cognitive ability cannot decide what that means. If we think it is caused by all stars are leaving us that will be wrong but if we use natural law to logically reason it, we can find it is just the mass media resistance caused energy loss reflected as frequency drop. What we see may not be what it is, without our logical inference, we don’t know what it is. Even direct experience may be false. I see with my eyes! No, we see with our brains.

4)

If our direct evidence is not correctly interpreted by our logical inference, it will a false base for further inferences to produce more indirect evidences. For instances: when we decided red shift is caused by all stars leaving us in extremely high speed, further inference based on it will produce space dilation, dark energy…

So, the pure “direct experience” with no logical inference involved does not exist.

1. Conclusion:

The information collecting and information processing are two inseparable aspects of an integrated cognitive process that one cannot without the other for this process. Separate them into independent processes is purely subjective manmade imagination or purposely conducted disinformation that cause disorder of our information system. Disinformation for the important effective information that relevant to human future (unlike the kind of disinformation in a war to cheat enemy) is the action that destructing real value just as the destruction of the material value in economy will cause the same real value loss and therefore impose the same danger for human future.

So this never ending so called “philosophical” debate of the traditional “rationalism” and ”empiricism” are actually some low level logical and factual mistakes/distortions. They can get away with this disinformation all the time because they playing with the words they created which no one knows what they mean and many of them are fallacies too. It will be a daunting task to untangle the knots of the huge system of fallacies one by one.

It is time we restore the name of the “rationalist” and “rationalism” and put them in proper use for human future. They have important job to do now --- because we need rational order to lead us into endless future, and only the real meaning of rationalism can lead us there.

These terms are so important for human future that we cannot allow them to be twisted, smeared and buried for good. We have to correct them back to their should-be form, wash them out of the mud, and restore their glory they should be.

It is empirically demonstrable that empiricism consistently describes observable reality, but that is not the same as proving that empiricism is a truth-bearer for the nature of reality - only that empiricism can consistently produce intelligible pictures of the nature of reality.

Language acquisition is the most glaring example. Children are born without an innate vocabulary. Is this the same as saying they are born without language? Is there some device constructed a-priori that gives them words? No. Is there an innate ability to learn words by observing examples and experimenting with their voice? Yes! Can language emerge without being taught? Yes! Can that emergence explain why language is intelligible? No!

Here’s a fun experiment: can you empirically invent numbers? Sure! Grab any set of things around you, make a heirarchy and name iterations of it. The hexadecimal system is cute. Did you know A is A number? Oh, that gets confusing when formal systems share the same symbol doesn’t it? Is ‘A’ a letter, a general nominative function, a number or the Ace up your sleeve? Is an Ace 1 or 11 in blackjack? The dealer always wins in the end.

It is empirically provable that empiricism works - that its pictures are well-formed - they correspond accurately and truthfully with each other. Empiricism can not be shown empirically to bear truth about the objects it is picturing - only that the pictures it produces can logically be used to inform the viewer of features of other pictures they have not yet seen. The internal completeness of empiricism is logical. It’s representation as the fact of reality is not. Are pictures and their objects the same thing? Can a picture produce a picture of itself?

Yes, if the reality in which that picture of a picture exists is different to the reality of the original picture. Let MC Escher show you how. A picture tells a thousand words, but only truly about its own world - not the world from which it is derived…

Is this real or just accurate? The genius of the man cannot be overstated, but he cannot reason outside his own sphere, nor can he be the hand that holds it. The fact that the picture implies this is irony.

The history of philosophy, like the history of many ideas that are very old, reveals a pendulum between two main views of what is, and of how the human mind knows what is. These two main views are: Rationalism and Empiricism. Empiricists believe that nothing exists that is not at least to some extent perceivable, and that knowledge, at least to a large extent, is about things that are or can be perceived. Rationalists, on the contrary, maintain that real things are ideas and principles, while the phenomenal, perceivable world is merely a reflection of the reality that we do not perceive at all—it is not material— but instead intuit or know with our minds a priori.

Now then! The greatest of all Rationalist was Plato, his pupil, Aristotle. was also a Rationalist, but not an extreme one like Plato. With Plato and Aristotle, the pendulum swung far toward Rationalism, but it swung back toward Empiricism with the rise to prominence of the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, who held that the mind at birth is a tabula rasa, or “clean slate,” on which messages are “written” by the senses. Unsophisticated philosophers are usually empiricists, and the early Christian thinkers were unsophisticated; but Saint Augustine, as a follower of Plato, introduced the Church to the Rationalism that prevailed for nearly a thousand years.

The pendulum swung again: Saint Thomas Acquinas and Roger Bacon were, in their different ways, Empiricists whose theories were subtle and highly sophisticated. But Rationalists struck back during the early Renaissance with the revival of interest in Plato and especially Aristotle and the dominance of the so-called scholastic philosophy in schools everywhere in Christendom. Thus, at the beginning of the 17th century, the pendulum had swung far toward Rationalism—and it was ready to swing the other way. But then Descartes, though himself a Rationalist, gave the pendulum a strong push, and so did the first of the English Empiricists, Francis Bacon, with the relatively naive insistence that all philosophical study and investigation should be concerned with the secrets of nature, to unlock which would allow man to progress. So, as you see, Mr. questioner, “It is why we need to learn Empiricism?” It is like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, though they were in some ways fervent Empiricists, although they also held some Rationalist! The pendulum has been swinging back and forth!

Perhaps the main weakness of Empiricism (i.e. basing all knowledge on the data of the five senses) is the fact that the human body is so tiny (compared to the vast Universe) and lasts 120 years at most, that to obtain a complete knowledge about the world through the five senses is impossible.

Our senses don’t take in enough data in one lifetime.

We know that our eyes can see only a limited range of color and light (and other animals can see more). Our ears can hear only a limited range of tones (and other animals can hear more). The same with the other senses. There are gaps between fingers, and there are gaps between the senses. Our sensory data is strictly limited — even with our scientific instruments.

Thus, Empiricism, as a philosophy based on sensory data, presumes that “facts” are strictly limited to ideas that we can verify by using our five senses. Everything else is just an illusion based on a bundle of feelings, says the Empiricist. Many scientists are Empiricists — but that is not enough to justify it as methodology. It works until it doesn’t.

The first critique of Empiricism was voiced by Socrates 2,400 years ago. He challenged our definition of crucial concepts by which we live — by which we construct our cultures, and that we would fight for and die for. Here are the concepts:

• Virtue; Duty; Morality; the Right; the Good; the Beautiful; Courage; Moderation; Wisdom; Justice.

Through a lifetime of public debates, Socrates showed that while we can show material examples of these Ideals within small contexts — nobody was able to define these Ideals in a way that would stand up to a rigorous debate. (That is, what is virtue for an adult is not always a virtue for a child. What is a virtue for a mother is not always a virtue for a soldier. And so on.)

This is the main argument against Empiricism, which denies the Reality of Ideals such as Virtue, Duty and Justice, because these cannot be verified by the five senses.

Actually, most people have a clear idea of Justice. We intuitively know who is Fair and Unfair; who is Kind and Unkind; who keeps Promises and who breaks Promises. Yet Empiricism claims that we cannot know these Ethical ideas as facts, but only as personal feelings.

Balderdash.

There are other good arguments against Empiricism from Metaphysics, but this argument from Ethics is probably the strongest.

What is the importance of empiricism as a source of knowledge?

Let's be sure we understand what the term means:

Of course, children learn about the world by using their senses. Most of what we call common sense is based on direct observation of how things work…or don't work.

Before there were research tools that extended human senses, empiricism was the only kind of SCIENCE one could do…just use your senses. By the end of the 19th century, we had discovered nearly everything that human senses alone could discover.

But today, the important additions to human knowledge come from tools that go far beyond our human senses. These include:

• Optical Microscopes
• Telescopes
• Radio astronomy
• Scanning electron microscopy
• Magnetometers
• Barometers and other pressure-measuring tools
• Accurate thermometers
• Mass spectrographs
• Atomic Absorbtion Spectroscopy
• Diffraction grates
• Polarizing filters
• Radiation detectors
• Weather Surveillance satellites
• Hyperspectral imagery
• Magnetic Resinance Imagery (MRI)
• Computed X-Ray Tomography (CAT scans)
• Chemical Assays like COVID tests and pool chemical tests
• Carbon Monoxide detectors
• Ultra-fast stop-action photography e.g. bullets in flight, light pulse in flight
• Genetic Sequencing
• Lasers (a myriad of uses, like measuring distances, measuring speeds, immobilizing single atoms, LIDAR scanned imagery, data storage and retrieval, signal transmission, LIGO gravity wave detectors)

Quasi-empiricism and empiricism are both philosophical approaches to knowledge and understanding, but they differ in important ways.

Empiricism is a philosophical approach that emphasizes the importance of sensory experience and observation in gaining knowledge about the world. Empiricists argue that knowledge is derived from sensory experience and that ideas that are not derived from experience, such as innate knowledge, are not valid.

Quasi-empiricism, on the other hand, is a view that combines elements of empiricism with other philosophical approaches, such as rationalism or idealism. Quasi-empiricists may argue that sensory experience is important for gaining knowledge, but they may also emphasize the importance of other factors, such as intuition or reason, in understanding the world.

One key difference between quasi-empiricism and empiricism is that quasi-empiricism is more flexible and allows for a wider range of approaches to gaining knowledge, while empiricism is more rigid in its focus on sensory experience as the primary source of knowledge. Quasi-empiricists may also be more open to other philosophical approaches, while empiricists are typically more skeptical of non-empirical methods of gaining knowledge.

In summary, while both quasi-empiricism and empiricism emphasize the importance of knowledge gained through experience, quasi-empiricism is a broader philosophical approach that incorporates other methods of gaining knowledge, while empiricism is a more focused approach that emphasizes the importance of sensory experience in understanding the world.

Mathematics is totally empirical in that you don’t just say what you intuitively think it should be, but have to set something in motion and stay totally faithful to how it comes out, watching carefully, relentlessly goading it into more things to watch. And I also know I’m always wanting to mathematicize mathematics, like “Isn’t one-to-one mapping a one-to-one between that term and a single referent? So many-to-one mapping doesn’t refer to itself?…etc. etc.” like that itself has a system(/quasi-system (of system and quasi-system)) (meta-)governing it.

Meanwhile, the glory of realizing “the nature of the world is written in mathematics” meets the counter-glory of the utter transcendence of mathematics beyond what we can know of it. So just like we’ll jump to accepting qualitative characterizations of mathematical solutions, so we’ll accept qualitative characterizations of empirical findings.

It’s even why I’m talking about the things I am now, like that the sociology can never be ignored. There really (*really*) isn’t a such thing as ‘rational/empirical’ or ‘mathematical/linguistic’—including no such thing as that right there. There’s a (no-)such-thing-as-(no-)such-thing that’s perfectly easy to operate by, where ‘temporary permanent’ or ‘relative absolute’ are themselves temporarily permanent relative absolutes. It unites critical and committed perfectly, science and meta-science, math and meta-math in perfect operating reciprocity, in a way only improved by (*ahem*) a *community* operating off of it. As opposed to the sociology we take for granted now.

From within such normal functioning, even ‘necessarily’ is an operator over itself as a domain, hinted at linguistically as ‘the necessity/possibility of necessity and possibility’ (and same again for ‘possibility’, and again for its domain).

And, see? I’m so wanting to mathematicize that, into its symbolic logic. But not with the (f💥💥n) sociology that’s wired as, “Let’s get it some real, firm grounding as opposed to all that soft, ignorant travesty out there” (which *guarantees* its own Greek Tragedy of turning out soft, ignorant travesty), or that the validity of this rides on whether some author should be awarded some social standing for it, as though that ever has f🚨🚨-all to do with anything.

‘Necessarily sometimes’ is itself sometimes necessary. In fact, if mathematics ever wanted to get around to understanding itself, rationo-empirically, it might even see how it’s an elaborate inscription of that itself.

There is no middle way in terms of a position on rationalism and empiricism. The contemporary take on them is usually that they are both useless on their own, and that we use both rational and empirical modes of reasoning in most of our knowledge.

Classical rationalism and empiricism differ on their views of what fundamentally justifies true beliefs in order to count as knowledge. Rationalism is the position that a priori justification counts to make true beliefs knowledge. Empiricism is the position that a posteriori justification is needed to make true belief knowledge. There is no middle position because you either need experience or don’t in order to justify your true beliefs.

Criticisms of both sides seemed to be correct. It’s seeming impossible to argue to some knowledge of about experience from reasoning alone. Logic models possible information organizations. It doesn’t tell you what is being organized. On the other side, experience doesn’t tell you how to organize anything. It gives you raw content. There are no conclusions to make from that stream of data without a logical structure to organize it. Both without each other give you meaninglessness, not knowledge.

What neither classical rationalism nor empiricism considered was that there might be a component of reasoning and a component of experience in the justification of the most important knowledge. In practice, this seems to be the approach influential philosophers like Descartes, Kant, and Russell were taking. It is also the approach which triggered the scientific revolution of the 20th century.

To put this transition of thinking about epistemic justification into a contemporary context, think about the difference between “theoretical” and “experimental” (or “applied”) in a particular science like physics. While there might be some debate between those preferring theoretical and experimental physics over which is more important, it’s much more about which they prefer than which is going to answer any particular question. In order to answer a question, one needs both the theory (ie., math) and experiments.

But the way a priori and a posteriori justification compliment one another goes even deeper than a general specialization in a particular field of science. In order to have any epistemic justification at all, one needs to at least be able to mentally structure some sort of epistemic logic. That structure is going to filter all of your experience, a central idea Kant seemed emphasize throughout his epistemological works. However, in any structure, whether it is a logical formula, mathematical formula, or database, you need to fill in the table cells with some sort of input from somewhere. That’s the role experience plays. It’s a constant data stream for training our neuro-ontological structures.

The real middle way is to recognize the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches to epistemic justification, then reorganize your theory of epistemic justification in order to utilize the advantages and minimize the disadvantages. Fortunately, nature has already done most of that work for us through the biological evolution of brains. So much of our work involves discovering that evolutionary history and describing it accurately. After that, we can go back to prescribing optimizations. Historically, they were more about prescription for methods of thinking, whether classical rationalist or empiricist. Today, we tend to think we need to do our due diligence with the description first.

I can only speak about the philosophical end of this, so I’ll give you what I know there.

Empiricism is the school of thought that tells us everything we know comes from “Sense Experience.” Basically, everything you know and believe comes from what you physically experience. If you know that concrete is hard, it’s only because you fell on a concrete floor once and realized this. If you know that your father is kind, it’s because he’s done kind things in the past and your sense experience tells you that this is true. Basically, they applied this principle to life. You only know what you’ve experienced, anything you have not personally experienced is mere conjecture and not to be trusted.

This movement was contrasted by Rationalism, who had their hero in Decartes. He believed that he could know things by logic. In Rationalism, if you meet 10 fathers who are kind you might be able to assume that most if not all fathers are kind. Empiricism would not make this assumption. You would have to meet every father to know from sense experience that they were, in fact, kind.

In common usage empiric simply means “based on experience”, but the root of it is in philosophy.
Empiricism is one of the dichotomies (false ones in my view) in the history of philosophy (this one specifically in epistemology - the branch of philosophy dealing with the nature and validity of knowledge). The other side of the dichotomy is rationalism. Rationalism claims that the main (or only) source of knowledge is rational deduction from concepts, while empiricism claims that the main (or only) source of knowledge is sense experience.

This is of course very (maybe overly…) simplified.

As an Objectivist I see this as a false dichotomy. Knowledge requires both sense experience and reason to process it.

Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that emphasizes the role of sensory experience in the acquisition of appreciation .It is based on the idea that all knowledge comes from our senses, and that we cannot know anything for sure that we have not experienced ourselves.

Empiricism is a fundamental principle of science. Scientists use observation and experimentation to test hypotheses and develop new theories. Modern empiricism recognizes the limitations of sensory experience and the role of reason and theory in shaping our understanding of the world. I

Here are some examples of how empiricism is applied today:

∆ In medicine, doctors use clinical trials to test the effectiveness of new drugs and treatments.

∆In education, teachers use data-driven instruction to tailor their teaching to the needs of their students.

∆In social science, researchers use surveys and experiments to study human behavior.

I hope this clear your Doubts.

Thank Q

While you personally may not realize it, a lot of decisions on your life are based on empiricism.

Anytime you take a medication, even if it’s just aspirin, you’re placing your trust in the fact that that medication will work. You’ve personally seen it work for others. But moreso there’s an entire industry that tests and certifies these drugs based on empiricism.

Anytime you get in your car, you trust that that car will work and get you to your destination. A great deal of work, engineering, studies, and tests have gone in to make sure your car works and will be safe. Again, all that methodology is based on empiricism.

If you mean the employment of empirical methods, this is rampant in science.

All the AI you have ever heard of are effectively empirical methods; we tried them and they work. We don’t know exactly how, we can’t unravel that, but the world champions in Chess, Go and Checkers are all AI, and we don’t know how they do it. We just know that if we arrange some synthetic neurons in a certain way, and provide a ton of training data in a certain way, they make good decisions in playing their games. Exactly what they are “looking” at, given any particular board position, we don’t know.

Given a particular state of a game, we cannot predict what the AI will do; the only way to find out is to let it do that. So it cannot teach us to play Chess, or Go, or Checkers like it does.

The same goes for self-driving cars. We show them the right “answers” for a whole lot of moves, and they learn to connect their inputs to the correct outputs, and we don’t know how, exactly. I can do a lot of hand-waving but in the end its learning is an empirical process, and the whole idea of neural nets began as an empirical process — Somebody said “What if we made a simplistic model of the way neurons trigger each other, would that work?”

Turns out, it does.

The same is true in much of science. Heck, even the use of a lever and fulcrum had to be an empirical discovery by some long forgotten cave dweller 50,000 years ago.

You can’t make something up and call it true.

You have to show it to other people so that they can see the same thing.

Of course, whether anyone can see exactly the same thing as anyone else is quite debatable…

This is not a well-formulated question - it’s hard to know exactly what you’re asking.

For anything x to be ‘good’ one first has to define what he/she means by good.

For example, if we take the good as a normative concept relating to ethics and metaethics (as in x is good so it ‘should’ or ‘ought to be’ practiced) this is different from looking at ‘good’ in a practical or pragmatic sense.

When we ask about tasks and what is good in a delimited practical framework, such as a game, e.g. in chess it is ‘good’ to take the pieces of your opponent off the board and bad to get checkmated but there is no ethical violation involved in not playing by those rules: but you will simply be a bad chess player if you constantly end up in mate.

Finally, from the perspective of general axiology or value theory, we can say that x is good because x is valuable, useful, significant to some person-group, etc.

Thus, when you ask “is empiricism good”, it’s difficult to know what sense of ‘good’ you are asking about.

In any case, that said, here’s my two-cents on this matter:

If the question is meant in an ethical sense, it’s hard to say that empiricism is ethically good in and of itself. Empiricism is usually taken to be an epistemological position relating to how humans attain knowledge (in the sense that an empiricist believes that all knowledge is attained after experience as opposed to rationalists or mystics who believe that important truths or knowledge claims can be attained independent of sense experience). Empiricism says little about what we do with that knowledge.

On the other hand, if the sense of the question is whether empiricism is good in a practical sense, then empiricism might be said to be good or bad depending on context. For example empiricism might- as a method- be good for learning truths about the natural world and how it is structured or how objects exist, but probably not as good if you wanted to know strictly formal laws or truths such as found in logical, metaphysical or mathematical theorems.

Finally, in an axiological sense of course empiricism is good. Empiricism is the main influence on what we call the scientific method.

Science is not only ‘good’, but I would say, the best method we have for learning about how the world is organized independent of our ideas and feelings about it.

So insofar as the attainment of knowledge is good and insofar as it is good to understand the world- yes, empiricism is good.

Think of it this way: if we reject all empirical approaches the consequence would most likely be the bad situation of having people rely on either whimsy, authority or strictly a priori concepts and methods for understand the world.

These approaches, historically, often led to incorrect and therefore bad models of reality.

A Google search for “father of empiricism” didn’t yield a clear winner, and that’s not surprising. A deeper search reveals that there were empiricists of note as early as in ancient Greece, but as a school of philosophy empiricism has progressed and been refined pretty much continuously since then, with various noteworthy philosophers tacking on bits and pieces all the way into the present. To single out any one of them would be unfair and inaccurate.

I found a wonderful article in the Encyclopedia Britannica which recounts the history of empiricism

Footnotes

To go and ransack and rumaning through one's home in hope of discovering “treasures of sort" would instead visit a flea market or trading post or even a garage sale . To plunder someone else's ideas or philosophy to acquire (critique or more express oneself) for an affront of being esteemed , may be robbery ? Isn't it best one builds their own house ? The experience found from getting the materials and planning out a strategy to begin work and the later rewards from having so accomplished . A person's (penned wisdom) tells much about them , even if no one knows them , until they run across something they've written . It is far greater to have one's own [considerations of the meaning of life and its existence] than to carry around others {thoughts} , perhaps not as meaningful as yours .

Illusions are these : our imaginations , our feelings and emotions , our lies that create untrue stories , and our denying what we see is real and pretending it something else !: Reality , always “was" ! Our capture of it came with our existence , by our perception . My friend .

Empiricism: It is a theory that states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience. It means that actual knowledge can’t be gained by only becoming scholar and getting jobs or degree certificates but it is something that we have to walk through the difficulties that will occur in our life;

because “nothing ever becomes real in our life, till it is experienced”

So, it is applicable for every where, in every work, in every movement of our life. for example-

• the teachers that teach us is also an application of the empiricism because they had also taught by someone so that their experience let them to teach us because unless and until if they can’t face their challenges of their life then how they can teach…..!.
• the doctors that treat their patients if they can’t have experience then they might kill their patients. And there are so many examples are but let it be…………

That is a tricky question, in part because what counts as “empiricism” is tricky terrain. Is any conscious effort to draw conclusions from sensory data empiricism? Your dog probably sniffs around a lot and draws conclusions about whether the terrain is a familiar one from the smells. Who is to say that process is not conscious enough to count as empiricism?

Clearly you have in mind some narrower definition. I submit that “empiricism” is best understood as a term of rebellion — it signifies some rebellion against some generation’s rationalists. As today, for example, Fiona Cowie is a rebel against the Reason idolatry of Fodor and Chomsky.

But you want something somewhere in between biology’s first sniffing wolf and a woman who wrote her important work in the 1990s.

I will nominate a surprise for you: Blaise Pascal. He was the great rebel against the then-regnant Rationalism of Rene Descartes. And he has the extra merit in m mind of marrying his empiricism with fideism.

To my knowledge there is no formal branch of empiricism known as ‘systematic empiricism.’ It doesn’t mean the phrase is not used, however. The application of a defined system to an empirical question can be called ‘systematic empiricism’ but rather than see that as a true philosophical divergence or some new take on empiricism, understand that from time-to-time you could run into ‘systematic’ as a descriptor to any movement, indicating that it is being studied and applied in a formal manner. The answer below trying to define ‘systematic empiricism’ is giving us a very thorough definition of empiricism.