Quotes About Empiricism

Evolutionary naturalism takes the inherent limitations of science and turns them into a devastating philosophical weapon: because science is our only real way of knowing anything, what science cannot know cannot be real.

Science is a self-sufficient activity.

Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.

Empiricism: The school of philosophy that maintains that knowledge of the external world (as compared to knowledge of analytic logic and its proper applications) comes only from sensory experience. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British Empiricism came in reaction to rationalism. Empiricism is a stance in epistemology. It is sometimes summed up by the statement, "What you see is all you get.

Logical Positivism: An early-twentieth-century school of philosophy that limits the scope of philosophy to the scientific method (empirical verification) and logic. Everything else philosophy once considered, such as metaphysics and ethics and theology, is tossed out the window as unverifiable and therefore meaningless.

The more people are exposed to science, the more we will move away from superstition.

Science] works! Planes fly. Cars drive. Computers compute. If you base medicine on science, you cure people. If you base the design of planes on science, they fly. If you base the design of rockets on science, they reach the moon. It works... bitches.

Technological man can't believe in anything that can't be measured, taped, or put into a computer.

Empiricism in the sciences is a method; naturalism in philosophy is a metaphysics; and the latter neither follows from nor underlies the former.

This is why the Royal Society (one of the earliest scientific academies, founded in London in 1660) took as its motto 'Nullius in verba', which means something like 'Take no one's word for it.

For most of the history of our species, we had almost no success in creating such knowledge. Where does it come from? Empiricism said that we derive it from sensory experience. This is false. The real source of our theories is conjecture, and the real source of our knowledge is conjecture alternating with criticism.

Empiricism assumes that objects can be understood independendy of observing subjects. Truth is therefore assumed to lie in a world external to the observer whose job is to record and faithfully reflect the attributes of objects. This logical empiricism is a pragmatic version of that scientific method which goes under the name of 'logical positivism', and is founded in a particular and very strict view of language and meaning.

It is impossible for us to think of any thing, which we have not antecedently felt, either by our external or internal senses.

We must reason in natural philosophy not from what we hope, or even expect, but from what we perceive.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

Les sciences telles que les comprennent les modernes, c'est-à-dire les sciences profanes, ne supposent effectivement, d'une façon générale, rien de plus ni d'autre qu'une élaboration rationnelle de données sensibles ; ce sont donc elles qui sont véritablement "empiriques" quant à leur point de départ ; et l'on pourrait dire que les modernes confondent indûment ce point de départ de leurs sciences avec l'origine de toute science.

Science is what you get when you restrict philosophy to just materialism and empiricism and scrupulously ignore everything else, without any justification. Science invented a materialist, empiricist method to exclude every other philosophical stance. It didn't debate other philosophies, it just referred them to its method, which paradigmatically omitted them! A bit like Christians referring all other religions to the Bible, and never allowing the conversation to extend beyond its pages.

Despite what it says, science is actually just a philosophy – the philosophy of materialism and empiricism – but it refuses to commit itself to this. It refuses to state why materialism is right and idealism is wrong. It refuses to state why empiricism is right and rationalism is wrong. And if it ever actually got into any of this, if it dared, it would be intellectually destroyed. That's why it completely avoids the whole issue.

Entwined with the strand of conservatism in the Democratic party is the strand of empiricism.

I'm tired of being a skeptic, I'm irritated by spiritual prudence and I feel bored and parched by empirical debate. I don't want to hear it anymore. I couldn't care less about evidence and proof and assurances. I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water.

I'm tired of being a skeptic, I'm irritated by spiritual prudence and I feel bored and parched by empirical debate. I don't want to hear it anymore. I couldn't care less about evidence and proof and assurances. I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water.

Contrary to rationalism, there are no a priori concepts; but contrary to empiricism, there are axiomatic concepts about which we can be certain; contrary to both schools, perception is not awareness of images, impressions, or sense data, but of objects that exist independent of our awareness of them.

Evolutionary naturalism takes the inherent limitations of science and turns them into a devastating philosophical weapon: because science is our only real way of knowing anything, what science cannot know cannot be real.

One of the greatest features of science is that it doesn't matter where you were born, and it doesn't matter what the belief systems of your parents might have been: If you perform the same experiment that someone else did, at a different time and place, you'll get the same result.