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146-550: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a book by the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume , published in English in 1748 under the title Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding until a 1757 edition came up with the now-familiar name. It was a revision of an earlier effort, Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature , published anonymously in London in 1739–40. Hume

292-560: A material intellect ( al-'aql al-hayulani ), which is a potentiality "that can acquire knowledge to the active intellect ( al- 'aql al-fa'il ), the state of the human intellect in conjunction with the perfect source of knowledge". So the immaterial "active intellect", separate from any individual person, is still essential for understanding to occur. In the 12th century CE, the Andalusian Muslim philosopher and novelist Abu Bakr Ibn Tufail (known as "Abubacer" or "Ebu Tophail" in

438-609: A result of their being perceived, or by virtue of the fact that they are an entity doing the perceiving. (For Berkeley, God fills in for humans by doing the perceiving whenever humans are not around to do it.) In his text Alciphron , Berkeley maintained that any order humans may see in nature is the language or handwriting of God. Berkeley's approach to empiricism would later come to be called subjective idealism . Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) responded to Berkeley's criticisms of Locke, as well as other differences between early modern philosophers, and moved empiricism to

584-436: A tautology by putting synonyms for synonyms is near Kant's account of analytic truth as a truth whose negation is a contradiction. Analytic truth defined as a truth confirmed no matter what, however, is closer to one of the traditional accounts of a priori . While the first four sections of Quine's paper concern analyticity, the last two concern a-priority. Putnam considers the argument in the two last sections as independent of

730-497: A thought experiment by Ibn Tufail . For Avicenna ( Ibn Sina ), for example, the tabula rasa is a pure potentiality that is actualized through education , and knowledge is attained through "empirical familiarity with objects in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts" developed through a " syllogistic method of reasoning in which observations lead to propositional statements which when compounded lead to further abstract concepts". The intellect itself develops from

876-412: A Dogma". Among other things, they argue that Quine's skepticism about synonyms leads to a skepticism about meaning. If statements can have meanings, then it would make sense to ask "What does it mean?". If it makes sense to ask "What does it mean?", then synonymy can be defined as follows: Two sentences are synonymous if and only if the true answer of the question "What does it mean?" asked of one of them

1022-455: A basis for trust in the testimony of persons: because a) human memory can be relatively tenacious; and b) because people are inclined to tell the truth, and ashamed of telling falsities. Needless to say, these reasons are only to be trusted to the extent that they conform to experience. (Hume 1974:389) And there are a number of reasons to be skeptical of human testimony, also based on experience. If a) testimonies conflict one another, b) there are

1168-426: A causal insight which transcends mere custom. Empiricism In philosophy , empiricism is an epistemological view which holds that true knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience and empirical evidence . It is one of several competing views within epistemology, along with rationalism and skepticism . Empiricists argue that empiricism is a more reliable method of finding

1314-431: A complementary rather than competitive mode, the latter of which had been the primary trend among the educated since David Hume wrote a century before. To this, Peirce added the concept of abductive reasoning . The combined three forms of reasoning serve as a primary conceptual foundation for the empirically based scientific method today. Peirce's approach "presupposes that (1) the objects of knowledge are real things, (2)

1460-502: A discipline is impossible. The remainder of the Critique of Pure Reason is devoted to examining whether and how knowledge of synthetic a priori propositions is possible. Over a hundred years later, a group of philosophers took interest in Kant and his distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions: the logical positivists . Part of Kant's examination of the possibility of synthetic

1606-472: A distinction is made between simple and complex ideas. The former are unanalysable, and are broken down into primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are essential for the object in question to be what it is. Without specific primary qualities, an object would not be what it is. For example, an apple is an apple because of the arrangement of its atomic structure. If an apple were structured differently, it would cease to be an apple. Secondary qualities are

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1752-462: A fact. But if every historian were to assert that Queen Elizabeth was observed walking around happy and healthy after her funeral, and then interpreted that to mean that they had risen from the dead, then we'd have reason to appeal to natural laws in order to dispute their interpretation. (Hume 1974:400-402) Hume continues his application of epistemology to theology by an extended discussion on heaven and hell. The brunt of this chapter allegedly narrates

1898-403: A framework). The "external" questions were also of two types: those that were confused pseudo-questions ("one disguised in the form of a theoretical question") and those that could be re-interpreted as practical, pragmatic questions about whether a framework under consideration was "more or less expedient, fruitful, conducive to the aim for which the language is intended". The adjective "synthetic"

2044-457: A heart also has kidneys, the concept "creature with a heart" does not contain the concept "has kidneys". So the philosophical issue is: What kind of statement is "Language is used to transmit meaning"? In the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason , Kant contrasts his distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions with another distinction, the distinction between a priori and

2190-399: A horn on a horse to create a unicorn ); transposing (or the substitution of one part of a thing with the part from another, such as with the body of a man upon a horse to make a centaur ); augmenting (as with the case of a giant , whose size has been augmented); and diminishing (as with Lilliputians , whose size has been diminished). (Hume 1974:317) In a later chapter, he also mentions

2336-463: A miracle to be any event which contradicts the laws of nature. He argues that the laws of nature have an overwhelming body of evidence behind them, and are so well demonstrated to everyone's experience, that any deviation from those laws necessarily flies in the face of all evidence. (Hume 1974:391-392) Moreover, he stresses that talk of the miraculous has no surface validity, for four reasons. First, he explains that in all of history there has never been

2482-496: A miracle which was attested to by a wide body of disinterested experts. Second, he notes that human beings delight in a sense of wonder, and this provides a villain with an opportunity to manipulate others. Third, he thinks that those who hold onto the miraculous have tended towards barbarism. Finally, since testimonies tend to conflict with one another when it comes to the miraculous—that is, one man's religious miracle may be contradicted by another man's miracle—any testimony relating to

2628-684: A new level of skepticism . Hume argued in keeping with the empiricist view that all knowledge derives from sense experience, but he accepted that this has implications not normally acceptable to philosophers. He wrote for example, "Locke divides all arguments into demonstrative and probable. On this view, we must say that it is only probable that all men must die or that the sun will rise to-morrow, because neither of these can be demonstrated. But to conform our language more to common use, we ought to divide arguments into demonstrations, proofs, and probabilities—by ‘proofs’ meaning arguments from experience that leave no room for doubt or opposition." And, I believe

2774-583: A notion of philosophy as the conceptual clarification of the methods, insights and discoveries of the sciences. They saw in the logical symbolism elaborated by Frege (1848–1925) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) a powerful instrument that could rationally reconstruct all scientific discourse into an ideal, logically perfect, language that would be free of the ambiguities and deformations of natural language. This gave rise to what they saw as metaphysical pseudoproblems and other conceptual confusions. By combining Frege's thesis that all mathematical truths are logical with

2920-433: A posteriori propositions. He defines these terms as follows: Examples of a priori propositions include: The justification of these propositions does not depend upon experience: one need not consult experience to determine whether all bachelors are unmarried, nor whether 7 + 5 = 12 . (Of course, as Kant would grant, experience is required to understand the concepts "bachelor", "unmarried", "7", "+" and so forth. However,

3066-420: A posteriori propositions. That leaves only the question of how knowledge of synthetic a priori propositions is possible. This question is exceedingly important, Kant maintains, because all scientific knowledge (for him Newtonian physics and mathematics) is made up of synthetic a priori propositions. If it is impossible to determine which synthetic a priori propositions are true, he argues, then metaphysics as

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3212-432: A posteriori statements have already been given, for synthetic a priori propositions he gives those in mathematics and physics. Part of Kant's argument in the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason involves arguing that there is no problem figuring out how knowledge of analytic propositions is possible. To know an analytic proposition, Kant argued, one need not consult experience. Instead, one needs merely to take

3358-501: A priori knowledge involved the examination of mathematical propositions, such as Kant maintained that mathematical propositions such as these are synthetic a priori propositions, and that we know them. That they are synthetic, he thought, is obvious: the concept "equal to 12" is not contained within the concept "7 + 5"; and the concept "straight line" is not contained within the concept "the shortest distance between two points". From this, Kant concluded that we have knowledge of synthetic

3504-478: A priori propositions. Although not strictly speaking a logical positivist, Gottlob Frege 's notion of analyticity influenced them greatly. It included a number of logical properties and relations beyond containment: symmetry , transitivity , antonymy , or negation and so on. He had a strong emphasis on formality, in particular formal definition, and also emphasized the idea of substitution of synonymous terms. "All bachelors are unmarried" can be expanded out with

3650-618: A priori truths. Thanks to Frege's logical semantics, particularly his concept of analyticity, arithmetic truths like "7+5=12" are no longer synthetic a priori but analytical a priori truths in Carnap 's extended sense of "analytic". Hence logical empiricists are not subject to Kant's criticism of Hume for throwing out mathematics along with metaphysics. (Here "logical empiricist" is a synonym for "logical positivist".) The logical positivists agreed with Kant that we have knowledge of mathematical truths, and further that mathematical propositions are

3796-415: A priori . However, they did not believe that any complex metaphysics, such as the type Kant supplied, are necessary to explain our knowledge of mathematical truths. Instead, the logical positivists maintained that our knowledge of judgments like "all bachelors are unmarried" and our knowledge of mathematics (and logic) are in the basic sense the same: all proceeded from our knowledge of the meanings of terms or

3942-474: A priori ; there are no a posteriori analytic propositions. It follows, second: There is no problem understanding how we can know analytic propositions; we can know them because we only need to consult our concepts in order to determine that they are true. After ruling out the possibility of analytic a posteriori propositions, and explaining how we can obtain knowledge of analytic a priori propositions, Kant also explains how we can obtain knowledge of synthetic

4088-543: A priori ] in nature, Mill set down as founded on induction. Thus, in Mill's philosophy there was no real place for knowledge based on relations of ideas. In his view logical and mathematical necessity is psychological; we are merely unable to conceive any other possibilities than those that logical and mathematical propositions assert. This is perhaps the most extreme version of empiricism known, but it has not found many defenders. Mill's empiricism thus held that knowledge of any kind

4234-462: A prominent advocate of the experimental method, held that we also have innate ideas. At the same time, the main continental rationalists ( Descartes , Spinoza , and Leibniz ) were also advocates of the empirical "scientific method". Between 600 and 200 BCE, the Vaisheshika school of Hindu philosophy , founded by the ancient Indian philosopher Kanada , accepted perception and inference as

4380-598: A rational reconstruction of knowledge into the language of an objective spatio-temporal physics. That is, instead of translating sentences about physical objects into sense-data, such sentences were to be translated into so-called protocol sentences , for example, " X at location Y and at time T observes such and such". The central theses of logical positivism (verificationism, the analytic–synthetic distinction, reductionism, etc.) came under sharp attack after World War II by thinkers such as Nelson Goodman , W. V. Quine , Hilary Putnam , Karl Popper , and Richard Rorty . By

4526-415: A sagely prudence which arrests generalizations, a capacity for a greater inner library of analogies to reason with, an ability to detach oneself and scrap one's own biases, and an ability to converse through language (and thus gain from the experience of others' testimonies). (Hume 1974:385, footnote 17.) The next topic which Hume strives to give treatment is that of the reliability of human testimony, and of

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4672-438: A second doctor who, when inspecting the sense organs of the first doctor, would himself have to have the sense data a normal observer has when inspecting the sense organs of a subject who is a normal observer. And if we are to specify in sensory terms that the second doctor is a normal observer, we must refer to a third doctor, and so on (also see the third man ). Logical empiricism (also logical positivism or neopositivism )

4818-560: A simple instance posed by Hume, we cannot know with certainty by inductive reasoning that the sun will continue to rise in the East, but instead come to expect it to do so because it has repeatedly done so in the past. Hume concluded that such things as belief in an external world and belief in the existence of the self were not rationally justifiable. According to Hume these beliefs were to be accepted nonetheless because of their profound basis in instinct and custom. Hume's lasting legacy, however,

4964-432: A small number of witnesses, c) the speaker has no integrity, d) the speaker is overly hesitant or bold, or e) the speaker is known to have motives for lying, then the epistemologist has reason to be skeptical of the speaker's claims. (Hume 1974:390) There is one final criterion that Hume thinks gives us warrant to doubt any given testimony, and that is f) if the propositions being communicated are miraculous. Hume understands

5110-450: A theory known as instrumentalism . The role of sense experience in Dewey's theory is crucial, in that he saw experience as unified totality of things through which everything else is interrelated. Dewey's basic thought, in accordance with empiricism, was that reality is determined by past experience. Therefore, humans adapt their past experiences of things to perform experiments upon and test

5256-493: A very influential view wherein the only knowledge humans can have is a posteriori , i.e., based upon experience. Locke is famously attributed with holding the proposition that the human mind is a tabula rasa , a "blank tablet", in Locke's words "white paper", on which the experiences derived from sense impressions as a person's life proceeds are written. There are two sources of our ideas: sensation and reflection. In both cases,

5402-427: A working notion of analyticity. In "'Two Dogmas' Revisited", Hilary Putnam argues that Quine is attacking two different notions: It seems to me there is as gross a distinction between 'All bachelors are unmarried' and 'There is a book on this table' as between any two things in this world, or at any rate, between any two linguistic expressions in the world; Analytic truth defined as a true statement derivable from

5548-618: Is a perception of ideas that are in accordance or discordance with each other, which is very different from the quest for certainty of Descartes . A generation later, the Irish Anglican bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753) determined that Locke's view immediately opened a door that would lead to eventual atheism . In response to Locke, he put forth in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) an important challenge to empiricism in which things only exist either as

5694-456: Is a two-way street. That is, it can be taken to say that whatever we find in the intellect is also incipiently in the senses. Hence, if theories are theory-laden then so are the senses, and perception itself can be seen as a species of abductive inference , its difference being that it is beyond control and hence beyond critique—in a word, incorrigible. This in no way conflicts with the fallibility and revisability of scientific concepts, since it

5840-421: Is an affirmative subject–predicate judgment, and, in each, the predicate concept is contained within the subject concept. The concept "bachelor" contains the concept "unmarried"; the concept "unmarried" is part of the definition of the concept "bachelor". Likewise, for "triangle" and "has three sides", and so on. Examples of synthetic propositions, on Kant's definition, include: Kant's own example is: As with

5986-454: Is an innate faculty of instincts which both beasts and humans share, namely, the ability to reason experimentally (through custom). Nevertheless, he admits, humans and animals differ in mental faculties in a number of ways, including: differences in memory and attention, inferential abilities, ability to make deductions in a long chain, ability to grasp ideas more or less clearly, the human capacity to worry about conflating unrelated circumstances,

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6132-663: Is more popular than philosophical, we need but reflect on two very obvious principles. First, That reason alone can never give rise to any original idea, and secondly, that reason, as distinguished from experience, can never make us conclude, that a cause or productive quality is absolutely requisite to every beginning of existence. Both these considerations have been sufficiently explained: and therefore shall not at present be any farther insisted on. Hume divided all of human knowledge into two categories: relations of ideas and matters of fact (see also Kant's analytic-synthetic distinction ). Mathematical and logical propositions (e.g. "that

6278-534: Is no non-circular (and so no tenable) way to ground the notion of analytic propositions. While Quine's rejection of the analytic–synthetic distinction is widely known, the precise argument for the rejection and its status is highly debated in contemporary philosophy. However, some (for example, Paul Boghossian ) argue that Quine's rejection of the distinction is still widely accepted among philosophers, even if for poor reasons. Paul Grice and P. F. Strawson criticized "Two Dogmas" in their 1956 article "In Defense of

6424-474: Is not from direct experience but an inductive inference from direct experience. The problems other philosophers have had with Mill's position center around the following issues: Firstly, Mill's formulation encounters difficulty when it describes what direct experience is by differentiating only between actual and possible sensations. This misses some key discussion concerning conditions under which such "groups of permanent possibilities of sensation" might exist in

6570-426: Is not identical with the internal–external distinction . In 1951, Willard Van Orman Quine published the essay " Two Dogmas of Empiricism " in which he argued that the analytic–synthetic distinction is untenable. The argument at bottom is that there are no "analytic" truths, but all truths involve an empirical aspect. In the first paragraph, Quine takes the distinction to be the following: Quine's position denying

6716-521: Is not purely logical, or is unverifiable, is devoid of meaning. As a result, most metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic and other traditional philosophical problems came to be considered pseudoproblems. In the extreme empiricism of the neopositivists—at least before the 1930s—any genuinely synthetic assertion must be reducible to an ultimate assertion (or set of ultimate assertions) that expresses direct observations or perceptions. In later years, Carnap and Neurath abandoned this sort of phenomenalism in favor of

6862-519: Is only the immediate percept in its unique individuality or "thisness"—what the Scholastics called its haecceity —that stands beyond control and correction. Scientific concepts, on the other hand, are general in nature, and transient sensations do in another sense find correction within them. This notion of perception as abduction has received periodic revivals in artificial intelligence and cognitive science research, most recently for instance with

7008-513: Is sometimes used to describe theoretical methods that make use of basic axioms , established scientific laws, and previous experimental results to engage in reasoned model building and theoretical inquiry. Philosophical empiricists hold no knowledge to be properly inferred or deduced unless it is derived from one's sense-based experience. In epistemology (theory of knowledge) empiricism is typically contrasted with rationalism , which holds that knowledge may be derived from reason independently of

7154-420: Is the true answer to the same question asked of the other. They also draw the conclusion that discussion about correct or incorrect translations would be impossible given Quine's argument. Four years after Grice and Strawson published their paper, Quine's book Word and Object was released. In the book Quine presented his theory of indeterminacy of translation . In Speech Acts , John Searle argues that from

7300-410: Is to have an "idea". Ideas are therefore the faint copies of sensations. Hume maintained that no knowledge, even the most basic beliefs about the natural world, can be conclusively established by reason. Rather, he maintained, our beliefs are more a result of accumulated habits , developed in response to accumulated sense experiences. Among his many arguments Hume also added another important slant to

7446-414: Is true. One need merely examine the subject concept ("bachelors") and see if the predicate concept "unmarried" is contained in it. And in fact, it is: "unmarried" is part of the definition of "bachelor" and so is contained within it. Thus the proposition "All bachelors are unmarried" can be known to be true without consulting experience. It follows from this, Kant argued, first: All analytic propositions are

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7592-404: Is workable it solves some very important problems in the philosophy of language. Saul Kripke has argued that "Water is H 2 O" is an example of the necessary a posteriori , since we had to discover that water was H 2 O, but given that it is true, it cannot be false. It would be absurd to claim that something that is water is not H 2 O, for these are known to be identical . Rudolf Carnap

7738-561: The Ancient Greek word ἐμπειρία, empeiria , which is cognate with and translates to the Latin experientia , from which the words experience and experiment are derived. A central concept in science and the scientific method is that conclusions must be empirically based on the evidence of the senses. Both natural and social sciences use working hypotheses that are testable by observation and experiment . The term semi-empirical

7884-420: The a priori – a posteriori distinction as employed here by Kant refers not to the origins of the concepts but to the justification of the propositions. Once we have the concepts, experience is no longer necessary.) Examples of a posteriori propositions include: Both of these propositions are a posteriori : any justification of them would require one's experience. The analytic–synthetic distinction and

8030-476: The a priori – a posteriori distinction together yield four types of propositions: Kant posits the third type as obviously self-contradictory. Ruling it out, he discusses only the remaining three types as components of his epistemological framework—each, for brevity's sake, becoming, respectively, "analytic", "synthetic a priori ", and "empirical" or " a posteriori " propositions. This triad accounts for all propositions possible. Examples of analytic and examples of

8176-513: The truth-value of a sentence . It is intended to resolve a puzzle that has plagued philosophy for some time, namely: How is it possible to discover empirically that a necessary truth is true ? Two-dimensionalism provides an analysis of the semantics of words and sentences that makes sense of this possibility. The theory was first developed by Robert Stalnaker , but it has been advocated by numerous philosophers since, including David Chalmers and Berit Brogaard . Any given sentence, for example,

8322-486: The "effectual truth" instead. Their contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) said, "If you find from your own experience that something is a fact and it contradicts what some authority has written down, then you must abandon the authority and base your reasoning on your own findings." Significantly, an empirical metaphysical system was developed by the Italian philosopher Bernardino Telesio which had an enormous impact on

8468-451: The 1870s. James popularized the term "pragmatism", giving Peirce full credit for its patrimony, but Peirce later demurred from the tangents that the movement was taking, and redubbed what he regarded as the original idea with the name of "pragmaticism". Along with its pragmatic theory of truth , this perspective integrates the basic insights of empirical (experience-based) and rational (concept-based) thinking. Charles Peirce (1839–1914)

8614-788: The 18th century, both George Berkeley in Ireland and David Hume in Scotland , all became leading exponents of empiricism, hence the dominance of empiricism in British philosophy. The distinction between rationalism and empiricism was not formally made until Immanuel Kant , in Germany, around 1780 , who sought to merge the two views. In response to the early-to-mid-17th-century " continental rationalism ", John Locke (1632–1704) proposed in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

8760-492: The West) included the theory of tabula rasa as a thought experiment in his Arabic philosophical novel , Hayy ibn Yaqdhan in which he depicted the development of the mind of a feral child "from a tabula rasa to that of an adult, in complete isolation from society" on a desert island , through experience alone. The Latin translation of his philosophical novel , entitled Philosophus Autodidactus , published by Edward Pococke

8906-529: The Younger in 1671, had an influence on John Locke 's formulation of tabula rasa in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding . A similar Islamic theological novel, Theologus Autodidactus , was written by the Arab theologian and physician Ibn al-Nafis in the 13th century. It also dealt with the theme of empiricism through the story of a feral child on a desert island, but departed from its predecessor by depicting

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9052-404: The actions they produce by way of some sense of the power of the will. He reasons that, 1. if we knew the nature of this power, then the mind-body divide would seem totally unmysterious to us; 2. if we had immediate knowledge of this mysterious power, then we would be able to intuitively explain why it is that we can control some parts of our bodies (e.g., our hands or tongues), and not others (e.g.,

9198-716: The actual numbers, as believed), and through this and other discoveries that demonstrated the fallibility of traditional authorities, a radically empirical attitude developed, passed on to Galileo, which regarded "experience and demonstration" as the sine qua non of valid rational enquiry. British empiricism , a retrospective characterization, emerged during the 17th century as an approach to early modern philosophy and modern science . Although both integral to this overarching transition, Francis Bacon , in England, first advocated for empiricism in 1620 , whereas René Descartes , in France, laid

9344-441: The afterlife, because we don't know anything of the afterlife from experience, and we can't infer it from the existence of God. (Hume 1974:408) Hume offers his friend an objection: if we see an unfinished building, then can't we infer that it has been created by humans with certain intentions, and that it will be finished in the future? His friend concurs, but indicates that there is a relevant disanalogy that we can't pretend to know

9490-480: The analytic statements. But, for all its a priori reasonableness, a boundary between analytic and synthetic statements simply has not been drawn. That there is such a distinction to be drawn at all is an unempirical dogma of empiricists, a metaphysical article of faith. To summarize Quine's argument, the notion of an analytic proposition requires a notion of synonymy, but establishing synonymy inevitably leads to matters of fact – synthetic propositions. Thus, there

9636-425: The analytic–synthetic distinction is summarized as follows: It is obvious that truth in general depends on both language and extralinguistic fact. ... Thus one is tempted to suppose in general that the truth of a statement is somehow analyzable into a linguistic component and a factual component. Given this supposition, it next seems reasonable that in some statements the factual component should be null; and these are

9782-441: The characters (properties) of real things do not depend on our perceptions of them, and (3) everyone who has sufficient experience of real things will agree on the truth about them. According to Peirce's doctrine of fallibilism , the conclusions of science are always tentative. The rationality of the scientific method does not depend on the certainty of its conclusions, but on its self-corrective character: by continued application of

9928-402: The closely related term subjective idealism . By the phenomenalistic line of thinking, to have a visual experience of a real physical thing is to have an experience of a certain kind of group of experiences. This type of set of experiences possesses a constancy and coherence that is lacking in the set of experiences of which hallucinations, for example, are a part. As John Stuart Mill put it in

10074-455: The conclusions of the Enquiry will be very powerful if they can be shown to apply to animals and not just humans. He believed that animals were able to infer the relation between cause and effect in the same way that humans do: through learned expectations. (Hume 1974:384) He also notes that this "inferential" ability that animals have is not through reason, but custom alone. Hume concludes that there

10220-464: The contents of the mind of God, while we can know the designs of other humans. Hume seems essentially persuaded by his friend's reasoning. (Hume 1974:412-414) The first section of the last chapter is well organized as an outline of various skeptical arguments. The treatment includes the arguments of atheism, Cartesian skepticism, "light" skepticism, and rationalist critiques of empiricism. Hume shows that even light skepticism leads to crushing doubts about

10366-589: The conventions of language. Since empiricism had always asserted that all knowledge is based on experience, this assertion had to include knowledge in mathematics. On the other hand, we believed that with respect to this problem the rationalists had been right in rejecting the old empiricist view that the truth of "2+2=4" is contingent on the observation of facts, a view that would lead to the unacceptable consequence that an arithmetical statement might possibly be refuted tomorrow by new experiences. Our solution, based upon Wittgenstein 's conception, consisted in asserting

10512-424: The craft of philosophy. Next, Hume discusses the distinction between impressions and ideas. By "impressions", he means sensations, while by "ideas", he means memories and imaginings. According to Hume, the difference between the two is that ideas are less vivacious than impressions. For example, the idea of the taste of an orange is far inferior to the impression (or sensation) of actually eating one. Writing within

10658-414: The data given by empirical observation. In later years he even emphasized the concept-driven side of the then ongoing debate between strict empiricism and strict rationalism, in part to counterbalance the excesses to which some of his cohorts had taken pragmatism under the "data-driven" strict-empiricist view. Among Peirce's major contributions was to place inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning in

10804-413: The debate about scientific method —that of the problem of induction . Hume argued that it requires inductive reasoning to arrive at the premises for the principle of inductive reasoning, and therefore the justification for inductive reasoning is a circular argument. Among Hume's conclusions regarding the problem of induction is that there is no certainty that the future will resemble the past. Thus, as

10950-568: The development of later Italian thinkers, including Telesio's students Antonio Persio and Sertorio Quattromani , his contemporaries Thomas Campanella and Giordano Bruno , and later British philosophers such as Francis Bacon , who regarded Telesio as "the first of the moderns". Telesio's influence can also be seen on the French philosophers René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi . The decidedly anti-Aristotelian and anti-clerical music theorist Vincenzo Galilei (c. 1520 – 1591), father of Galileo and

11096-509: The development of the protagonist's mind through contact with society rather than in isolation from society. During the 13th century Thomas Aquinas adopted into scholasticism the Aristotelian position that the senses are essential to the mind. Bonaventure (1221–1274), one of Aquinas' strongest intellectual opponents, offered some of the strongest arguments in favour of the Platonic idea of

11242-421: The difference between belief and fiction is that the former produces a certain feeling of confidence which the latter doesn't. (Hume 1974:340) This short chapter begins with the notions of probability and chance. For him, "probability" means a higher chance of occurring, and brings about a higher degree of subjective expectation in the viewer. By "chance", he means all those particular comprehensible events which

11388-402: The difficulties encountered in trying to explicate analyticity by appeal to specific criteria, it does not follow that the notion itself is void. Considering the way that we would test any proposed list of criteria, which is by comparing their extension to the set of analytic statements, it would follow that any explication of what analyticity means presupposes that we already have at our disposal

11534-421: The distinction was first proposed by Immanuel Kant , it was revised considerably over time, and different philosophers have used the terms in very different ways. Furthermore, some philosophers (starting with Willard Van Orman Quine ) have questioned whether there is even a clear distinction to be made between propositions which are analytically true and propositions which are synthetically true. Debates regarding

11680-476: The doctrines of the dogmatic school , preferring to rely on the observation of phantasiai (i.e., phenomena, the appearances). The Empiric school was closely allied with the Pyrrhonist school of philosophy, which made the philosophical case for their proto-empiricism. The notion of tabula rasa ("clean slate" or "blank tablet") connotes a view of the mind as an originally blank or empty recorder (Locke used

11826-401: The early Wittgenstein's idea that all logical truths are mere linguistic tautologies , they arrived at a twofold classification of all propositions: the "analytic" ( a priori ) and the "synthetic" ( a posteriori ). On this basis, they formulated a strong principle of demarcation between sentences that have sense and those that do not: the so-called " verification principle ". Any sentence that

11972-611: The fact that he has never experienced it. This seems to pose a serious problem for the empirical account, though Hume brushes it aside as an exceptional case by stating that one may experience a novel idea that itself is derived from combinations of previous impressions. (Hume 1974:319) In this chapter, Hume discusses how thoughts tend to come in sequences, as in trains of thought. He explains that there are at least three kinds of associations between ideas: resemblance , contiguity in space-time, and cause-and-effect . He argues that there must be some universal principle that must account for

12118-519: The fantastic is self-denunciating. (Hume 1974:393-398) Still, Hume takes care to warn that historians are generally to be trusted with confidence, so long as their reports on facts are extensive and uniform. However, he seems to suggest that historians are as fallible at interpreting the facts as the rest of humanity. Thus, if every historian were to claim that there was a solar eclipse in the year 1600, then though we might at first naively regard that as in violation of natural laws, we'd come to accept it as

12264-562: The first place. Berkeley put God in that gap; the phenomenalists, including Mill, essentially left the question unanswered. In the end, lacking an acknowledgement of an aspect of "reality" that goes beyond mere "possibilities of sensation", such a position leads to a version of subjective idealism. Questions of how floor beams continue to support a floor while unobserved, how trees continue to grow while unobserved and untouched by human hands, etc., remain unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable in these terms. Secondly, Mill's formulation leaves open

12410-566: The first section of the Enquiry, Hume provides a rough introduction to philosophy as a whole. For Hume, philosophy can be split into two general parts: natural philosophy and the philosophy of human nature (or, as he calls it, "moral philosophy"). The latter investigates both actions and thoughts. He emphasizes in this section, by way of warning, that philosophers with nuanced thoughts will likely be cast aside in favor of those whose conclusions more intuitively match popular opinion. However, he insists, precision helps art and craft of all kinds, including

12556-438: The flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. " The criteria Hume lists in his examination of the validity of human testimony are roughly upheld in modern social psychology, under the rubric of the communication-persuasion paradigm. Supporting literature includes: the work of social impact theory , which discusses persuasion in part through the number of persons engaging in influence; as well as studies made on

12702-433: The following: (While the logical positivists believed that the only necessarily true propositions were analytic, they did not define "analytic proposition" as "necessarily true proposition" or "proposition that is true in all possible worlds".) Synthetic propositions were then defined as: These definitions applied to all propositions, regardless of whether they were of subject–predicate form. Thus, under these definitions,

12848-411: The formal definition of bachelor as "unmarried man" to form "All unmarried men are unmarried", which is recognizable as tautologous and therefore analytic from its logical form: any statement of the form "All X that are ( F and G ) are F ". Using this particular expanded idea of analyticity, Frege concluded that Kant's examples of arithmetical truths are analytical a priori truths and not synthetic

12994-426: The future. (Hume 1974:346-348) By "necessary connection", Hume means the power or force which necessarily ties one idea to another. He rejects the notion that any sensible qualities are necessarily conjoined, since that would mean we could know something prior to experience. Unlike his predecessors, Berkeley and Locke, Hume rejects the idea that volitions or impulses of the will may be inferred to necessarily connect to

13140-488: The idea that causes are mere occasions of the will of some god(s) , a view associated with the philosopher Nicolas Malebranche . (Hume 1974:356-359) Having dispensed with these alternative explanations, he identifies the source of our knowledge of necessary connections as arising out of observation of constant conjunction of certain impressions across many instances . In this way, people know of necessity through rigorous custom or habit, and not from any immediate knowledge of

13286-413: The inventor of monody , made use of the method in successfully solving musical problems, firstly, of tuning such as the relationship of pitch to string tension and mass in stringed instruments, and to volume of air in wind instruments; and secondly to composition, by his various suggestions to composers in his Dialogo della musica antica e moderna (Florence, 1581). The Italian word he used for "experiment"

13432-466: The issue rest on human instinct, custom and habit. According to an extreme empiricist theory known as phenomenalism , anticipated by the arguments of both Hume and George Berkeley, a physical object is a kind of construction out of our experiences. Phenomenalism is the view that physical objects, properties, events (whatever is physical) are reducible to mental objects, properties, events. Ultimately, only mental objects, properties, events, exist—hence

13578-505: The late 1960s, it had become evident to most philosophers that the movement had pretty much run its course, though its influence is still significant among contemporary analytic philosophers such as Michael Dummett and other anti-realists . In the late 19th and early 20th century, several forms of pragmatic philosophy arose. The ideas of pragmatism, in its various forms, developed mainly from discussions between Charles Sanders Peirce and William James when both men were at Harvard in

13724-445: The latter are given through experience. (Hume 1974:322) In explaining how matters of fact are entirely a product of experience, he dismisses the notion that they may be arrived at through a priori reasoning. For Hume, every effect only follows its cause arbitrarily—they are entirely distinct from one another. (Hume 1974:324) In part two, Hume inquires into how anyone can justifiably believe that experience yields any conclusions about

13870-417: The latter. But it came to be realized that there is no finite set of statements about actual and possible sense-data from which we can deduce even a single physical-object statement. The translating or paraphrasing statement must be couched in terms of normal observers in normal conditions of observation. There is, however, no finite set of statements that are couched in purely sensory terms and can express

14016-412: The liver or heart); 3. we have no immediate knowledge of the powers which allow an impulse of volition to create an action (e.g., of the "muscles, and nerves, and animal spirits" which are the immediate cause of an action). (Hume 1974:353-354) He produces like arguments against the notion that we have knowledge of these powers as they affect the mind alone. (Hume 1974:355-356) He also argues in brief against

14162-486: The main groundwork upholding rationalism around 1640. (Bacon's natural philosophy was influenced by Italian philosopher Bernardino Telesio and by Swiss physician Paracelsus .) Contributing later in the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza are retrospectively identified likewise as an empiricist and a rationalist, respectively. In the Enlightenment of the late 17th century, John Locke in England, and in

14308-512: The method science can detect and correct its own mistakes, and thus eventually lead to the discovery of truth". In his Harvard "Lectures on Pragmatism" (1903), Peirce enumerated what he called the "three cotary propositions of pragmatism" ( L: cos, cotis whetstone), saying that they "put the edge on the maxim of pragmatism ". First among these, he listed the peripatetic-thomist observation mentioned above, but he further observed that this link between sensory perception and intellectual conception

14454-453: The mid-19th century, matter is the "permanent possibility of sensation". Mill's empiricism went a significant step beyond Hume in still another respect: in maintaining that induction is necessary for all meaningful knowledge including mathematics. As summarized by D.W. Hamlin: [Mill] claimed that mathematical truths were merely very highly confirmed generalizations from experience; mathematical inference, generally conceived as deductive [and

14600-669: The mind starts blank, but acquires knowledge as the outside world is impressed upon it. The doxographer Aetius summarizes this view as "When a man is born, the Stoics say, he has the commanding part of his soul like a sheet of paper ready for writing upon." During the Middle Ages (from the 5th to the 15th century CE) Aristotle's theory of tabula rasa was developed by Islamic philosophers starting with Al Farabi ( c.  872  – c.  951 CE ), developing into an elaborate theory by Avicenna (c.  980 – 1037 CE) and demonstrated as

14746-463: The mind. In the late renaissance various writers began to question the medieval and classical understanding of knowledge acquisition in a more fundamental way. In political and historical writing Niccolò Machiavelli and his friend Francesco Guicciardini initiated a new realistic style of writing. Machiavelli in particular was scornful of writers on politics who judged everything in comparison to mental ideals and demanded that people should study

14892-423: The most general and most popular explication of this matter, is to say [See Mr. Locke, chapter of power.], that finding from experience, that there are several new productions in matter, such as the motions and variations of body, and concluding that there must somewhere be a power capable of producing them, we arrive at last by this reasoning at the idea of power and efficacy. But to be convinced that this explication

15038-454: The natural world rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition , or revelation . Empiricism, often used by natural scientists , believes that "knowledge is based on experience" and that "knowledge is tentative and probabilistic, subject to continued revision and falsification ". Empirical research, including experiments and validated measurement tools, guides the scientific method. The English term empirical derives from

15184-647: The nature and usefulness of the distinction continue to this day in contemporary philosophy of language . The philosopher Immanuel Kant uses the terms "analytic" and "synthetic" to divide propositions into two types. Kant introduces the analytic–synthetic distinction in the Introduction to his Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1998, A6–7/B10–11). There, he restricts his attention to statements that are affirmative subject–predicate judgments and defines "analytic proposition" and "synthetic proposition" as follows: Examples of analytic propositions, on Kant's definition, include: Kant's own example is: Each of these statements

15330-410: The only two reliable sources of knowledge. This is enumerated in his work Vaiśeṣika Sūtra . The Charvaka school held similar beliefs, asserting that perception is the only reliable source of knowledge while inference obtains knowledge with uncertainty. The earliest Western proto-empiricists were the empiric school of ancient Greek medical practitioners, founded in 330 BCE. Its members rejected

15476-414: The operations of mixing , separating , and dividing . (Hume 1974:340) However, Hume admits that there is one objection to his account: the problem of " The Missing Shade of Blue " . In this thought-experiment, he asks us to imagine a man who has experienced every shade of blue except for one (see Fig. 1). He predicts that this man will be able to divine the color of this particular shade of blue, despite

15622-435: The opinions, not of Hume, but of one of Hume's anonymous friends, who again presents them in an imagined speech by the philosopher Epicurus . His friend argues that, though it is possible to trace a cause from an effect , it is not possible to infer unseen effects from a cause thus traced. The friend insists, then, that even though we might postulate that there is a first cause behind all things—God—we can't infer anything about

15768-470: The perception that there can be any value added by seeking supernatural explanations for natural phenomena . James' "radical empiricism" is thus not radical in the context of the term "empiricism", but is instead fairly consistent with the modern use of the term " empirical ". His method of argument in arriving at this view, however, still readily encounters debate within philosophy even today. John Dewey (1859–1952) modified James' pragmatism to form

15914-572: The powers of the will. (Hume 1974:361) Here Hume tackles the problem of how liberty may be reconciled with metaphysical necessity (otherwise known as a compatibilist formulation of free will ). Hume believes that all disputes on the subject have been merely verbal arguments—that is to say, arguments which are based on a lack of prior agreement on definitions. He first shows that it is clear that most events are deterministic, but human actions are more controversial. However, he thinks that these too occur out of necessity since an outside observer can see

16060-416: The pragmatic values of such experience. The value of such experience is measured experientially and scientifically, and the results of such tests generate ideas that serve as instruments for future experimentation, in physical sciences as in ethics. Thus, ideas in Dewey's system retain their empiricist flavour in that they are only known a posteriori . Analytic%E2%80%93synthetic distinction While

16206-432: The previous examples classified as analytic propositions, each of these new statements is an affirmative subject–predicate judgment. However, in none of these cases does the subject concept contain the predicate concept. The concept "bachelor" does not contain the concept "alone"; "alone" is not a part of the definition of "bachelor". The same is true for "creatures with hearts" and "have kidneys"; even if every creature with

16352-433: The primary intension watery stuff then the secondary intension of "water" is H 2 O, since H 2 O is watery stuff in this world. The secondary intension of "water" in our world is H 2 O, which is H 2 O in every world because unlike watery stuff it is impossible for H 2 O to be other than H 2 O. When considered according to its secondary intension, "Water is H 2 O" is true in every world. If two-dimensionalism

16498-433: The primary intension of "water" could have been otherwise. For example, on some other world where the inhabitants take "water" to mean watery stuff , but, where the chemical make-up of watery stuff is not H 2 O, it is not the case that water is H 2 O for that world. The secondary intension of "water" is whatever thing "water" happens to pick out in this world, whatever that world happens to be. So if we assign "water"

16644-410: The proposition "It is raining or it is not raining" was classified as analytic, while for Kant it was analytic by virtue of its logical form. And the proposition " 7 + 5 = 12 " was classified as analytic, while under Kant's definitions it was synthetic. Two-dimensionalism is an approach to semantics in analytic philosophy . It is a theory of how to determine the sense and reference of a word and

16790-705: The relative influence of communicator credibility in different kinds of persuasion; and examinations of the trustworthiness of the speaker. The "custom" view of learning can in many ways be likened to associationist psychology. This point of view has been subject to severe criticism in the research of the 20th century. Still, testing on the subject has been somewhat divided. Testing on certain animals like cats have concluded that they do not possess any faculty which allow their minds to grasp an insight into cause and effect. However, it has been shown that some animals, like chimpanzees, were able to generate creative plans of action to achieve their goals, and thus would seem to have

16936-634: The role of habit in a theory of knowledge, are retained. This book has proven highly influential, both in the years that would immediately follow and today. Immanuel Kant points to it as the book which woke him from his self-described "dogmatic slumber." The Enquiry is widely regarded as a classic in modern philosophical literature. The argument of the Enquiry proceeds by a series of incremental steps, separated into chapters which logically succeed one another. After expounding his epistemology , Hume explains how to apply his principles to specific topics. In

17082-442: The role that testimony plays a part in epistemology . This was not an idle concern for Hume. Depending on its outcome, the entire treatment would give the epistemologist a degree of certitude in the treatment of miracles. True to his empirical thesis, Hume tells the reader that, though testimony does have some force, it is never quite as powerful as the direct evidence of the senses. That said, he provides some reasons why we may have

17228-410: The same regularity that he would in a purely physical system. To show the compatibility of necessity and liberty, Hume defines liberty as the ability to act on the basis of one's will e.g. the capacity to will one's actions but not to will one's will. He then shows (quite briefly) how determinism and free will are compatible notions, and have no bad consequences on ethics or moral life. Hume insists that

17374-428: The satisfaction of the condition of the presence of a normal observer. According to phenomenalism, to say that a normal observer is present is to make the hypothetical statement that were a doctor to inspect the observer, the observer would appear to the doctor to be normal. But, of course, the doctor himself must be a normal observer. If we are to specify this doctor's normality in sensory terms, we must make reference to

17520-456: The senses, and in the philosophy of mind it is often contrasted with innatism , which holds that some knowledge and ideas are already present in the mind at birth. However, many Enlightenment rationalists and empiricists still made concessions to each other. For example, the empiricist John Locke admitted that some knowledge (e.g. knowledge of God's existence) could be arrived at through intuition and reasoning alone. Similarly, Robert Boyle ,

17666-441: The sensory information we can perceive from its primary qualities. For example, an apple can be perceived in various colours, sizes, and textures but it is still identified as an apple. Therefore, its primary qualities dictate what the object essentially is, while its secondary qualities define its attributes. Complex ideas combine simple ones, and divide into substances, modes, and relations. According to Locke, our knowledge of things

17812-436: The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides") are examples of the first, while propositions involving some contingent observation of the world (e.g. "the sun rises in the East") are examples of the second. All of people's "ideas", in turn, are derived from their "impressions". For Hume, an "impression" corresponds roughly with what we call a sensation. To remember or to imagine such impressions

17958-478: The subject and "extract from it, in accordance with the principle of contradiction, the required predicate" (B12). In analytic propositions, the predicate concept is contained in the subject concept. Thus, to know an analytic proposition is true, one need merely examine the concept of the subject. If one finds the predicate contained in the subject, the judgment is true. Thus, for example, one need not consult experience to determine whether "All bachelors are unmarried"

18104-447: The thesis of empiricism only for factual truth. By contrast, the truths of logic and mathematics are not in need of confirmation by observations, because they do not state anything about the world of facts, they hold for any possible combination of facts. Thus the logical positivists drew a new distinction, and, inheriting the terms from Kant, named it the "analytic-synthetic distinction". They provided many different definitions, such as

18250-423: The time Mill wrote, fall under the agreed meaning of induction . The phenomenalist phase of post-Humean empiricism ended by the 1940s, for by that time it had become obvious that statements about physical things could not be translated into statements about actual and possible sense data. If a physical object statement is to be translatable into a sense-data statement, the former must be at least deducible from

18396-441: The tradition of empiricism , he argues that impressions are the source of all ideas. Hume accepts that ideas may be either the product of mere sensation or of the imagination working in conjunction with sensation. According to Hume, the creative faculty makes use of (at least) four mental operations that produce imaginings out of sense-impressions. These operations are compounding (or the addition of one idea onto another, such as

18542-410: The truth than purely using logical reasoning , because humans have cognitive biases and limitations which lead to errors of judgement. Empiricism emphasizes the central role of empirical evidence in the formation of ideas, rather than innate ideas or traditions . Empiricists may argue that traditions (or customs) arise due to relations of previous sensory experiences. Historically, empiricism

18688-449: The unsettling possibility that the "gap-filling entities are purely possibilities and not actualities at all". Thirdly, Mill's position, by calling mathematics merely another species of inductive inference, misapprehends mathematics. It fails to fully consider the structure and method of mathematical science , the products of which are arrived at through an internally consistent deductive set of procedures which do not, either today or at

18834-411: The various sorts of connections that exist between ideas. However, he does not immediately show what this principle might be. (Hume 1974:320-321) In the first part, Hume discusses how the objects of inquiry are either "relations of ideas" or "matters of fact", which is roughly the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions . The former, he tells the reader, are proved by demonstration, while

18980-426: The viewer considers possible in accord with the viewer's experience. However, further experience takes these equal chances, and forces the imagination to observe that certain chances arise more frequently than others. These gentle forces upon the imagination cause the viewer to have strong beliefs in outcomes. This effect may be understood as another case of custom or habit taking past experience and using it to predict

19126-497: The words "white paper") on which experience leaves marks. This denies that humans have innate ideas . The notion dates back to Aristotle , c.  350 BC : What the mind ( nous ) thinks must be in it in the same sense as letters are on a tablet ( grammateion ) which bears no actual writing ( grammenon ); this is just what happens in the case of the mind. (Aristotle, On the Soul , 3.4.430 1). Aristotle's explanation of how this

19272-400: The words, is taken to express two distinct propositions , often referred to as a primary intension and a secondary intension , which together compose its meaning . The primary intension of a word or sentence is its sense , i.e., is the idea or method by which we find its referent. The primary intension of "water" might be a description, such as watery stuff . The thing picked out by

19418-625: The work of Irvin Rock on indirect perception . Around the beginning of the 20th century, William James (1842–1910) coined the term " radical empiricism " to describe an offshoot of his form of pragmatism, which he argued could be dealt with separately from his pragmatism—though in fact the two concepts are intertwined in James's published lectures. James maintained that the empirically observed "directly apprehended universe needs ... no extraneous trans-empirical connective support", by which he meant to rule out

19564-440: The world because of habit or custom , which human nature forces us to take seriously. This is also, presumably, the "principle" that organizes the connections between ideas. Indeed, one of the many famous passages of the Enquiry is on the topic of the incorrigibility of human custom. In Section XII, Of the academical or sceptical philosophy , Hume will argue, In the second part, he provides an account of beliefs. He explains that

19710-788: The world which - while they ultimately are philosophically justifiable - may only be combated through the non-philosophical adherence to custom or habit. He ends the section with his own reservations towards Cartesian and Lockean epistemologies. In the second section he returns to the topic of hard skepticism by sharply denouncing it. He concludes the volume by setting out the limits of knowledge once and for all. " When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to

19856-420: The world: He shows how a satisfying argument for the validity of experience can be based neither on demonstration (since "it implies no contradiction that the course of nature may change") nor experience (since that would be a circular argument ). (Hume 1974:330-332) Here he is describing what would become known as the problem of induction . According to Hume, we assume that experience tells us something about

20002-499: Was esperimento . It is known that he was the essential pedagogical influence upon the young Galileo, his eldest son (cf. Coelho, ed. Music and Science in the Age of Galileo Galilei ), arguably one of the most influential empiricists in history. Vincenzo, through his tuning research, found the underlying truth at the heart of the misunderstood myth of ' Pythagoras' hammers ' (the square of the numbers concerned yielded those musical intervals, not

20148-455: Was a strong proponent of the distinction between what he called "internal questions", questions entertained within a "framework" (like a mathematical theory), and "external questions", questions posed outside any framework – posed before the adoption of any framework. The "internal" questions could be of two types: logical (or analytic, or logically true) and factual (empirical, that is, matters of observation interpreted using terms from

20294-553: Was an early 20th-century attempt to synthesize the essential ideas of British empiricism (e.g. a strong emphasis on sensory experience as the basis for knowledge) with certain insights from mathematical logic that had been developed by Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein . Some of the key figures in this movement were Otto Neurath , Moritz Schlick and the rest of the Vienna Circle , along with A. J. Ayer , Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach . The neopositivists subscribed to

20440-409: Was associated with the " blank slate " concept ( tabula rasa ), according to which the human mind is "blank" at birth and develops its thoughts only through later experience. Empiricism in the philosophy of science emphasizes evidence, especially as discovered in experiments . It is a fundamental part of the scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of

20586-521: Was considered to give a more important position to sense perception than Plato , and commentators in the Middle Ages summarized one of his positions as " nihil in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu " (Latin for "nothing in the intellect without first being in the senses"). This idea was later developed in ancient philosophy by the Stoic school, from about 330 BCE. Stoic epistemology generally emphasizes that

20732-594: Was disappointed with the reception of the Treatise , which "fell dead-born from the press," as he put it, and so tried again to disseminate his more developed ideas to the public by writing a shorter and more polemical work. The end product of his labours was the Enquiry . The Enquiry dispensed with much of the material from the Treatise , in favor of clarifying and emphasizing its most important aspects. For example, Hume's views on personal identity do not appear. However, more vital propositions, such as Hume's argument for

20878-409: Was highly influential in laying the groundwork for today's empirical scientific method . Although Peirce severely criticized many elements of Descartes' peculiar brand of rationalism, he did not reject rationalism outright. Indeed, he concurred with the main ideas of rationalism, most importantly the idea that rational concepts can be meaningful and the idea that rational concepts necessarily go beyond

21024-809: Was not used by Carnap in his 1950 work Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology . Carnap did define a "synthetic truth" in his work Meaning and Necessity : a sentence that is true, but not simply because "the semantical rules of the system suffice for establishing its truth". The notion of a synthetic truth is of something that is true both because of what it means and because of the way the world is, whereas analytic truths are true in virtue of meaning alone. Thus, what Carnap calls internal factual statements (as opposed to internal logical statements) could be taken as being also synthetic truths because they require observations , but some external statements also could be "synthetic" statements and Carnap would be doubtful about their status. The analytic–synthetic argument therefore

21170-447: Was possible was not strictly empiricist in a modern sense, but rather based on his theory of potentiality and actuality , and experience of sense perceptions still requires the help of the active nous . These notions contrasted with Platonic notions of the human mind as an entity that pre-existed somewhere in the heavens, before being sent down to join a body on Earth (see Plato's Phaedo and Apology , as well as others). Aristotle

21316-417: Was the doubt that his skeptical arguments cast on the legitimacy of inductive reasoning, allowing many skeptics who followed to cast similar doubt. Most of Hume's followers have disagreed with his conclusion that belief in an external world is rationally unjustifiable, contending that Hume's own principles implicitly contained the rational justification for such a belief, that is, beyond being content to let

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