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59 lines
6.8 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Empiricism
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sort: 130
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section-id: epistemology
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description: Locke, Berkeley, and Hume — the empiricist tradition and the limits of sensory knowledge.
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language: en
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---
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# Empiricism
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*Empiricism* is the epistemological view that knowledge derives from, and must be grounded in, sensory experience. Where rationalism privileges reason, empiricism insists that the mind at birth is a *tabula rasa* — a blank slate — and that all our concepts and knowledge are acquired through experience. The great British empiricists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume — explored this view with increasing rigour and found, perhaps to their own surprise, that it leads to deeply uncomfortable places.
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## Locke's Empiricism
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John Locke set the agenda for British empiricism in his *Essay Concerning Human Understanding* (1689). His starting point is a polemic against innate ideas: there are no ideas or principles inscribed in the mind from birth, contrary to what Descartes and Leibniz held ^[Locke, J., *Essay*, I.ii].
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All ideas originate in experience, which Locke divides into two kinds: *sensation* (the senses providing ideas of external objects) and *reflection* (the mind observing its own operations — thinking, doubting, willing, perceiving). From simple ideas given in experience, the mind constructs *complex ideas* by combination, abstraction, and relation.
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Locke's primary/secondary quality distinction (discussed in the previous chapter) is central to his epistemology. We have genuine knowledge only of relations among our own ideas; the extent to which our ideas correspond to mind-independent reality is limited to the primary qualities.
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Locke's *Essay* is a monument of systematic empiricism, but it contains significant tensions. His account of substance — the "I know not what" that underlies the qualities we perceive — sits uneasily with his empiricism, since no experience corresponds to substance itself.
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## Hume's Fork and Bundle Theory
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David Hume pushed empiricism to its systematic conclusions with greater rigour and less embarrassment about where they led. In the *Treatise of Human Nature* (1739-40) and the *Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding* (1748), he developed what has been called the most powerful case in the history of philosophy for the limits of reason and knowledge.
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*Hume's fork* divides all genuine claims to knowledge into two classes ^[Hume, D., *Enquiry*, §4]:
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1. **Relations of ideas** — propositions knowable a priori by reason alone, whose denials are contradictions (mathematics, logic, conceptual truths). These are certain but tell us nothing about the actual world.
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2. **Matters of fact** — propositions about the world, known a posteriori through experience. Their denials are conceivable. They are contingent and can only be known through experience.
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Hume's criterion of empirical significance follows: any meaningful claim is either a relation of ideas or a matter of fact. Claims that fit neither category — much of traditional metaphysics, theology, and rationalist philosophy — are, famously, "nothing but sophistry and illusion" ^[Hume, D., *Enquiry*, §12.3].
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On the self, Hume is radically deflationary. When he introspects, he finds no impression of a persistent, unified self — only "a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity" ^[Hume, D., *Treatise*, I.iv.6]. The self, on his view, is a fiction constructed from the successive flow of impressions and ideas. Personal identity is a matter of psychological continuity, not a metaphysical substance.
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## The Problem of Induction
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Hume's most influential contribution to epistemology is his analysis of inductive inference. We routinely infer, from past regularities, what will happen in the future: the sun has risen every morning, so it will rise tomorrow. All known emeralds have been green, so the next emerald will be green. What justifies these inferences?
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Not deductive reason: there is no logical contradiction in the sun's failing to rise. Not experience: to justify induction by appeal to the fact that induction has worked before is circular — it assumes the very principle in question ^[Hume, D., *Treatise*, I.iii.6].
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Hume's conclusion: our habit of inductive inference is a psychological necessity — we cannot help forming expectations from regularities — but it has no rational justification. This is the *problem of induction*, sometimes called "Hume's guillotine" for the way it cuts off a seemingly obvious route to empirical knowledge.
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The problem of induction has proved enormously productive. Karl Popper's falsificationism — the view that science proceeds by bold conjecture and attempted refutation rather than inductive generalisation — was an explicit response ^[Popper, K., *The Logic of Scientific Discovery*, 1934]. Nelson Goodman's "new riddle of induction" showed that the problem was deeper than Hume recognised: even if induction is sometimes reliable, we need a further principle to determine which regularities to project onto the future ^[Goodman, N., *Fact, Fiction and Forecast*, 1955].
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## Hume on Causation
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Hume's analysis of causation is equally influential. We believe that causes necessitate their effects — that fire *must* produce heat, that one billiard ball *must* move another when struck. But examining our impressions, Hume finds no impression of *necessary connection* between events ^[Hume, D., *Enquiry*, §7]. We observe constant conjunction — event A is always followed by event B — and we observe the spatial and temporal contiguity of cause and effect. But necessity itself is never observed.
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Hume's account: the idea of necessary connection is a projection of our own psychological tendency to expect B after A, given repeated experience of their conjunction. The "necessary connection" is in us, not in the world.
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This has generated enormous controversy. The *regularity theory* of causation — in Hume's footsteps — holds that causation just is constant conjunction (plus contiguity and temporal priority). Counterfactual theories, mechanistic theories, and probabilistic theories have all been proposed as improvements.
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## Empiricism's Legacy
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Empiricism as a systematic research programme continues in analytic philosophy. The logical empiricists (Carnap, Schlick, Neurath) developed a sophisticated version oriented toward the philosophy of science. Quine's naturalised epistemology — the view that epistemology is continuous with empirical psychology — is the most radical empiricist programme of the twentieth century ^[Quine, W.V.O., "Epistemology Naturalized", in *Ontological Relativity and Other Essays*, 1969].
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The permanent contribution of the classical empiricists is methodological: the insistence that philosophical claims be answerable to experience, and the willingness to follow the logic of that insistence into uncomfortable territory.
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