Quotes About Empiricism

Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

It's so hard to believe in anything anymore. I mean, it's like, religion, you really can't take it seriously, because it seems so mythological, it seems so arbitrary...but, on the other hand, science is just pure empiricism, and by virtue of its method, it excludes metaphysics. I guess I wouldn't believe in anything anymore if it weren't for my lucky astrology mood watch.

Being freed from superstition isn't enough for science to grow. One must also have the idea of interrogating Nature, of doing experiments.

The Vienna Circle was empiricist and phenomenalist, Popper was a critical rationalist.

I was a born empiricist. I believed that writers were paid to pretend, and where appropriate should make use of the real world, the one we all shared, to give plausibility to whatever they had made up.

A thorough-going empiricist for whom mathematics was a method rather than an explanation, Newton apparently considered any attempt to question the instantaneity of motion as linked with metaphysics, and so avoided framing a definition of it.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

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

Since the Enlightenment, in the great tension between rationalism (how we would like things to be so they make sense to us) and empiricism (how things are), we have been blaming the world for not fitting the beds of "rational" models, have tried to change humans to fit technology, fudged our ethics to fit our needs for employment, asked economic life to fit the theories of economists, and asked human life to squeeze into some narrative.

In other words, history teaches us to avoid the brand of naive empiricism that consists of learning from casual historical facts.

As an empiricist (actually a skeptical empiricist) I despise the moralizers beyond anything on this planet: I still wonder why they blindly believe in ineffectual methods. Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions. We will see how modern behavioral science shows this to be completely untrue.

In a textbook case of naive empiricism, the author also looked for traits these millionaires had in common and figured out that they shared a taste for risk taking. Clearly risk taking is necessary for large success—but it is also necessary for failure. Had the author done the same study on bankrupt citizens he would certainly have found a predilection for risk taking.

naïve empiricism, we have a natural tendency to look for instances that confirm our story and our vision of the world—these instances are always easy to find. Alas

naïve empiricism—successions of anecdotes selected to fit a story do not constitute evidence. Anyone

Charlatan" was held to be a synonym for empirick. The word "empiric" designated someone who relied on experiment and experience to ascertain what was correct. In other words, trial and error and tinkering. That was held to be inferior—professionally, socially, and intellectually. It is still not considered to be very "intelligent.

In other words, history teaches us that things that never happened before do happen. It can teach us a lot outside of the narrowly defined time series; the broader the look, the better the lesson. In other words, history teaches us to avoid the brand of naive empiricism that consists of learning from casual historical

It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view—and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite. Almost all of my non–Yogi Berra quotes are from people I disagree with.

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

The supposition that the future resembles the past, is not founded on arguments of any kind, but is derived entirely from habit.

His denomination, he says, is Empiricism. If you can't count it, measure it, or gauge wit with science, it didn't happen.

Mix the Protestant impulse to find the meaning and purpose in everything with the Enlightenment's empiricism, and you get our American mania for connecting all the dots,*5 irrationality in rationalist drag.

There's a tremendous popular fallacy which holds that significant research can be carried out by trying things. Actually it is easy to show that in general no significant problem can be solved empirically, except for accidents so rare as to be statistically unimportant. One of my jests is to say that we work empirically -- we use bull's eye empiricism. We try everything, but we try the right thing first!

Empiricism and philosophy itself are both sensuous and sensual. The desire to know is desire.

All the arguments urged by Berkeley and Hume against the existence of a material world, are grounded on this principle, That we do not perceive external objects themselves, but certain images or ideas in our own minds