Empiricism

Classification

Position level

specific

Domains

Epistemology

Overview

The empiricist claim concerns the source of content as much as the source of warrant: there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses, so the mind contributes no concepts and no substantive truths of its own. Whatever looks innate is either a deposit of experience or else empty of factual content, true only in virtue of relations among ideas.

That economy is the position's strength — it explains how a mind could come to know a world it did not make — and its exposure. The hard cases are the truths that seem both informative and unobtainable from any finite run of experience: mathematics, and the projection of observed regularities into the future, which Hume, pressing the principle to its end, concluded experience cannot underwrite.

Position on

• Experience or Reason?

Held by traditions

• British Empiricism

  Question scope: Experience or Reason?

Incompatible positions

• Rationalism

  Question scope: Experience or Reason?

References

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rationalism vs. Empiricism
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rationalism vs. Empiricism, §1 (the Empiricism thesis about a subject area is the direct denial of the Intuition/Deduction and Innate Knowledge theses about that same area)