Abstract
What is empiricism? There can be no authoritative answer to any such question. A historian of philosophy can at best try to call what is common to philosophers who either identified themselves, or have traditionally been identified, as empiricists. But what has set those philosophers apart from others, and especially from those whom they criticized, may not be captured in common views or doctrines. The historian may, in trying to fix the label, rely tacitly on a view of what philosophical positions are and how they are to be identified. Finally, it is typical of philosophers who decide to range themselves under some pre-existing banner (“empiricism”, “pragmatism”, “phenomenology”) to change the very philosophy they take on, as much as did their historical heroes in their day. I will here try to give a sustained argument about what empiricism cannot be, and then enter upon a tentative exploration of what it should be (taken to be).
In his 1986 Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association, Professor Kockelmans challenged me, in effect, to confront the metaphysics implicit in empiricism. This challenge was further elucidated in our subsequent correspondence. In response, I have been trying to re-develop empiricism self--critically so as to meet his challenge. The present paper has as companion my “Against Naturalized Empiricism”, but is self-contained. It is appropriate for me here to acknowledge my great debt to Professor Kockelmans, whose writings I read already in Dutch when I was an undergraduate, with no idea at all that I would ever meet the author. To my good fortune, I not only met him but was able to take two seminars he gave at the University of Pittsburgh when I was a graduate student there. I owe much to his erudition and his gentle questing spirit; for the past three years I have again been struggling with problems he posed for me.
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Notes
This section contains two lines of argument for a common conclusion. The first I have previously presented in my “Carnap on Logic and Ontology” (unpublished ms. of 1991), and the second in my “Against Naturalized Empiricism,” in P. Leonardi and M. Santambrogio, eds. On Quine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
For a critique of historical empiricism by a contemporary empiricist, see Reichenbach’s “Rationalism and Empiricism: An Inquiry into the Roots of Philosophical Error,” in H. Reichenbach, Modern Philosophy of Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959).
A fourth example is the assertion: if mathematics is not the true description of a platonic realm of abstract entities, and also does not just consist of logical tautologies, then you can’t explain why it is useful for science.
See my “Empiricism in the Philosophy of Science,” in P.M. Churchland and C.A. Hooker, eds., Images of Science: Essays on Realism and Empiricism, with a Reply by Bas C. van Fraassen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 245–308.
See my “Against Naturalized Empiricism.”
This is not nearly enough for a good argument, and I refer to “Against Naturalized Empiricism” for the version of this argument which I consider adequate.
The word stance has been given recent currency in analytic philosophy by Daniel Dennett’s use of the term (“intentional stance,” “physical stance”) and I believe that my usage here is consonant with his very suggestive exploitation of that term. See especially D. Dennett, “Intentional Systems,” Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971), pp. 87–106; and, by the same author, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). In the English translation of Husserl’s Ideen I, the term is “standpoint,” with “orientation” reserved for spatial perspective (for example, section 150).
E. Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. W.P. Alston and G. Nakhnikian (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964). These lectures were given by Husserl in Göttingen in 1907.
Ibid. p. 15.
Ibid. p. 15.
Ibid. p. 15.
Compare Joseph J. Kockelmans, Phenomenology and Physical Science (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1966), chapters nine and ten.
I have made a start in this in my “Belief and Will,” Journal of Philosophy 81 (1984), pp. 235–56, and gone somewhat further in by “Belief and the Problem of Ulysses and the Sirens,” Philosophical Studies, forthcoming. But these are tentative, first steps.
See my “Empiricism in the Philosophy of Science,” for a critique of the approach to methodology which attempts to ground it in belief in the conditions of its adequacy. I regard this as an often instantiated recipe for disaster in epistemology
By psychological discourse I do not mean only descriptions of ‘mental’ states and events; I mean discourse in which concepts of persons and personal agency and/or their cognates are expressed. The word “game” for example belongs to such discourse and not to physical discourse. Epistemology is entirely carried on within psychological discourse, in this sense.
Empiricism does involve the view, I think, that when a scientific theory is accepted, that involves a belief of just that sort.
See also my “The World of Empiricism,” forthcoming in the proceedings of the Erasmus Foundation Conference on Science in the Modern World, 1992.
Analogue: being truly religious necessarily involves a skeptical attitude toward all extant religious institutions and to any intellectual scheme in human hands.
This is ambiguous: while e.g. “All swans ever to exist, past, present and future, are white” goes beyond any evidence we could have at any point in time, it does not go beyond checkable facts about observable things.
A misgiving not exactly defused by scientific realists: see Paul Churchland, Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). See further my review thereof in Canadian Journal of Philosophy 11 (1981), pp. 555–67; and my “On the Radical Incompleteness of the Manifest Image (Comments on Sellars),” Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association [1976], Volume II, eds. F. Suppe and P. Asquith (East Lansing, Mich: Philosophy of Science Association, 1977), pp. 335–43.
F.H. Bradley, Principles of Logic, 2nd edition, 2 volumes (London: Oxford University Press, 1922), vol. III, chapter 2, section iv.
It is very important not to confuse “I believe that X, on the supposition that A” with “I would believe that X, if A (or: if I came to believe that A).” The conditionality of propositional attitudes is in general irreducible to construals in terms of unconditional propositional attitudes.
It should be added of course that I can have this attitude while also regarding the scientific approach as limited in scope (in a way that is certainly connected to the accordion-like character of the word “factual”).
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van Fraassen, B.C. (1994). Against Transcendental Empiricism. In: Stapleton, T.J. (eds) The Question of Hermeneutics. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1160-7_13
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