Empiricism

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EMPIRICISM

EMPIRICISM is best understood not as a single doctrine but as a cluster of theses, each of which affirms the primacy of human experience in the general area of epistemology. As used here, the term experience refers primarily to sense experience, but it must also be extended to cover introspective experience. Insofar as other types of awarenesses, such as feeling states, pains, pangs, and so forth, are not already included in one of these categories, they too should be separately included in the general class of experiences. Following are discussions of three theses usually associated with empiricism. The first two have had considerable impact on the history of Christian theology; the third has not.

The first thesis is that ideas are derived entirely from experience. For example, the idea of red is derived entirely from experiences of red things—in this case visual sense perceptions or impressions of red objects. A complex idea such as the idea of a desk or of a unicorn may be derived directly from complex sense impressions (e.g., perceptions of desks), or may be constructed out of other ideas that are, in turn, derived entirely from sense impressions. Assuming, for instance, that no one has ever seen (i.e., had a complex sense impression of) a unicorn, still there are no elements of this idea that are not themselves derived from sense impressions.

That ideas have their origin in perception is a view worked out in some detail by Epicurus (341–270 bce) in his work On Nature. It is also a thesis held by Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologiae 1.84.3, 6, 7) who in turn claimed to find it in Aristotle. As a doctrine of importance in modern philosophy, however, it is identified primarily with the classical British empirical tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as represented in the epistemological writings of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. In contrast to the doctrine of innate ideas held by Descartes and other so-called rationalists, such as Leibniz, Locke insisted that all ideas are derived from experience. In its original state, Locke said, the mind is a blank tablet (tabula rasa) and, as such, does not possess ideas. Ideas are acquired either as a result of the operation of the sense faculties (the idea of red); or as a result of the mind's operation on the data supplied by the sense faculties (the idea of a unicorn); or as a result of introspection (what Locke called "inner sense"), observing the mind as it operates on materials supplied by the sense faculties (for instance, the idea of mind).

In Hume, the claim that all ideas are derived entirely from impressions served as the cornerstone of his empirical theory of meaning. Hume held that a word has meaning only when it is (to use his phrase) "annexed" to an idea. A term's specific meaning can be decided only by consulting the content of the idea annexed to it. But because, as Hume claimed, the content of any given idea is completely determined by the impressions from which it is derived, the meaning of a given word can be exhaustively analyzed by itemizing the impressions from which the idea annexed to that word is derived. Hume relied on this theory of meaning when he dismissed as meaningless a host of traditional metaphysical items such as the Aristotelian doctrine of substratum. With respect to the latter, Hume argued that because one has no impression of substratum, one has no such idea; thus the operative term used by metaphysicians when formulating this doctrine is without meaning. An argument of this sort was used to establish virtually all the doctrines usually associated with Hume's "skeptical" philosophy—for instance, his well-known analysis of "causation" and his highly controversial analysis of "mind."

In Alciphron, one of his last major works, Berkeley reviewed with approval a theory concerning the origin of the idea of God. According to the theory in question, the idea of God is a complex having as ingredients ideas generated from one's experience of creatures. Thus, for example, the idea of a being who has knowledge is derived from one's experience of finite beings like one's self. Though one does not have any direct experience of the perfect case, one can construct the idea of perfect knowledge by imagining away the imperfections (e.g., limited scope) that invariably attach to knowledge in imperfect cases. This provides the idea of omniscience, the exemplary version of knowledge. Ideas of the other so-called perfections standardly attributed to God (omnipotence, eternity, etc.) are derived by a similar process from the ideas one has of attributes possessed by finite beings. Berkeley said that this account of the idea of God is precisely the one given by Thomas Aquinas and developed by the Schoolmen under the title "analogy by proportionality." This interpretation of Thomas's doctrine of analogy is supported by a number of contemporary commentators as well (e.g., Copleston, History of Philosophy, vol. 2, chap. 38). It is an account that fits well both with Berkeley's and with Thomas's general empiricist stance concerning the origin of ideas.

Perhaps the most provocative empiricist account of the ideas operative in the area of religion is the one advanced by Friedrich Schleiermacher in The Christian Faith (1830) and subsequently expanded by his student Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy (1917), which no doubt is the most influential study in the phenomenology of religion published in the twentieth century. According to Otto, the idea of God is derived from a complex "nonrational" (i.e., preconceptual) awareness that he referred to as "the experience of the Numen." Otto undertook to show how this primitive awareness is (as he said) "schematized" (i.e., conceptualized) in standard theological doctrines that give expression to its various ingredient feelings. Following Schleiermacher, Otto insisted that the content of the concept of God is determined by the preconceptual religious phenomena of which that concept is the schematization. Although this theory differs from the one given by Berkeley, it clearly reflects the influence of classical empiricist thought. Framed in the language of Locke or Hume, the claim is made that the idea of God comes directly from religious experiences. Berkeley (and Thomas) would disagree only with respect to the claim that the experiences in question are of a specifically religious nature.

The second thesis associated with empiricism is that human knowledge concerning matters of fact is grounded ultimately in experience. Because there is a distinction between an idea (e.g., the idea of red) and a statement (e.g., "Apples are red"), and because knowledge is formulated in statements, one must distinguish a theory concerning the origin of ideas from a theory concerning the source of knowledge. Unlike the former, the latter specifies conditions under which it can be legitimately claimed that a statement is true. These are conditions under which a knowledge claim is warranted. According to this second thesis, whatever may be the origin of one's ideas, one's knowledge of facts about the world is formulated in statements supported entirely by empirical evidence. This claim stands opposed to one made by Kant (and a number of other modern and medieval thinkers such as Descartes and Thomas Aquinas), namely, that some statements that describe facts about the world (e.g., "Every event has a cause") are known to be true a priori, that is, prior to or independent of experience. Such statements are sometimes described as self-evident. The empiricist's claim is that all factual knowledge is, by contrast, a posteriori, that is, posterior to and consequent upon experience. No factual statement is self-evident, if this means that the statement in question can be known to be true without consulting observational evidence.

It is important to note that the thesis just reviewed is explicitly restricted to knowledge about the world, that is, to knowledge of what Hume called "matters of fact." It is thus not extended to knowledge formulated in what Kant labeled "analytic" statements, that is, to statements whose truth values depend entirely on word meanings. As regards these latter statements, empiricists acknowledge that they are a priori. They add, however, that such statements are empty of factual content. This is to say that, while a priori statements may reveal something about the way one uses words or about what Hume referred to as "relations between ideas," they reveal nothing about the objects or circumstances to which these words presumably refer or to which one's ideas presumably correspond. This dichotomy between the factual a posteriori and the analytic a priori remains to this day a point of embarrassment for empiricists. The problem is not that the distinction is unintelligible or inapplicable, but rather that some knowledge statements do not fit comfortably into either class. As mentioned above, Kant thought that the statement "Every event has a cause" is of the kind last mentioned. He also thought that mathematical knowledge such as that formulated in the statement "2 + 3 = 5" defies classification in either of these categories.

The idea that knowledge about the world is grounded in experience is the hallmark of what is usually thought of as the "scientific" mentality. As such, it is antithetical to the traditional Christian insistence that revelation is the ultimate source of the factual knowledge codified in theological doctrine. Still, in the three centuries that have elapsed since the publication of Newton's Principles, Christian theology has exhibited some affection for the scientific style of theory construction. Largely inspired by the theological writings of Newton, eighteenth-century England was crowded with advocates of what Hume called "experimental theism," that is, theism entertained as a hypothesis and supported by reference to evidence provided by the appearance of design in nature. This trend stood in contrast to medieval methods for proving the existence of God by purely a priori considerations, as in Anselm's ontological argument, or by arguments making use of a priori (self-evident) factual premises such as the first three of Thomas's five proofs for the existence of God. Theism cast as a scientific theory and supported by the abductive logical procedures characteristic of the natural sciences reached its climax in the nineteenth century in William Paley's monumental work Natural Theology (1825). Although this approach to Christian apologetics is still practiced (witness Robert Clark's The Universe: Plan or Accident, Oxford, 1961), it is not widely held to be effective. A great many contemporary philosophers of religion think that Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) constitutes the definitive critique of theism as an explanatory hypothesis.

The third thesis associated with empiricism is that factual statements are meaningful only insofar as they are verifiable. If one assumes that all knowledge concerning matters of fact is ultimately grounded in experience, it follows that, except for statements whose truth values can be determined by reference to the meanings of the terms they employ, any statement known to be true is so only because it has been verified by experience. Given the same exclusion, it follows that, insofar as a statement affirms something knowable, to that extent it affirms something verifiable. Anything that cannot be verified cannot be known. Let a second assumption now be made, namely, that a statement is meaningful insofar, but only insofar, as it has a discoverable truth value. Restricting attention to statements whose truth values cannot be determined by reference to the meanings of their constituent words, this second assumption reveals that all meaningful statements affirm something that is knowable. This is so because, for any meaningful statement that is not contradictory (in which case its truth value can indeed be determined by reference to the meanings of its constituent words), there is some possible world in which it is true and in which it has been discovered (i.e., is known) to be true. It is, then, in principle knowable. But if a given statement is in principle knowable, then, by one's first assumption, it is also in principle verifiable. By this sequence of reasonings, the second empiricist thesis discussed above yields the following theory: The meaning of any statement whose truth value cannot be determined by reference to the meanings of its constituent words consists entirely of its empirically verifiable content. Of course, given this theory, any statement about the world for which no verifying observations could in principle be specified would not count as a genuine statement: it would be devoid of meaning. This is because according to the principle before us, any purported statement about the world is meaningful only to the extent that it is empirically verifiable.

This last principle, usually referred to as the verifiability principle, became the centerpiece of empiricism—called logical empiricism or more often logical positivism—during the second quarter of the twentieth century. It is important to see that it connects not only with the second of the empiricist theses treated above (as indicated in the last paragraph), but with the first as well. Here, for the second time, one is confronted with a theory of meaning. Of course the verifiability principle is not the same as the theory used by Hume. In fact, it differs on two counts: (1) it takes statements rather than individual words as the meaningful units; and (2) it requires empirical consequences rather than antecedently acquired empirical ideas as the conditions of meaning. Still, the verifiability principle is a recognizable cousin of Hume's empirical theory of meaning. It was also utilized by positivists such as A. J. Ayer, in a characteristically Humean program, to dismiss as meaningless a whole range of traditional metaphysical doctrines. At its height, positivism dominated the philosophical community, influencing as well trends in psychology (behaviorism) and in the physical sciences (operationalism). Burdened, however, by its own inability to provide a version of the verifiability principle acceptable to philosophers of science, at the end of the 1950s this theory vanished quite abruptly from the philosophical scene. It is now dead—or at least as dead as any philosophical theory can be.

As for the impact of logical positivism on theology or on religious studies more generally, there is little to say. That there exists a transcendent being who created the universe is one of the metaphysical doctrines that positivists typically dismissed as meaningless. Of course this was not atheism, if one understands atheism to be the view that God does not exist, that is, that the statement "God exists" is false. To have a truth value—that is, to be either true or false—a statement must have meaning. For positivists, the words "God exists"—being, as A. J. Ayer used to say "nonsensical"—simply did not have credentials enough to be false. As yet few (if any) religious thinkers have found this position worthy of serious attention.

Bibliography

Ayer, A. J. Language, Truth and Logic. 2d ed. London, 1946. See also Logical Positivism (Glencoe, Ill., 1959), edited by Ayer, which contains essays by most leading positivists such as Carnap, Neurath, Schlick, and Ayer himself. It also contains essays by other important twentieth-century empiricists such as Russell and Stevenson. The bibliography is amazingly complete.

Epicurus. On Nature. In Epicurus: The Extant Remains, translated by Cyril Bailey. Oxford, 1926.

Paley, William. Natural Theology (1802). Edited by Frederick Ferré. Indianapolis, 1963.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. The Christian Faith. Translated from the second German edition. New York, 1963. Schleiermacher's best-known student and disciple was Rudolf Otto, whose study of the nature of religious experience in Das Heilige (Breslau, 1917), translated by John W. Harvey as The Idea of the Holy, 2d ed. (1950; New York, 1970), is a modern classic in religious studies.

Taylor, Richard, ed. The Empiricists. Garden City, N.Y., 1974. Contains a handy collection of the writings of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Unfortunately, Taylor's text does not include Hume's Treatise, which is available in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3d ed., edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1975).

Thomas Aquinas. "Treatise on Man," Summa theologiae 1.75–89. In Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, edited by Anton C. Pegis. New York, 1945. Helpful studies of Thomas's theory of knowledge and philosophy of mind can be found in Frederick C. Copleston's History of Philosophy, vol. 2 (Westminster, Md., 1952), chapter 38; and in chapter 4 of Copleston's Aquinas (Baltimore, 1967).