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Empiricism is the philosophical doctrine that all human knowledge comes at first from senses and experience. Empiricism denies that humans have innate ideas or that anything is knowable prior to any experience.

Empiricism is contrasted with continental rationalism, epitomized by Rene Descartes. According to the rationalist, philosophy should be performed via introspection and a priori deductive reasoning. Names associated with empiricism include St. Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, Francis Bacon, John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.

It is generally regarded as being at the heart of the modern scientific method, that our theories should be based on our observations of the world rather than on intuition or faith; that is, empirical research and a posteriori inductive reasoning rather than purely deductive logic.

Empirical is an adjective often used in conjunction with science, both the natural and social sciences, which means the use of working hypotheses which are capable of being disproved using observation or experiment (i.e.: ultimately through experience).

In a second sense empirical in science may be synonymous with experimental. In this sense, an empirical result is an experimental observation. In this context, the term semi-empirical or semi-empirical is used for qualifying theoretical methods which use in part basic axioms or postulated scientific laws and empirical (experimental) results. Such methods are opposed to theoretical ab initio methods which are purely deductive and based on first principles. This terminology is particularly important in theoretical chemistry.

The ultimate source of knowledge, in Aristotle's view, is perception. Aristotle was a thoroughgoing 'empiricist' in two senses of that slippery term. First, he held that the notions or concepts in terms of which we seek to grasp and explain reality are all ultimately derived from perception; 'and for that reason, if we did not perceive anything, we would not learn or understand anything, and whenever we think of anything we must at the same time think of an idea'. Secondly, he thought that all science or knowledge is ultimately grounded on perceptual observations. This is perhaps hardly surprising: as a biologist, Aristotle's primary research tool was sense-perception, his own or that of others; as an ontologist, Aristotle's primary substances were ordinary perceptible objects. Plato, having given abstract Forms the leading role in his ontology, was led to regard the intellect rather than perception as the searchlight which illuminated reality. Aristotle, placing sensible particulars at the centre of the stage, took sense-perception as his torch.

Perception is the source of knowledge, but it is not knowledge itself. How, then, are the facts given in perception transformed into scientific knowledge? Aristotle describes the process as follows.

All animals . . . have an innate capacity to make discriminations, which is called perception; and if perception is present in them, in some animals the percept is retained and in others it is not. Now for those in which it is not retained . . . there is no knowledge outside perception. But for some perceivers it is possible to hold the percept in their minds; and when many such things have come about there is a further difference, and some animals, from the retention of such things, come to possess a general account, while others do not. Thus from perception there comes memory, as we call it; and from memory (when it occurs often in connection with the same thing) experience -- for memories that are many in number form a single experience; and from experience, or from the whole universal that has come to rest in the mind, . . . there comes a principle of skill and of knowledge.

We perceive particular facts -- that this thing, here and now, is thus-and-so (that Socrates, say, is now going grey). That perception may stick in the mind and become a memory. Many of the facts we perceive are similar to one another: it is not just Socrates, but Callias and Plato and Nicomachus and the rest who are seen to go grey. And so we may come to have a batch of similar memories, the residues of similar perceptions. When we possess such a batch we have what Aristotle terms 'experience'; and experience is turned into something very close to knowledge when 'the whole universal has come to rest in the mind', when the batch of particular memories is, as it were, compressed into a single thought -- the thought that, for the most part, all men go grey. (I say 'something very close to knowledge': knowledge itself does not arrive until we grasp the cause of greying -- until we learn that men go grey as they grow old because as they grow old the sources of pigmentation dry up.) Knowledge, in sum, is bred by generalization out of perception.

This story is open to criticism. First, it is clear that most of our knowledge is not acquired in the way Aristotle suggests. We do not normally require a mass of similar observations before we jump to a universal judgment: I doubt if Aristotle observed hectocotylization in more than one or two octopuses, and he surely dissected very few prawns before giving his general description of their internal parts. The story he tells of the growth of general knowledge from particular observations may be correct at bottom, but its plot must be considerably refined if it is to be an adequate account of our actual procedures.

Secondly, Aristotle's story will meet a philosophical challenge. Is sense-perception reliable? If so, how can we tell that it is? How can we distinguish illusion from genuine perception? And again, are we justified in moving from particular observations to general truths? How can we know if we have made enough observations or if our actual observations are a fair sample of the field of possible observations? Questions of this sort have been asked by sceptically minded philosophers for centuries, and they need to be addressed by any serious Aristotelian.

Aristotle was aware of the dangers of hasty generalization; for example, 'the cause of the ignorance of those who take this view is that, while the differences among animals with regard to copulation and procreation are manifold and unobvious, these people observe a few cases and think that things must be the same in all cases'. But Aristotle has nothing to say in general terms about the problems raised by generalization: those problems -- problems of 'induction' as they were later called -- did not receive detailed philosophical attention until long after Aristotle's death. Aristotle has rather more to say about the problems of perception. In his psychological treatise On the Soul he remarks in passing that the reliability of the senses varies according to the objects at which they are directed. If our eyes tell us 'That is white' they are most unlikely to be wrong; if they say 'That white thing is a daisy' they have a greater chance of erring. And Book IV of the Metaphysics considers and dismisses a number of sceptical positions. But the remarks in On the Soul are not backed by any argument, and Aristotle's reply to the sceptics in the Metaphysics is little more than a curt dismissal. He thinks that their views are not seriously held and need not be seriously taken: 'it is evident that no one -- neither those who state the thesis nor anyone else -- is actually in that condition. For why does anyone walk to Megara rather than stay where he is when he thinks he should walk there? Why doesn't he walk into a well or over a cliff in the morning if there is one about?' And Aristotle asks if 'they are really puzzled as to whether sizes and colours are such as they seem to those at a distance or to those who are near, to the healthy or to the sick; whether what seems heavy to the weak or to the strong really is heavy; whether what seems to be the case to men awake or to men asleep really is true.'.

If someone assures me that we can know nothing at all about the world, and I then see him looking carefully in each direction before he crosses the road, I shall not take his assurance seriously. And in general, sceptical assurances are shown in this sort of way to be unserious. Perhaps this is so; but it is hardly pertinent to the philosophical questions which Aristotle's optimistic epistemology encounters. A sceptic's arguments may be serious even if he is not. A sceptic's objections may be pointed, and may demand a response, even if the sceptic is a playboy. Aristotle ought perhaps to have taken scepticism more seriously -- but he had to leave bones for his successors to gnaw.

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