What is empirical knowledge? Justify its objectivity with the help of suitable examples.
Course: Philosophy of Education
Course code 8609
Course code 8609
Level: B.Ed Solved Assignment
ANSWER
Empirical Knowledge
Epistemology has many branches and includes essentialism, historical perspective, perennials, progressivism, empiricism, idealism, rationalism, constructivism, and others. Empiricism and rationalism can be specified as the two major constructing debates within the field of epistemological study. Empiricism accepts personal experiences associated with observation, feelings, and senses as a valid source of knowledge, whereas rationalism relies on empirical findings gained through valid and reliable measures as a source of knowledge. Empirical knowledge relies on objective facts that have been established and can be demonstrated.
The empirical knowledge is an attempt to discover a basis for our knowledge in the sense of experience. In other words, empirical knowledge is the type that finds recourse or is confirmed by the evidence of sensory experience. It is thus derived from the use of the five senses since knowledge can only be acquired from the experience of seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, and tasting. It is the evidence of the senses that gives meaning to empirical knowledge since the senses, according to the empiricists, are the source and originator of our knowledge. The thrust of the empiricists as regards knowledge is that there is no knowledge before sense experience and there can be no knowledge outside sense experience. Since empirical knowledge is fundamentally rooted in sense experience, it stands to reason that observation and experimentation will also be basic to empirical knowledge.
Empiricists hold that all of our knowledge is ultimately derived from our senses or our experiences. They therefore deny the existence of innate knowledge, i.e. knowledge that we possess from birth. Empiricism fits well with the scientific worldview that places an emphasis on experimentation and observation. It struggles, however, to account for certain types of knowledge, e.g. knowledge of pure mathematics or ethics.
Empirical knowledge is knowledge of such facts as one may meet in experience. These are always particular and may be of many kinds, including such as needing a lot of training or some apparatus to experience them.
This doctrine states that experience is the primary source of all human knowledge. For that, it relies on the assertion that when human beings are deprived of various kinds of experiences, they do not know any truth, regardless of its clarity. This shows that human beings are born without any innate knowledge. They begin their awareness and knowledge as soon as they begin their practical lives. Their knowledge widens as their experiences widen, and their knowledge becomes varied in kind as their experiences take on different forms.
The empiricists do not admit necessary rational knowledge before experience. Rather, they consider experience as the only basis of sound judgment and the general criterion in every field. Even those judgments that the rational doctrine alleges to be necessary knowledge must, [according to the empiricists], be subject to the empirical criterion, and must be admitted following the determination of experience. This is because human beings do not have any judgment whose confirmation does not require experience.
This results in the following:
First, the power of human thinking is delimited by the limits of the empirical field; so that, any metaphysical investigation or study of metaphysical issues becomes useless. [In this, the empirical doctrine] is exactly the contrary of the rational doctrine. Second, the movement of thought progresses in a way contrary to the manner asserted by the rational doctrine. Thus, whereas the rational doctrine asserts that a thought always moves from what is general to what is particular, the empiricists assert that it moves from what is particular to what is general; that is, from the narrow limits of experiments to universal laws and principles. It always progresses from the empirical particular truth to the absolute truth. The general laws and universal principles that human beings have are nothing but the result of experiences. The consequence of this is a progression of induction from individual things to a discovery of general objective truths.
For this reason, the empirical doctrine relies on the inductive method in [its] search for evidence and in thinking, since this method ascends from the particular to the universal.
The natural sciences, which the empiricists seek to establish based on pure experimentation, are themselves in need of primary rational principles that are before experimentation. This is because the scientist carries out his experiment in his laboratory on limited objective particulars. Then he puts forward a theory for explaining the phenomena that the experiment in the laboratory had disclosed, and for justifying them by one common cause. This is exemplified in the theory that states that the cause of heat is motion, based on several experiments interpreted in this way. It is our right to ask the natural scientist about how he offers this theory as a universal law applicable to all circumstances resembling those of the experiment, even though the experiment did not apply except to several specific things. Is it, not the case, then, that this generalization is based on a principle stating that similar circumstances and things alike in kind and reality must share in-laws (p. 83) and decrees? Here, once again, we inquire about how the mind reached this principle. The empiricists cannot claim that it is an empirical principle. Rather, it must be a piece of rational knowledge that is before experimentation. The reason is that if it were supported by experimentation, then the experimentation on which this principle is based also, in turn, treats only specific subjects. How, then, can a general principle be based on it? Thus, the establishment of a general principle or a universal law in light of one or more experiments cannot be accomplished except after admitting prior rational knowledge.
With this, it becomes clear that all the empirical theories in the natural sciences are based on several pieces of rational knowledge that are not subject to experimentation. Rather, the mind accepts them immediately. Although there is great value in experience for humanity and the extent of its service in the fields of knowledge. However, experiments are not the primary criterion and the fundamental source of human thought and knowledge.
The seed of the positivist school in philosophy germinated during the nineteenth century, in which the empirical tendency prevailed. Thus, this school developed under the auspices of this empirical tendency.
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