The term empiricism describes a philosophical position emphasizing that all concepts and knowledge are derived from and justified by experience. Empiricists disagree on the nature of experience, including whether it is individual or social and whether sense experience is to be emphasized. Empiricism often is associated with other positions, including nominalism, naturalism, materialism, atheism, secularism, humanism, behaviorism, and emotivism.

Empiricism usually contrasts with views that truths can be derived from tradition, Scripture, revelation, intuition, or reason. Empiricists often have a special attitude toward mathematics, acknowledging its role in understanding the world yet denying that it gives direct truths about the world apart from experience. In the last third of the twentieth century, Anglo-American discussion has tended to contrast empiricism with holism or coherentism.

Classic empiricism

Despite earlier roots, empiricism really began with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British philosophers John Locke (1632–1704), George Berkeley (1685–1753), and David Hume (1711–1776). Locke rejected the existence of innate ideas, including truths of religion and morals and held that the mind is a "blank slate" at birth. All of one's ideas are derived, either directly or indirectly, from either sensation (the source of one's knowledge of external objects) or reflection (the source of one's knowledge of one's mental processes). Berkeley, holding that perception requires a perceiver, developed a theory that required individual minds and God as perceivers of the world. Hume pushed empiricism in a skeptical direction, questioning beliefs in causation, self, and God.

Early in the twentieth century, the Vienna circle of logical positivists made a major impact on philosophy in England and the United States. They used empiricism as a criterion for meaning, holding that the only meaningful propositions are either tautologies (including mathematical statements), which tell nothing about the world, or else statements that are empirically verifiable. Logical positivism ran into two problems: It was difficult to state the principle of verification precisely, and it had a self-contradiction at its heart because the criterion of meaning is neither a tautology nor empirically verifiable. Thus the criterion of meaning seems to be meaningless. The later holism of American philosopher W. V. O. Quine (1908–2000) also challenged the positivist distinction between tautologies and empirical statements, pointing out that meanings may vary so much between contexts that the dichotomy is hard to maintain.

American empiricism

In the United States, William James (1842–1910) and John Dewey (1859–1952) developed an empiricism (called radical empiricism by James) that challenged some of the assumptions of British empiricism, especially the commitment to the existence of separate sensations. James held instead that people experience complexes of sensations in a matrix of relations. Thus they are not left with a choice between Hume's world of separate pieces and the non-empirical containers of these pieces (mind, God) of idealism. Values, the worth of things, can be perceived. Thus values are not subjective and arbitrary additions to empirical facts as held by most empiricists (and by modern culture generally). Dewey's subject-object transactionalism avoids the subject-object dichotomy. This more "generous empiricism" has influenced such thinkers as Henry Nelson Wieman, Bernard Meland, William Dean, Nancy Frankenberry, and Jerome A. Stone. Later Quine held that since empirical propositions are embedded in a network of commonsense or scientific theories, no statement can be verified in isolation. Confirmation or disconfirmation always affects a range of theories.

That vast conglomeration of ideas typically labeled postmodern has also impacted empiricism. A common theme of postmodernism is that there is no theory-free observation, that theories are not completely determined by data, and consequently that science is merely one of the many stories that people can tell each other. A major task confronting people who value science is how to honor the insights of postmodernism, including the tentativeness of verification and the hegemonic motive of the Enlightenment grand narrative of progress toward rationality, while at the same time articulating the ways in which scientific procedures have a relative and tentative yet significant value. A number of thinkers work towards this, including Richard Bernstein, Frederick Ferré, Susan Haack, J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, Lynn Hankinson Nelson, and Robert Neville.

It has been asked whether human gender influences empirical procedures, either through biological or cultural factors. Sandra Harding, Helen Longino, Evelyn Fox Keller, Lynn Hankinson Nelson, and others have been pursuing this question from differing perspectives.

Cross-cultural perspectives

To turn to a cross-cultural analysis, it should be observed that in developing their various technologies all cultures seem to have pursued empirical methods, sometimes in combination with nonempirical approaches. However, only the Western philosophical tradition seems to have developed the exclusiveness of empiricism as a theoretical option. In South Asia the Carvakas, Nyaya-Vaisesikas, and early Buddhists might be classified as empiricists. In China, Korea, and Japan the principle of "the investigation of things" occasionally took an empiricist direction, although not with the exclusiveness of European empiricism. "The investigation of things" usually included an investigation of the worth of things. One might speak of the empiricism of Mozi, Xunzi, Wang Fuzhi, Yan Yuan, Dai Zhen, and others of the "Investigations Based on Evidence" movement, and of the Korean Yi Yulgok.

Empiricism in the science-religion dialogue

As for science-religion issues, the topic of empiricism relates to virtually every question. For example, ideas on God, the soul, heaven, or reincarnation will be greatly influenced by a person's stance toward empiricism. That stance will also affect a person's ideas on the questions of the worth of tradition, revelation, scripture, or reason in religion and ethics. Related questions are whether the divine or the sacred as a quality of natural processes can be appreciated or responded to, as some "religious naturalists" hold, and whether such awareness is a complement to or an extension of a more strict empirical method. Another approach is to ask whether religious ideas can be vetoed by empirical procedures, whether they must be strictly based on or may be more loosely informed by them, or whether science and religion are such distinct orientations that neither can interfere with the other. Writers such as Douglas Clyde Macintosh and Henry Nelson Wieman have attempted to treat theology as an empirical study. The success of this depends on how one conceives God and also empirical method.

See also COHERENTISM; POSITIVISM, LOGICAL

JEROME A. STONE