Empiricism: Core Principles and Impact on Philosophy
In a broad sense, empiricism describes any philosophical position that considers experience as the source of knowledge or the limit of knowledge (maintained by numerous philosophers, such as Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics, Thomas Aquinas, and Ockham). However, in a strict sense, empiricism is a philosophical current that emerged in opposition to rationalism in 17th-century England, developing during the 18th century. Its main representatives are J. Locke, G. Berkeley, and D. Hume. T. Hobbes is typically included in this movement, although with certain reservations. The fundamental characteristics of empiricism are:
1. Subjectivism of Knowledge
At this point, empiricists and rationalists coincide in saying that to know the world, one must start from the subject itself, not from reality itself. The mind cannot know things other than from what it has within itself.
2. Experience as the Sole Source of Knowledge and Criterion of Truth
This statement has a different meaning for each empiricist: for Locke, our ideas (perceptions) are objective, that is, they are produced in me by things or substances. Berkeley does not accept that our ideas are caused by material things (idealism). For Berkeley, the only existing substance is God, and our ideas are produced by our own mind. “To be” consists solely in being perceived (esse est percipi). Hume extends his critique to the existence of any substance, whether corporeal, spiritual (I), or divine (God). Our knowledge is knowledge of our own perceptions (impressions), which are the origin of ideas, which are like copies of the former. Therefore, we cannot defend the existence of an external world, or of an “I”, or of a divine substance.
3. Negation of Innate Ideas of the Rationalists
If all knowledge comes from experience, this presupposes that it must be acquired. The mind does not possess any content, but, as Aristotle said, it is like a “tabula rasa”, an empty receptacle that must be “filled” from experience and learning.
4. Human Knowledge is Limited by Experience
This position is radically opposed to that of the rationalists, for whom reason, using an adequate method, has no limits and could come to know everything. Hume, the most radical and consistent with the postulates of empiricism, criticizes the possibility of metaphysics or theories about reality that do not have an empirical basis and that transcend the limits of experience.
- Metaphysics of the beyond (God, soul…) are absurd and unintelligible, because they do not come from any sensory impression, of which the former are copies.
- Nor can it accept that physics provides necessary and true knowledge about phenomena, since it is based on the metaphysical principle of causality. About natural phenomena, the only thing we can have is probable knowledge based on belief.
- Only mathematics, which is not based on experience but on our own ideas and the relationships that they maintain, can be considered a science in the strict sense of the word: a necessary and absolutely true knowledge about things.
5. Advocacy for the Empirical and Experimental Method in Science
If for rationalists the ideal method for directing thought was the mathematical and deductive method, for empiricists it should be the experimental and inductive method, similar to the one used by Newton in physics. The validity of scientific theories depends on their empirical verification. Except for mathematics, which does not deal with facts but with our ideas and their own laws of association, all sciences of natural phenomena (physics, geography, biology, etc.) must avoid any metaphysical presupposition or hypothesis, thus rejecting the deductive method of mathematics. The error of the rationalists: to try to proceed in the same way and with the same method in all sciences without distinction, whether they refer to facts of experience (questions of fact) or to a simple procedure of the mind (relations of ideas).
6. Advocacy for Moral Emotivism
The foundation of morality is not found in reason but in the feeling that the qualities of actions and people awaken in us. Primarily for Hume, the goodness or badness of something or a fact is not perceived by reason. Goodness or evil is not an object of understanding. We do not guide our lives based on reason, but through feelings (reason will help us put the most appropriate means to achieve them). For Hume, the basic moral feeling is the positive feeling for humanity, for its happiness, and resentment for its misery. Problem: subjectivism and moral relativism. It is not against reason to prefer the destruction of the world to a scratch on my finger. Time proved the empiricists right, because from the 18th century on, physics became independent of metaphysics, which, after Kantian criticism, ceased to be considered a science. In short, empiricist philosophy carried out the first healthy self-criticism of reason, delimited its limits, and restricted its field of possibilities, grounding it in experience.