“Empiricism is the philosophical idea that we derive knowledge from our senses. There are a number of problems with this. One is that sense-data by themselves are meaningless. If you had no pre-existing ideas or expectations, you wouldn’t know how to interpret your senses. We do not read from the book of nature. The other major problem with empiricism is how to deal with false perceptions, like optical illusions”
This has similar problems to Deutsch ’s critique of induction. It is true that pure empiricism is not a source of explanations, but it does not follow that empiricism can play no useful role: empirical evidence can even play a role in Popperian science, as a source of refutation.
It is true that emprical data need interpretation. It follows that pure empiricism is useless, but does imply that empiricism has no use.
It is true that empiricism that is not infallible. But that can be addressed by using probabilistic and falliblistic approaches … approaches, plural, because the Deutsch/Popper version of fallibilism is not the only one.
“Empiricism is the philosophical idea that we derive knowledge from our senses. There are a number of problems with this. One is that sense-data by themselves are meaningless. If you had no pre-existing ideas or expectations, you wouldn’t know how to interpret your senses. We do not read from the book of nature. The other major problem with empiricism is how to deal with false perceptions, like optical illusions”
This has similar problems to Deutsch ’s critique of induction. It is true that pure empiricism is not a source of explanations, but it does not follow that empiricism can play no useful role: empirical evidence can even play a role in Popperian science, as a source of refutation.
It is true that emprical data need interpretation. It follows that pure empiricism is useless, but does imply that empiricism has no use.
It is true that empiricism that is not infallible. But that can be addressed by using probabilistic and falliblistic approaches … approaches, plural, because the Deutsch/Popper version of fallibilism is not the only one.