Empiricism

EMPIRICISM (From Greek ἐκπέτρις « experience »). - It is the valuing of the facts of common experience. Against the abstractions of pure speculation, this recourse to the concreteness of experience often presents itself in the history of philosophy.

Already the first philosophers of Greece, the pre-Socratics, incline toward this attitude, beginning with Thales, who had recourse to water to explain the origin of things (others, to air, to fire, etc.). But these men, in reality, were reacting against the fantasies and myths of the poets and the legends of the preceding period, and, if they start from the observation of common facts, it is only in order to construct upon them a theory that gives the principle or principles of all that happens in the world, that is, a metaphysics which here has a frankly naturalistic character. The Sophists, on the other hand, after them, brought experience into value by referring exclusively to the daily life of man and to the differences among individuals. A clearer and more legitimate note of [empiricism] is found in the attitude of Aristotle in polemic against the Platonic theory of ideas, where he insists on the concreteness of the reality that is the object of our knowledge, which engages not only the intellect but also the senses: what truly exists is not the idea but the individual in the richness of its sensible and conceptual determinations. But Aristotle already distinguishes what we call a "sound" empiricism from vulgar empiricism: that is, the consideration of facts, accompanied by critical reflection, from that which is mere observation. He speaks of it in the first two chapters of the Metaphysics, where he observes, among other things, that "empirics sometimes hit the mark better than those who possess the theory without the experience" (the emphasis concerns medical practice, in which even today the contrast between "empirics" and "theorists" sometimes surfaces). Nevertheless, says Aristotle, science is worth more than [mere] know-how. This appeal to experience sufficed, in any case, to give rise in post-Aristotelian philosophy to numerous affirmations of a broader empiricism: Stoics and Epicureans, for example, agree in deriving perception from the impressions that external objects make upon the soul. Thus skepticism had its origin and development, which in that empiricism ascertained the lack of a stable and sure criterion of truth, but only in order to conclude to the necessity of sticking to facts while renouncing all scientific demonstration.

The question returns in modern times; indeed, it is precisely in the modern age that it becomes a fundamental problem for philosophy. Insofar, in fact, as modern philosophy, in agreement with the new physical science established by Galileo, reacts against the abuse of formal logic and of the metaphysical (sometimes even fantastic) speculations of the preceding period, it values to the maximum the world of human experience (the adjective, here, is not superfluous; rather, it itself gives the most significant, polemical note of the new concept). But it would not for this reason be correct to define this philosophy as empiricistic: it shows itself, on the contrary, immediately troubled by the effort to emerge from empiricism, to construct a new logic and a new metaphysics that might better than the traditional one give an account of this world of human experience. And here are the discussions on method, in which the names of Bacon and Descartes are celebrated (the one more inclined to the experimental part of the new physical science; the other to its mathematical and constructive moment); and here are the attempts at a metaphysics founded on the consideration of man, who is soul and body, thinking substance and extended substance (Descartes), which Spinoza and Leibniz will seek to unify by different paths. Against this current, later called "rationalistic," there arises in England (where precursors can be traced as far back as the time of Scholasticism) that which is more properly designated as "empiricistic," whose most conspicuous representative is G. Locke (1632-1704). He enunciated with all clarity the presupposition from which modern philosophy moved, the world of human experience, and combated consequently, in innatism, all those theories that admitted principles, theoretical or practical, not derived from that world, and anticipated, in one way or another, to it. Hence his tendency to sensism, without, however, falling into it, because he recognizes the work of reflection, and beyond external sensation he places internal sensation, that is, the consciousness of the operations of our spirit, as another source of ideas. This tendency was then developed and perfected by Condillac (1715-80), who attempted to unify the two sources in the single principle of sensation, which appears first as an internal state of consciousness, and then, little by little, draws from its own bosom all the richness of the determinations concerning the real world of experience and of reflection upon it. Meanwhile, Lockean empiricism underwent, in England itself, a profound criticism. Berkeley (1684-1753) began it, who, moving from the principle that every sensation or perception is a state of our consciousness, denied the necessity of presupposing the existence of a material world (the "things") outside us. But the one who carried criticism to the extreme point was D. Hume (1711-76), who attempted to demonstrate that, human knowledge being founded on the ever-mutable and contingent experience of the senses, we can affirm nothing about reality: neither about what things outside us are, nor about what we ourselves are. There remains only a "flow" of sensations, among which it is impossible to posit any relation of necessity. Thus modern empiricism issued into (epistemological) skepticism, more radical. But from here, as is well known, Kantian criticism took its start, which began by conceding, yes, that all our knowledge has its origin, in time, from experience, but, precisely because with experience alone it is not explained, it means that implicit in it are principles (a priori), forms of sense and of the intellect which he calls "transcendental," posited by the cognitive faculty itself in the act of appropriating the data of immediate experience (v. CRITICISMO; KANT).

After Kant, but above all after the absolute idealism that amply developed the (transcendental) concept of the a priori from Kantianism, empiricism fell into ill repute: for many it still counts today as the acceptance of the data of experience without criticism (without "philosophical" criticism, that is: for physical science too exercises upon the data of experience a criticism of its own, but only as an objective interpretation of phenomena). But in the second half of the last century a reaction arose against absolute idealism, and empiricism attempted to present itself anew in new forms, developing that side of Kantianism itself by which the necessity was recognized, for the validity of our knowledge, of not leaving the world of phenomena, that is, of experience. An attempt was therefore made to demonstrate that Kant's own a priori forms can be explained as a product of psychic associations, or as properties implicit in every sensation, from which it suffices to extract them (without any need to presuppose them), etc. Associationism, phenomenism, positivism, empiriocriticism, etc., thus seek to take up the empiricism preceding Kantian criticism in new forms. There has even been talk of "pure experience," and of an "absolute empiricism," to indicate a consideration of experience that resolves in itself all the principles put forward to explain it by Kantian criticism and by idealism itself. But in truth the classic period of empiricism remains the pre-Kantian one, when its force, however still naive, had the greatest charm of novelty. Today we can say this:

Insofar as it rejects a theoretical interpretation of experience that would count as an explanation of it in its reasons and principles, empiricism is equivalent to skepticism, and therefore must be judged negatively. Instead, as a valuation of experience and of its positive function in every moment of intellectual knowledge, empiricism is in agreement with the real condition of human knowing and is linked to the most genuine philosophical tradition from Aristotle to modern times.

Armando Carlini