EEMPIRICISM,
is the philosophical doctrine that emphasizes the role of experience in human
knowledge and minimizes the role of reason. The term "empiricism" is
derived from the Greek word empiria, meaning trail or experience. Empiricism as
a doctrine is opposed to rationalism. To understand the doctrine, it is
important to distinguish two central theories that are characteristic of
empirical philosophies: a theory of meaning and a theory of knowledge.
Theory
of Meaning
The empiricist theory of meaning has
traditionally been stated as a theory about the genesis of our ideas or
concepts. In the Middle Ages it was summarized in the formula Nihil est in intellectu qued non prius fuerit in sensu
("Nothing is in the intellect that has not been previously in
sensation"). This was essentially the thesis of John Locke's epoch-making
polemic. An essay Concerning Human Understanding (1960), against the rationist
doctrine of innate ideas. The mind at birth, Locke maintained, is like a blank
sheet of paper, or tabula nasa, and every idea that it acquires must come from
experience-either from vision, hearing, taste, toch, and other sense
experiences or from observing the operations of our own minds by means of what
Locke called "inner sense."
Daivd Hume, who restated this restated this
theory about the genesis of ideas in the opening paragraphs of his Treatise of
Human Nature (1739), gave it greater strength and precision by drawing a
distinction between ideas and impressions. All our ideas, he said, come from
impressions, and impressions are defined to include sensations, passions, and
emotions, as they occur in their original vividness.
The contrasting rationalist to which Locke and
Hume were opposed is clearly stated in the writings of Rene Desecrates and
other 17th century rationalists. Desecrates distinguished two functions of
human reason: a discursive function that enables us to draw conclusions from
premises, and an intuitive function that enables us to grasp certain ultimate truths
and concepts directly. Although many of our ideas are acquired through sense
experience, there are some -notably the idea of the soul and the idea of
material substance-that must be acquire a priori (that is, independently of
experience) by means of rational intuition.
In the 20th century, empiricists have tended to
formulate their theory of meaning not by reference to the genesis of our
concepts, but by reference to the experiences that determine whether a concept
has been applied correctly. One outstanding example of this change of emphasis
is the pragmatic theory of meaning, which was originally formulated by Charles
Sanders Peircee in the naxim: "Consider what effects that might
conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the object of your conception
to have. Then, your conception of these effects is the whole of your conception
of the object."
The verifiability theory of meaning, which is
closely associated with the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the school of
logical positivism, represents a very similar position. However an empiricist
theory of meaning is formulated, there are certain basic terms that are usually
excluded as meaningless unless interpreted in a purely empirical way. Thus for
the typical empiricist the soul can be conceived only as a stream of conscious
experiences, matter only as a pattern of sensible qualities, and necessary
casual connection only as uniform sequences of events.
Theory
of Knowledge.
Whatever the source of our concepts, a further
question arises concerning the source of human knowledge and the justification
of our beliefs. Rationalists have traditionally maintained that there are some
general truths such as "Every event has a cause," the elementary
propositions of mathematics, and sometimes the basic principles of ethics,
which are self-evident and known a priori by means of rational intuition.
Empiricists have denied that we have such a faculty of rational intuition. They
have usually conceded, however, that the truths of mathematics are indeed a priori
and thus to be sharply distinguished from the truths of physics, biology,
psychology, and other natural sciences.
In the natural sciences our knowledge is obtained a posteriori by means of
experimentation, observation, and induction, whereas this experimental method
has no place in the solution of problems of pure mathematics.
To account for this distinction the empiricist
usually maintains that the truths of mathematics are merely propositions that
express the relations of meaning that hold among our concepts. Thus "2 t-
2 = 4" is true simply because of the way "2," "plus,"
"equals," and "4" are defined, and the theorems of geometry
are true simply because of the way such terms as "line," "point,"
and "between" are defined. In other words, all such mathematical
propositions have the same epistemic status as the statement "Every wife
has a husband," which is true because a wife is defined as a woman who has
a husband. They are all, in a broad sense of the word, tautologies. Hume stated
this empiricist theory of mathematics by distinguishing between "relations
of ideas" and "matters of fact": the propositions of mathematics
merely express the relations among our ideas or
concepts,
whereas all knowledge about matters of fact (that is, about the actual world)
must be derived from experience.
Immanuel Kant's use of the terms
"analytic" and
"synthetic" has enabled subsequent philosophers to state the issue
even more precisely. A judgment is analytic, as Kant uses the word, if it can be
shown to be true merely by analysis of the concepts in it. A judgment is
synthetic, on the contrary, if its predicate really adds something new to the
subject. Using these terms, therefore, we may define an empiricist as one
who
believes that all rational (a priori truths are analytic. Kant's own Critique
of Pure Reason (1781; revised 1787) is a defense of the rationalistic thesis
that - there are some synthetic a priori truths. However, Kant denies that
these truths extend beyond the range of possible human experience.
After 1940, certain philosophers, notably
Willard Van Orman Quine and Morton Gabriel White in the United States,
challenged the validity of the distinction between the analytic and the
synthetic. They suggested the possibility of an empiricism even more thoroughgoing
than that of Hume-an empiricism that would deny a priori knowledge altogether.
