Empiricism

Empiricism, in philosophy, a doctrine that affirms that all knowledge is based on experience, and denies the possibility of spontaneous ideas or a priori thought. Until the 20th century the term empiricism was applied to the view held chiefly by the English philosophers of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Of these the English philosopher John Locke was the first to give it systematic expression, although his compatriot, the philosopher Francis Bacon, had anticipated some of its characteristic conclusions. The philosophy opposed to empiricism is rationalism, represented by such thinkers as the French philosopher René Descartes; the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza; and the 17th- and 18th-century German philosophers Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian von Wolff. Rationalists assert that the mind is capable of recognizing reality by means of the reason, a faculty that exists independent of experience. Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, attempted a compromise between empiricism and rationalism, restricting knowledge to the domain of experience, and thus agreeing with the empiricists, but attributing to the mind a function in incorporating sensations into the structure of experience. This structure could be known a priori without resorting to empirical methods, and in this respect Kant agreed with the rationalists.

In recent years the term empiricism has taken on a more flexible meaning, and now is used in connection with any philosophical system that finds all of its materials in experience. In the United States, William James called his own philosophy radical empiricism, and John Dewey coined the term immediate empiricism for his view of experience. The term empirical laws is applied to those laws that express relationships observed to exist among phenomena, without implying the explanation or cause of the phenomena.