Position
Empiricism
Experience, whether sensory or reflective, is the ultimate source of substantive knowledge and concepts.
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 experience did not first supply, 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
Held by traditions
- British Empiricism
Question scope: Experience or Reason?
Rival positions
- Rationalism
Question scope: Experience or Reason?
References
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rationalism vs. Empiricism
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rationalism vs. Empiricism, §1.2 and §2 (empiricists reject the Innate Knowledge and Innate Concept theses and endorse the Intuition/Deduction thesis only 'in a more restricted sense', for relations among the contents of our minds; the debate is joined when rationalists assert, and empiricists deny, that thesis for propositions with substantive information about the external world)