Empiricism Quotes:

Metaphysics must be based on what exists, for it has the task of explicating it.

- Franz Grillparzer

topic: Tasks, Metaphysics, Empiricism

Only he who finds empiricism irksome is driven to method.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

topic: Driven, Method, Empiricism

Yes, I know liberals are more empirical because Jonathan Chait says they are, but my empirical studies of liberal empiricism keep spitting out contradictory findings.

- Jonah Goldberg

topic: Study, Contradictory, Empiricism

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

- George Santayana

topic: Experience, Conclusion, Draws, Drawing Conclusions, Empiricism

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

- William James

source: William James (1976). “Essays in Radical Empiricism”, p.22, Harvard University Press

topic: Elements, Construction, Radical, Empiricism

Relaxed Empiricism -- I only believe something to be true if someone I know quite well tells me if happened.

- Bill Bailey

topic: Believe, Quitting, Being True, Empiricism

Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.

- E. O. Wilson

source: "E.O. Wilson Is on Top of the World". Interview with Jill Neimark, www.psychologytoday.com. September 1, 1998.

topic: Heart, Winning, Mind, Empiricism

"We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" in a draft of the Declaration of Independence changes it instead into an assertion of rationality. The scientific mind of Franklin drew on the scientific determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of David Hume and Gottfried Leibniz. In what became known as "Hume's Fork" the latters' theory distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact, and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition.

- Benjamin Franklin

topic: Empiricism, Determinism, Assertion, Synthetic, Hume

There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.

- David Whyte

topic: Fierce, Lyrical, Aspect, Practicality, Empiricism

Real science exists, then, only from the moment when a phenomenon is accurately defined as to its nature and rigorously determined in relation to its material conditions, that is, when its law is known. Before that, we have only groping and empiricism.

- Claude Bernard

topic: Real, Law, Determined, Empiricism

Rejecting all organs of informationbut my senses, I rid myself of the Pyrrhonisms with which an indulgence in speculations hyperphysical and antiphysical so uselessly occupy and disquiet the mind.

- Thomas Jefferson

topic: Mind, Speculation, Indulgence, Empiricism

Almost any mode of observation will be successful at last, for what is most wanted is method.

- Henry David Thoreau

source: Henry David Thoreau (2014). “The Illustrated "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"”, p.363, Princeton University Press

topic: Successful, Science, Lasts, Most Wanted, Empiricism

It's so hard to believe in anything anymore. I mean, it's like, religion, you really can't take it seriously, because it seems so mythological, it seems so arbitrary...but, on the other hand, science is just pure empiricism, and by virtue of its method, it excludes metaphysics. I guess I wouldn't believe in anything anymore if it weren't for my lucky astrology mood watch.

- Steve Martin

source: "A Wild and Crazy Guy". Comedy album by Steve Martin, 1978.

topic: Believe, Mean, Science, Empiricism

At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.

- Barbara Ehrenreich

source: Barbara Ehrenreich (2009). “Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America”, p.148, Macmillan

topic: Commitment, Technology, Issues, Knowledge Of The World, Reassurance

There's a tremendous popular fallacy which holds that significant research can be carried out by trying things. Actually it is easy to show that in general no significant problem can be solved empirically, except for accidents so rare as to be statistically unimportant. One of my jests is to say that we work empirically -- we use bull's eye empiricism. We try everything, but we try the right thing first!

- Edwin Land

topic: Eye, Trying, Use, Empiricism

What do the botanists know? Our lives should go between the lichen and the bark. The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind. We are still being born, and have as yet but a dim vision of sea and land, sun, moon, and stars, and shall not see clearly till after nine days at least.

- Henry David Thoreau

source: Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.286, Delphi Classics

topic: Life, Stars, Eye, Sun Moon, Sun Moon And Stars

Surely, we are provided with senses as well fitted to penetrate the spaces of the real, the substantial, the eternal, as these outward are to penetrate the material universe. Veias, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates, Christ, Shakespeare, Swedenborg,--these are some of our astronomers.

- Henry David Thoreau

source: Henry David Thoreau (2013). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.307, Courier Corporation

topic: Real, Space, Transcendentalism, Empiricism

In its more authoritarian forms, religion punishes questioning and rewards gullibility. Faith is not a function of stupidity, but a frequent cause of it.

- Wendy Kaminer

topic: Stupidity, Religion, Rewards, Empiricism

The fact that the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us seems to me a compelling argument for religious reverence rather than skeptical empiricism as a response to life's meaning.

- David Foster Wallace

source: "All That" by David Foster Wallace, www.newyorker.com. December 14, 2009.

topic: Religious, Powerful, Connections, Empiricism

Empiricism in the sciences is a method; naturalism in philosophy is a metaphysics; and the latter neither follows from nor underlies the former.

- David Bentley Hart

topic: Philosophy, Latter, Method, Empiricism

The bottom of being is left logically opaque to us, a datum in the strict sense of the word, something we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. In this confession lies the lasting truth of empiricism.

- William James

source: William James, Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis (1978). “Essays in Philosophy”, p.59, Harvard University Press

topic: Lying, Data, Wish, Empiricism

In philosophical terms, the opposite of rationalism is not irrationalism but empiricism, that is, a willingness to form beliefs on the basis of experience rather than from a priori deduction. Empirical evidence never yields the dogmatic certainty that accompanies logical deduction.

- John Quiggin

topic: Philosophical, Yield, Opposites, Empirical Evidence, Deductions

It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite.

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

source: Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010). “The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly ImprobableFragility"”, p.32, Random House

topic: Views, Opposites, Support, Empiricism

Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations.

- James Bryant Conant

topic: Science, Degrees, Problem, Empiricism

...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.

- Alan Watts

topic: Together, World, Letters, Empiricism, Scholasticism

Religions, of course, have their own demanding intellectual traditions, as Jesuits and Talmudic scholars might attest.... But, in its less rigorous, popular forms, religion is about as intellectually challenging as the average self-help book. (Like personal development literature, mass market books about spirituality and religion celebrate emotionalism and denigrate reason. They elevate the "truths" of myths and parables over empiricism.) In its more authoritarian forms, religion punishes questioning and rewards gullibility. Faith is not a function of stupidity but a frequent cause of it.

- Wendy Kaminer

topic: Book, Self, Average, Gullibility, Jesuit

Like belief, doubt takes a lot of different forms, from ancient Skepticism to modern scientific empiricism, from doubt in many gods to doubt in one God, to doubt that recreates and enlivens faith and doubt that is really disbelief.

- Jennifer Michael Hecht

topic: Doubt, Different, Belief, Faith And Doubt, Empiricism

Bohr’s standpoint, that a space-time description is impossible, I reject a limine. Physics does not consist only of atomic research, science does not consist only of physics, and life does not consist only of science. The aim of atomic research is to fit our empirical knowledge concerning it into our other thinking. All of this other thinking, so far as it concerns the outer world, is active in space and time. If it cannot be fitted into space and time, then it fails in its whole aim and one does not know what purpose it really serves.

- Erwin Schrodinger

topic: Life, Failure, Knowledge, Outer Worlds, Space Time

To develop an empiricist account of science is to depict it as involving a search for truth only about the empirical world, aboutwhat is actual and observable.... It must involve throughout a resolute rejection of the demand for an explanation of the regularities in the observable course of nature, by means of truths concerning a reality beyond what is actual and observable, as a demand which plays no role in the scientific enterprise.

- Bas van Fraassen

topic: Mean, Science, Reality, Empiricism

The significant contribution of empiricism was not the eradication of certainty, but the eradication of infallibility as a criterion of certainty. And this shift from infallibilism to fallibilism has profound consequences not only for toleration, but also for the subordination of faith to reason and theology to philosophy.

- George H. Smith

source: George H. Smith (2000). “Why Atheism?”, Pyr Books

topic: Philosophy, Profound, Atheism, Subordination, Empiricism

In a very real sense, therefore, advocacy of the doctrine of continuity [i.e evolutionism] has always necessitated on retreat from pure empiricism [i.e., logic an observation], and contrary to what is widely assumed by evolutionary biologists today, it has always been the anti-evolutionists [i.e creationist], not the evolutionists, in the scientific community who have struck rigidly to the facts and adhered to a more strictly empirical approach... It was Darwin the evolutionist who was retreating from the facts.

- Michael Denton

topic: Real, Community, Doctrine, Empiricism, Creationist

Someday someone will write a pathology of experimental physics and bring to light all those swindles which subvert our reason, beguile our judgement and, what is worse, stand in the way of any practical progress. The phenomena must be freed once and for all from their grim torture chamber of empiricism, mechanism, and dogmatism; they must be brought before the jury of man's common sense.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

topic: Writing, Science, Men, Grim, Pathology

My interests drew me in different directions. On the one hand I was powerfully attracted by science, with its truths based on facts; on the other hand I was fascinated by everything to do with comparative religion. [...] In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism.

- Carl Jung

source: Carl Gustav Jung (1973). “Memories, dreams, reflections”, Random House Inc

topic: Hands, Facts, Different, Empiricism, Comparative Religion

I have a reverence for medicine because I hero-worshiped my father [a former doctor], and because I admire doctors, I admire study, empiricism and rational thought. I don't study, empiricize or think rationally myself - but I admire it in others.

- Hugh Laurie

topic: Father, Hero, Thinking, Empiricism, Rational Thought