empiricism

← Encyclopedia

Empiricism is the position that knowledge comes chiefly, and for the strongest versions entirely, from sensory experience rather than from reason operating on its own. It is less a single doctrine than a recurring stance, defined as much by what it denies as by what it asserts: there are no truths about the world that the mind can reach by pure thought, prior to and independent of what the senses supply. Its standing opponent is rationalism, which holds that at least some substantial knowledge is innate or arrived at by reason alone.

The stance is old. Aristotle held that the mind begins empty and is written on by experience, and a school of Hellenistic physicians called themselves the Empirics because they trusted observed cases over theory. The scholastic formula nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu — nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses — carried the idea through the Middle Ages. But empiricism as a named and worked-out program belongs above all to a sequence of British thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, conventionally grouped as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Locke argued that the mind at birth is a blank sheet and that every idea, however abstract, can be traced back to sensation or to reflection on the mind’s own operations. Berkeley pressed the principle further, concluding that to exist, for sensible things, is to be perceived. Hume pressed it furthest, doubting whether experience could justify even the causal connections and the continuing self that ordinary thought takes for granted.

What unites these thinkers is a method rather than a creed: claims about the world are to be tested against, and built up from, what observation actually delivers, and concepts that cannot be cashed out in experience fall under suspicion. That demand reshaped more than philosophy. It is one of the intellectual sources of the experimental natural sciences, and in the twentieth century the logical positivists made a stricter version of it their central weapon, holding that a statement has meaning only if experience could in principle confirm or refute it — a criterion that proved hard to state without ruling itself out.

Empiricism sits at a deliberate distance from the traditions much of this material otherwise concerns. Where a mystic or a Platonist locates the deepest knowing beyond the senses — in a turning of the soul, an inner illumination, a direct acquaintance unavailable to ordinary perception — the empiricist takes exactly that move to be where error enters. The two make incompatible wagers about where the real comes through to the mind. Naming the disagreement plainly is part of taking either side seriously; much of Western thought is the long argument between them, and the argument has not closed.

→ Related: Reason · Gnosis