Quotes About Empiricism

But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience.

There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.

Santayana wrote, "The empiricist…thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than seeing." That

Thus empiricism directed attention away from abstract principles to the data of experience. Hence, while the philosophers of the pre-Enlightenment period favoured the geometric method, reasoning deductively from first principles, their successors worked by induction, first observing particular details and arriving eventually at general truths.

Believing, with Locke, that all our knowledge comes ultimately from the senses, and is thus empirical, not metaphysical, in origin, the philosophes do not profess to know what lies behind empirical phenomena.151 They do not inquire into the ultimate nature of things.

Positivism is a theory of knowledge according to which the only kind of sound knowledge available to human kind is that if science grounded in observation.

Science is the best thing humans beings have ever come up with. And if it isn't, science will fix it.

As a scientist, I don't believe anything. Science shouldn't use the word belief. There are things more likely and less likely. Science can say nothing with absolute certainty.

That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder.

Belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.

Modern science is under no obligation to satisfy the expectations of your five senses.

Science transcends the personal domain of beliefs. You can see the grace of Science in every direction of the human universe.

Reason observation and experience - the Holy Trinity of Science.

Empiricism isn't true, and it is time to put away childish things.

Reason, Observation, and Experience — the Holy Trinity of Science.

The content of every thought must be given, in the last analysis, in terms of the experiences that warrant it, and no belief can be established as true except by reference to the sensory 'impressions' that provide its guarantee. (This is the general assumption of empiricism.)

Aristotle maintains that there is only one reality: the world of particulars in which we live, the world men perceive by means of their physical senses.

There is one other possibility to explain the oddity of the Enlightenment thinkers ending up so prominently in the firing line of our era. And that is this: The European Enlightenments were the greatest leap forward for the concept of objective truth. The project that Hume and others worked away on was to ground an understanding of the world in verifiable fact. Miracles and other phenomena that had been a normal part of the world of ideas before their era suddenly lost all their footholds.

By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.

Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

We possess scientific knowledge today to precisely the extent that we have decided to accept the evidence of the senses – to the extent that we have learned to sharpen and arm them and to think them through to their conclusions.

And we had made a nice misuse of that 'empiricism', we had created the world on the basis of it as a world of causes, as a world of will, as a world of spirit.

The whole intention of empirical economics is to force theory down to Earth.