Empiricism (redirected from English empiricist)

empiricism (ĕmpĭr`ĭsĭzəm) [Gr.,=experience], philosophical doctrine that all knowledge is derived from experience. For most empiricists, experience includes inner experience—reflection upon the mind and its operations—as well as sense perception. This position is opposed to rationalism in that it denies the existence of innate ideas. According to the empiricist, all ideas are derived from experience; therefore, knowledge of the physical world can be nothing more than a generalization from particular instances and can never reach more than a high degree of probability. Most empiricists recognize the existence of at least some a priori truths, e.g., those of mathematics and logic. John Stuart Mill was the first to treat even these as generalizations from experience. Empiricism has been the dominant but not the only tradition in British philosophy. Among its other leading advocates were John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. See also logical positivism.

Bibliography

See L. Bonjour, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (1985); A. H. Goodman, Empirical Knowledge (1988).

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empiricism

Either of two closely related philosophical doctrines, one pertaining to concepts and the other to knowledge. The first doctrine is that most, if not all, concepts are ultimately derived from experience; the second is that most, if not all, knowledge derives from experience, in the sense that appeals to experience are necessarily involved in its justification. Neither doctrine implies the other. Several empiricists have allowed that some knowledge is a priori, or independent of experience, but have denied that any concepts are. On the other hand, few if any empiricists have denied the existence of a priori knowledge while maintaining the existence of a priori concepts. John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume are classical representatives of empiricism. See also Francis Bacon.

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empiricism

1. Philosophy the doctrine that all knowledge of matters of fact derives from experience and that the mind is not furnished with a set of concepts in advance of experience

2. medical quackery; charlatanism
http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/e/emp-brit.htm

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Empiricism 

a school of epistemology that recognizes sensory experience as the source of knowledge and according to which the content of knowledge either may be represented as a description of sensory experience or may be reduced to such experience. As opposed to rationalism, empiricism reduces rational cognitive activity to different kinds of combinations of the material provided by experience, maintaining that such activity adds nothing to the content of knowledge.

Empiricism was formulated as an integrated epistemological concept in the 17th and 18th centuries. It emerged in the form of (1) materialist empiricism, which asserted that sensory experience reflects the characteristics of objectively existing things (F. Bacon, T. Hobbes, J. Locke, and E. de Condillac), and (2) subjective-idealist empiricism, which admitted subjective experience as the only reality (G. Berkeley and D. Hume).

It is in 20th-century bourgeois philosophy that idealist empiricism is first combined with ontologism—that is, with certain assumptions about reality; the fundamental empiricist concept of the elementary data of the senses is now interpreted as relating not to the subject’s mental experiences but rather to some sensory essences that exist objectively (that is, independent of individual cognition), such as E. Mach’s “neutral elements” of the world, the neorealists’ “sensory data,” and B. Russell’s “sensibilia.” This type of empiricism combines the features of both subjective and objective idealism. Logical empiricism (or logical positivism) classifies all meaningful propositions as either synthetic (that is, empirical) or analytic; it asserts that synthetic propositions may be reduced, through a set of logical procedures, to the registration of the evidence of sensory experience, maintaining that analytic propositions have no content.

Empiricism is faced with the insoluble difficulties of identifying the original components of experience and using them as the basis for reconstructing all the various types and forms of knowledge. In order to explain the cognitive process as it occurs in reality, empiricism is forced to go beyond the boundaries of sensory data and examine them in conjunction with the characteristics of consciousness (such as memory and the spontaneous operation of reason) and logical operations (such as inductive generalization); it must turn to the apparatus of logic and mathematics in order to describe experiential data and to construct theoretical knowledge. Furthermore, the function of memory cannot be reduced to the passive preservation of previously received impressions. The adherents of empiricism have failed in their attempts to substantiate induction on purely empirical grounds and to represent logic and mathematics merely as the inductive generalization of sensory experience.

While recognizing sensory experience as the source of our knowledge, dialectical materialism does not reduce the entire content of knowledge to such experience, and it emphasizes the active function of thought. In Marxist philosophy, sensory experience is regarded not as the effect of passive imprints of the external world but as a socially and culturally mediated cognitive process effected by an active subject. The dialectical interrelatedness of sensory and rational cognition is a basic principle of Marxist epistemology.

V. A. LEKTORSKII