Empiricism

Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that holds sensory experience as the primary source of all justification for beliefs about the world. It asserts that ideas, concepts, and scientific theories must be grounded in observation and evidence obtained through the senses, rather than in innate ideas or purely a priori reasoning.

A central claim of empiricism is that knowledge is largely a posteriori, acquired through experience. General principles are formed from careful induction from reliable observations. This focus on observation and experience leads to methodological emphasis on evidence, testability, and the replication of results. Critics have pointed to problems such as the problem of induction, which questions how universal claims can be justified from finite observations, and the reliability and interpretation of sensory data.

In the Western tradition, empiricism arose in opposition to rationalist accounts that assign significant a priori sources of knowledge. Early tendencies can be found in Aristotle’s emphasis on observational study, but modern empiricism is associated with Francis Bacon’s push for inductive methods, John Locke’s tabula rasa, George Berkeley’s sense-based idealism, and David Hume’s radical empiricism and skepticism about causation and induction. Immanuel Kant later argued that while knowledge begins with experience, some structure of the mind conditions how we experience and organize that input, bridging empiricism and rationalism.

In science, empiricism underpins the experimental method: hypotheses are tested against observable data, and conclusions are drawn from repeatable, independently verifiable evidence. In contemporary philosophy, empiricism remains a foundational stance in epistemology, the philosophy of science, and related fields, often contrasted with rationalist, non-empirical, or instrumentalist approaches.