Empiricism
In philosophy, empiricism is an epistemological view which holds that true knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience and empirical evidence.
Empiricists argue that empiricism is a more reliable method of finding the truth than purely using logical reasoning, because humans have cognitive biases and limitations which lead to errors of judgement.
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.
[11][12] Between 600 and 200 BCE, 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.
[18] 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.
[21] 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".
In the 12th century CE, the Andalusian Muslim philosopher and novelist Abu Bakr Ibn Tufail (known as "Abubacer" or "Ebu 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.
[21] A similar Islamic theological novel, Theologus Autodidactus, was written by the Arab theologian and physician Ibn al-Nafis in the 13th century.
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.
[24] 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).
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.
Although both integral to this overarching transition, Francis Bacon, in England, first advocated for empiricism in 1620, whereas René Descartes, in France, laid the main groundwork upholding rationalism around 1640.
)[24] Contributing later in the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza are retrospectively identified likewise as an empiricist and a rationalist, respectively.
[citation needed] 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.
Both these considerations have been sufficiently explained: and therefore shall not at present be any farther insisted on.Hume divided all of human knowledge into two categories: relations of ideas and matters of fact (see also Kant's analytic-synthetic distinction).
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.
[32] 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.
[34] 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.
This misses some key discussion concerning conditions under which such "groups of permanent possibilities of sensation" might exist in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
came under sharp attack after World War II by thinkers such as Nelson Goodman, W. V. Quine, Hilary Putnam, Karl Popper, and Richard Rorty.
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.
Along with its pragmatic theory of truth, this perspective integrates the basic insights of empirical (experience-based) and rational (concept-based) thinking.
James maintained that the empirically observed "directly apprehended universe needs ... no extraneous trans-empirical connective support",[48] by which he meant to rule out the perception that there can be any value added by seeking supernatural explanations for natural phenomena.
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,[49] in physical sciences as in ethics.
