The Gaps in Empiricism

Abstract

Empiricism has engendered many different ideas, from the naive concepts of knowledge as a copy of reality, to the more refined forms of “functional copy” (Hull’s behaviorism) to logical positivism, which aims at reducing scientific knowledge exclusively to physical experience and to language. If we look for common factors in these diverse approaches we find a central idea: the function of cognitive mechanisms is to submit to reality, copying its features as closely as possible, so that they may produce a reproduction which differs as little as possible from external reality. This idea of empiricism implies that reality can be reduced to its observable features and that knowledge must limit itself to transcribing these features.