Empiricism
Empiricism is a 17th-century philosophical doctrine that deals with knowledge arising from human sensory experiences.
Empiricism is directly opposed to innatism. This aspect states that the existence of all knowledge exists in human beings from birth, requiring only introspection to achieve it.
In addition to innatism, empiricism is also opposed to Rationalism. This confers the discovery of Truth only through logical reasoning, revealing a deep aversion to the experimental method.
The empirical philosopher, contrary to these concepts, states that the origin of all ideas necessarily comes from man’s relationship with the external environment. That is, through our biological senses.
From Aristotle to John Locke
Despite being theoretically realized only in the 17th century with John Locke, empiricism is portrayed much earlier with Aristotle, in his studies on the search for an absolute Truth.
In his studies, Aristotle indicated that a way to reach Truth was through sensory experiences and the logical inductive method.
Induction is, like reason for rationalists, a fundamental part of empiricism. Induction shows that there are few ideas that can be fully concluded and validated when there are no sources of knowledge that come from experience.
A classic example of how the inductive method works is the question: “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, will its fall produce a sound?” As there is no one nearby to experience what happened, it is not possible to say for sure whether or not the sound will be produced.
Among the philosophers who stand out on the subject are Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, David Hume, and John Locke. The latter being considered the father of Empiricism (or British Empiricism).
Locke began his studies on empiricism in his book “Essay on Human Understanding” (1690), in which he stipulates the human being at birth as a “blank slate”. For him, the individual is a blank slate, where information and knowledge are added as he gains experience, thus becoming a being capable of generating ideas and new opinions.
When considering that all men are born without any knowledge, Locke defines men as equal at birth, an argument that would later contest absolutism and its “divine right”.
Exemplifying the concepts of empiricism, it denies – and therefore cannot explain – all knowledge that does not have an experimental validation method, taking for example animal instinct or the migration of birds to places they have never been.
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) was a leading philosopher and the first to produce an outline of modern scientific technique.
Considering Aristotelian philosophy outdated, he began to produce a treatise that proposed organizing philosophy around the search for knowledge.
He thus wrote the “New Method” (1620), in which he explained why man needed to dominate nature and understand its functioning, so that, by understanding its gears, he could transform and bring to himself the benefits produced by it. In this context, Bacon states that “ knowledge is power ”.
Bacon, in his treatise, further divides science into areas:
1. poetry or science of imagination;
2. history or science of memory;
3. philosophy or science of reason.
Current Empiricism – Neopositivism
Current empiricism – logical empiricism – is known as neopositivism and is the origin of three strands of thought: integral, moderate, and scientific.
Integral empiricism
Integral empiricism reduces the source of all knowledge to sensitive experiences, including in the area of mathematics.
John Stuart Mill in “System of Logic” (1843), systematically states that human knowledge is the result of the inductive method, except mathematics, which would be a generalization of the experiences carried out.
However, he still states that the axioms of mathematics themselves are capable of being reached by the inductive method.
Moderate empiricism
Secondly, moderate empiricism – or genetic-psychological – states that experiences are a source, but not the only ones capable of validating knowledge about the world.
Mathematical ideas are an example of this aspect. For moderates, mathematics is a process solely of thought, and cannot be proven, measured or validated by simple scientific experiments.
Scientific empiricism
Finally, scientific empiricism only validates as true those ideas capable of being measured and experimented, refuting even processes such as induction.
The scientific method currently used, started with Rene Descartes through the “Discourse on Method” (1637), he was of great influence on scientific empiricism.
With each new theory that emerges, experimentation, data verification, and measurements are necessary. Systematically, everything must be validated. Only then can something be considered of value to the scientific community?