Quotes About Empiricism

I'm an aesthetic empiricist. If you like something, it doesn't matter who made it. There really is no objective standard other than your own taste. You develop your own tastes, you find things that do or do not fit your tastes, and therefore are or are not 'good.' Whether they have been labeled as produced by the right person is another matter.

Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.

Biological determinism is a blight on science. It implies that the way things are is the way they must be. [...] This position is wrong, both empirically and morally.

Galileo established what has since become the modern approach to the study of all natural phenomena.

the hallmark of the Enlightenment was off to the races.

Science is a self-sufficient activity.

Epicurus as a moral empiricist felt that our immediate feelings are far more cogent and authoritative guides to the good life than abstract maxims, verbal indoctrination, or even the voice of reason itself. Hence he based his ethics on nature, not on convention or on reason.

What we can do is provide the tools, through our educational system, for people to be able to tell sense from nonsense. These tools include the scientific method, skeptical questioning, empirical evidence, verifying sources, etc.

Without the withering criticism by nominalism, medieval Christian philosophy and theology would not have relinquished their claim to the role of knowledge in discovering the nature of things in light of higher principles; instead, it caused them to leave the field of battle without any defense before the onslaught of secularism, rationalism, and empiricism, which were, as a result, able to gain a remarkably easy victory.

the whole point of science, the whole thrust of the Enlightenment, is the rejection of arguments from authority.

At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.

the witch was an empiricist: she relied on her senses rather than on faith or doctrine, she believed in trial and error, cause and effect. Her attitude was not religiously passive, but actively inquiring. She trusted her ability to find ways to deal with disease, pregnancy, and childbirth—whether through medications or charms.

En estado natural, por decirlo de algún modo, a los seres humanos no les gusta pensar como lógicos, ni siquiera como empiristas. Hace falta entrenamiento para pensar así. Pero aun en ausencia de ese entrenamiento, seguimos pensando, aunque lo hacemos de manera más subjetiva, como seres -poco razonables-, idiosincráticos, emocionales que habitan unos cuerpos de tamaño determinado, con unas propiedades particulares y constreñidas.

To the culture of the early Renaissance, the demon presents a limit to the empiricism of the unknown, something that can only be verified through contradictions – an absent manifestation, an unnatural creature, a demonic malady.

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

Los hombres de más amplio intelecto saben que no existe una verdadera distinción entre lo real y lo irreal; que todas las cosas aparecen tal como son tan solo en virtud de los frágiles sentidos físicos y mentales mediante los que las percibimos; pero el prosaico materialismo de la mayoría tacha de locuras a los destellos de clarividencia que traspasan el vulgar velo del empirismo chabacano.

Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.

There is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of supersight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.

Los hombres de más amplio intelecto saben que no existe una verdadera distinción entre lo real y lo irreal; que todas las cosas aparecen tal como son tan sólo en virtud de los frágiles sentidos físicos y mentales mediante los que las percibimos; pero el prosaico materialismo de la mayoría tacha de locuras a los destellos de clarividencia que traspasan el vulgar velo del empirismo soez

Hume is thus led to the view that, when we say 'A causes B', we mean only that A and B are constantly conjoined in fact, not that there is some necessary connection between them.

the idea is to see how far one can go without supposing supernatural intervention.

Are we not growing sensibly more merciful, more wisely humane towards empirics themselves, when they cease to be our oracles ? Are we not learning, from their jumbled discoveries and failures, that empiricism itself is a social function

What can give us more sure knowledge than our senses? How else can we distinguish between the true and the false?

Those skills [to test the veracity of news produced], however, can be identified. If we look at those who have been in the business of empiricism - people in journalism, law, intelligence, science, medicine, and elsewhere - we will see a set of common concepts and skills that have developed over generations.