Quotes About Empiricism

This is largely because he felt it was futile to wrestle with theological questions about which he had no empirical evidence and thus no rational basis for forming an opinion. Thunderbolts from heaven were, for him, something to be captured by a kite string and studied. As

Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist.

Even as an empiricist, I have to say that I believe in luck. I've seen it too many times in politics to let it pass by unnoticed.

A true empiricism is one that sets itself the task of getting as close as possible to the original, of sounding the depths of life, of feeling the pulse of its spirit by a sort of intellectual auscultation; we listen in on the current of life. By direct perception we feel the presence of the mind; by intellectual circumlocution we arrive at the notion that thought is a dance of molecules in the brain. Is there any doubt that intuition here beholds more truly the heart of life?

The great achievement of Kant is to have shown, once for all, that the external world is known to us only as sensation; and that the mind is no mere helpless tabula rasa, the inactive victim of sensation, but a positive agent, selecting and reconstructing experience as experience arrives.

It matters not to an empiricist from what quarter an hypothesis may come to him: he may have acquired it by fair means or by foul; passion may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if the total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he means by its being true.

It is at this point that my own solution begins to appear. I offer the oddly-named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand. It can remain religious like the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with facts. I hope I may be able to leave many of you with as favorable an opinion of it as I preserve myself. Yet, as I am near the end of my hour, I will not introduce pragmatism bodily now.

L'intelligence humaine, dit Auguste Comte, passe successivement par trois états : L'état théologique ou fictif (êtres divins) ; L'état métaphysique ou abstrait (nature, être) ; L'état scientifique ou positif (observation, empirisme).

It is necessary to choose: if you wish to be an empiricist, you must abandon the hope of founding scientific knowledge on a solid and certain basis; if you wish to have a solidly established science, you must place it under the protection of the idea of Necessity and, in addition, recognize this idea as primordial, original, having no beginning and consequently no end - that is to say, you must endow it with the superiorities and qualities that men generally accord to the S

What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry.

No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.

The key principle of Jean Piaget's genetic epistemology is constructivism. Constructivism rejects old-fashioned rationalism: Knowledge is not made out of special knowledge-parts preformed in each individual knower at birth. It also rejects empiricism: Knowledge does not consist of epistemic pieces impressed on the knower by the environment, whether physical or social. Instead, the knower has to construct knowledge.

In contrast to empiricist theories, in which knowledge is derived from perception, Piaget emphasized the role of action and operations (transformation) in the construction of knowledge.

Piaget's third way (i.e., alternative to empiricism and nativism) is that knowledge develops through the child's actions on the world. In addition, knowledge is always tied to a particular framework (see Chapter 3, this volume), a paradigm case of which are the structures that emerge as any knowing subject interacts with the world.

According to Piaget, the central idea of empiricism is that "the function of cognitive mechanisms is to submit to reality, copying its features as closely as possible, so that they may produce a reproduction which differs as little as possible from external reality" (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969/1976, p. 24).

Scientific investigation, narrowly conceived, does not prove materialism. Rather, materialism arises from confusing two distinct moves: (1) the narrow scientific strategy of focusing on what is material and (2) the claim that the narrow focus is all that there is.

In recent years the tension between realism and empiricism has often been debated under the topic of the underdetermination of theory by evidence. Empiricists argue that there will always be a range of alternative theories compatible with all our actual evidence, and maybe a range of alternative theories compatible with all our possible evidence. So we never have good empirical grounds for choosing one of these theories over others and regarding it as representing how the world really is.

The average Pakistani student is brought up on a mix of dogma and mythology that does not encourage respect for facts or empiricism.

Science is the most durable and nondivisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national, and political boundaries. You don't have American science versus Canadian science versus Japanese science.

Their philosophy was that you should not always trust your senses and sense experience in order to understand the world, but should rely ultimately on logic and mathematics.

That all our knowledge begins with experience, there is indeed no doubt....but although our knowledge originates WITH experience, it does not all arise OUT OF experience.

Hypotheses non fingo (Latin for "I feign no hypotheses", "I frame no hypotheses", or "I contrive no hypotheses")

Rationalism, which is the feeling that everything is subject to and completely explicable by Reason, consequently rejects everything not visible and calculable.

Experience by itself is not science.