ABSTRACT
A very general philosophical term referring to the acquisition of knowledge by experience of the external world as opposed to reasoning or logic alone. Closely identified with associationism in the work of the British School of empiricist philosophy from John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) to James Mill’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829), although one can be an empiricist without being an associationist. Philosophical theories of knowledge, a topic known as epistemology, have long been somewhat crudely classified as empiricist or rationalist. Science in general is an empirical enterprise but the respective weightings of, as it were, thought or reasoning and ‘empirical evidence’ has varied. Einstein’s theory of relativity was virtually arrived at by mathematical reasoning and ‘thought experiments’ alone and only subsequently empirically confirmed. In Psychology, the issue arises regarding the roles of subjective experience, reasoning and introspection as opposed to empirical data-gathering in research and theory construction. Strong empiricism also, however, produces primarily environmentalist Psychological theories, such as behaviourism. The phrase ‘crude empiricism’ is commonly encountered in criticisms of approaches in which the role of reasoning or theorising is minimised or rejected.
