In philosophy generally, empiricism is a theory of knowledge
emphasizing the role of experience in the formation of ideas, while
discounting the notion of innate ideas.
In the philosophy of science, empiricism is a theory of knowledge which
emphasizes those aspects of scientific knowledge that are closely
related to experience, especially as formed through deliberate
experimental arrangements. It is a fundamental requirement of
scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested
against observations of the natural world, rather than resting solely
on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation. Hence, science is
considered to be methodologically empirical in nature.
The term "empiricism" has a dual etymology. It comes from the Greek
word εμπειρισμός, the Latin translation of which is
experientia, from which we derive the word experience. It also derives
from a more specific classical Greek and Roman usage of empiric,
referring to a physician whose skill derives from practical experience
as opposed to instruction in theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism
a. Traditional Foundationalism
Traditionally the foundations of knowledge have been seen as infallible
(they cannot be wrong), incorrigible (they cannot be refuted), and
indubitable (they cannot be doubted).
For empiricists, these foundations
consist in your beliefs about
your own experience.
Your beliefs are basic
and non-basic.
Your basic beliefs comprise such beliefs as that you are now seeing a
red shape in your visual field, let us say, and that you are aware of a
pungent smell. In order to justify your non-basic belief that Thierry
Henry is the best striker in Europe, you must be able to infer it from
other beliefs, say that he has scored the most goals. The traditional
foundationalist claim, however, is that this sort of inferential
justification is not required for your basic beliefs.
There may not actually be a
red object in the world because
you may be hallucinating, but,
nevertheless, you cannot be wrong
about the fact that you now believe
that you am seeing something red.
Justification for such beliefs is
provided by experiential states that
are not themselves beliefs, that is,
by your immediate apprehension of the
content of your sensory, perceptual
experience, or what is sometimes
termed, "the Given".
It is, then, your experience of seeing red that justifies your belief
that you are seeing red. Such experience is non-conceptual. It is,
though, the raw material which you then go on to have conceptual
thoughts about. This conception of the relation between knowledge and
experience has had a distinguished history. It was advocated by the
British empiricists--Locke, Berkeley and Hume--and by the important
modern adherents C. I. Lewis (1946) and R. Chisholm (1989). However,
this conception of how your perceptual beliefs are justified has been
widely attacked, and the next two sections address the most influential
arguments against traditional foundationalism.
Sellars and the Myth of the Given
Sellars (1956) provides an extended critique of the notion of the
Given. There are two parts to Sellars' argument: first, he claims that
knowledge is part of the "logical space of reasons;" and second, he
provides an alternative account of "looks talk," or an alternative
reading of such claims as "that looks red to me," claims that
traditionally have been seen as infallible and as foundations for our
perceptual knowledge. According to Sellars, no cognitive states are
non-inferentially justified. For him:
"The essential part is that in characterising an episode or a state as
that of knowing, we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of
justifying and being able to justify what one says." (Sellars, 1956, p.
76)
Whether we are talking about perceptual or non-perceptual knowledge, we
must be able to offer reasons for why we take such claims to be true.
To even claim appropriately that I have knowledge that I now seem to be
seeing a red shape, I must be able to articulate such reasons as,
"since my eyes are working fine, and the light is good, I am right in
thinking that I am having a certain sensory experience." As Rorty
(1979, chapter 4) argues, justification is essentially a linguistic or
"conversational" notion; it must consist in the reasoned recognition of
why a particular belief is likely to be true or why one is rightly said
to be having a certain experience. If such an account of justification
is correct, then the notion of non-inferentially justified basic
beliefs is untenable and non-conceptual perceptual experience cannot
provide the justification for our perceptual beliefs.
Surely, though, "this looks red to me," cannot be something that I can
be wrong about. Such a foundationalist claim seems to be undeniable.
Sellars, however, suggests that such wording does not indicate
infallibility. One does not say, "This looks red to me," to
(infallibly) report the nature of one's experience; rather, one uses
such a locution in order to flag that one is unsure whether one has
correctly perceived the world.
... when I say "X looks green to me"...the fact that I make this report
rather than the simple report "X is green," indicates that certain
considerations have operated to raise, so to speak in a higher court,
the question 'to endorse or not to endorse.' I may have reason to think
that X may not after all be green. (Sellars, 1956, p. 41)
Thus, Sellars provides a two-pronged attack on traditional
foundationalism. The way we describe our perceptual experience does
indeed suggest that we have infallible access to certain private
experiences, private experiences that we cannot be mistaken about.
However, we should recognize the possibility that we may be being
fooled by grammar here. Sellars gives an alternative interpretation of
such statements as, "this looks red to me," an interpretation that does
not commit one to having such a privileged epistemological access to
one's perceptual experience. Further, a conceptual analysis of
"knowledge" reveals that knowledge is essentially a rational state and,
therefore, that one cannot claim to know what one has no reason for
accepting as true. Such reasons must be conceived in terms of
linguistic constructions that one can articulate, and thus, the bare
presence of the Given cannot ground the knowledge we have of our own
experience or, consequently, of the world. This, then, is a rejection
of the traditional foundationalist picture, or what Sellars calls, "the
Myth of the Given."
One of the forms taken by the Myth of the Given is the idea that there
is, indeed must be, a structure of particular matter of such fact that
(a) each fact can not only be noninferentially known to be the case,
but presupposes no other knowledge either of particular matters of
fact, or of general truths; and (b) such that the noninferential
knowledge of facts belonging to this structure constitutes the ultimate
court of appeal for all factual claims, particular and general, about
the world. (Sellars, 1956, pp. 68-9)
http://www.iep.utm.edu/e/epis-per.htm
Seeing That,
- Seeing As &
- - Simple Seeing
Perception is the process by which we acquire information about the
world around us using our five senses. Consider the nature of this
information. Looking out of your window, you see that it is raining.
Your perception represents the world as being like that. To perceive
the world in this way, therefore, it is required that you possess
concepts, that is, ways of representing and thinking about the world.
In this case, you require the concept RAIN. Thus, seeing that your
coffee cup is yellow and that the pencil is green involves the
possession of the concepts COFFEE CUP, YELLOW, PENCIL and GREEN. Such
perception is termed "perceiving that," and is factive; that is, it is
presupposed that you perceive the world correctly. To perceive that it
is raining, it must be true that it is raining. You can also, though,
perceive the world to be a certain way and yet be mistaken. This we can
call, "perceiving as," or in the usual case, "seeing as". A stick
partly submerged in water may not be bent but, nevertheless, you see it
as bent. Your perception represents the stick as being a certain way,
although it turns out that you are wrong. Much of your perception,
then, is representational: you take the world to be a certain way,
sometimes correctly, when you see that the world is thus and so, and
sometimes incorrectly, when the world is not how you perceive it to be.
It also seems that there is a form of perception that does not require
the possession of concepts (although this claim has been questioned).
It is plausible to claim that cognitively unsophisticated creatures,
those that are not seen as engaging in conceptually structured thought,
can perceive the world, and that at times we can perceptually engage
with the world in a non-conceptual way. You can tell that the wasp
senses or perceives your presence because of its irascible behavior.
When you are walking along the High Street daydreaming, you see bus
stops, waste bins, and your fellow pedestrians. You must see them
because you do not bump into them, but you do not see that the bus stop
is blue or that a certain pedestrian is wearing Wrangler jeans. You
can, of course, come to see the street in this way if you focus on the
scene in front of you, but the claim here is that there is a coherent
form of perception that does not involve such conceptual structuring.
Let us call such baseline perceptual engagement with the world, "simple
seeing". This perception involves the acquisition of perceptual
information about the world, information that enables us to visually
discriminate objects and to successfully engage with them, but also
information that does not amount to one having a conceptually
structured representation of the world. (Dretske, 1969, refers to
simple seeing as "non-epistemic" seeing, and refers to 'seeing that' as
"epistemic" seeing).
You can, then, simply see the bus stop, or you can see that the bus
stop is blue, or you can, mistakenly, see the bus stop as made of
sapphire. These are all forms of perceptual experience, ways you have
of causally engaging with the world using your sensory apparatus and
ways that have a distinctive conscious or "phenomenological" dimension.
Seeing in its various forms strikes your consciousness in a certain
way, a way that you are now experiencing as you look at your computer
screen. This article investigates the causal and epistemic roles of
this perceptual experience.
A little more terminology: the term "sensation" can be used to refer to
the conscious aspect of perception, but note that one can have such
sensations even when one would not be said to be perceiving the world.
When hallucinating, for example, one is having the sensations usually
characteristic of perceptual experience, even though in such cases
one's experience would not be described as perceptual.
Consider how these various kinds of perceptual experience are related
to our perceptual beliefs. Perceptual beliefs are those concerning the
perceptible features of our environment, and they are beliefs that are
grounded in our perceptual experience of the world. The content of such
beliefs can be acquired in other ways: You could be told that the bus
stop is blue, or you could remember that it is blue. Right now, though,
waiting for the bus, you acquire this belief by looking straight at it,
and, thus, you have a perceptual belief concerning this particular
fact. Just how your perceptual beliefs are grounded in your perceptual
experience is a contentious issue. There is certainly a causal relation
between the two, but some philosophers also claim that it is perceptual
experience that provides justification for our perceptual beliefs. This
foundationalist claim is denied by the coherentist (see sections 3 and
4 below).
http://www.iep.utm.edu/e/epis-per.htm
