H. P. Grice's Empiricum

EMPIRICUM -- empiricism: a philosophical approach to knowledge and reality. Its central contentions are that all knowledge or all meaningful discourse about the world is related to sensory experience (including inner sense or introspection), and that the boundaries of possible sense-experience are the boundaries of possible knowledge. Different empiricists have different views about how knowledge is based on sensation. The major interest of empiricism is in the sphere of sense-perception, and it offers detailed examinations of problems concerning perception, the relation between sense-data and material objects, the problem of the external world, and the results and methodology of the sciences. This approach embraces concreteness and particularity, and encourages rigorous standards of clarity and precision. Empiricism claims that the sciences provide our best knowledge of reality. It is suspicious of abstraction and generalization and rejects all irrational and superstitious claims. The major difficulty empiricism faces is to provide a satisfactory account of universals, and of a priori necessary truths in mathematics and logic. Empiricism contrasts with rationalism, taken as an epistemological approach that gives a lesser role to sense-experience and emphasizes the centrality of the faculty of reason itself in knowledge. When rationalism is taken broadly as respect for reason and a rejection of irrationality, empiricism is a type of rationalism. Modern scholarship rejects too sharp a distinction between rationalism and empiricism among some of the great seventeenth-century philosophers. Empiricism as a tradition can be traced to Aristotle, and has been deeply rooted in the British intellectual tradition since the Middle Ages. The classical British empiricists include Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and in the twentieth century Russell, Ayer, and the Vienna Circle (also called logical empiricists) are its major representatives. “Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matter of fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience.” Quine, From a Logical Point of View -- empirio-criticism Epistemology A rigorously positivist and radically empirical philosophy, established by the German philosopher Richard Avenarius and developed by the Austrian scientist and philosopher Ernst Mach. Developing the thought of Berkeley and Hume, empirio-criticism claims that all we can know is our sensations and that knowledge should be confined to pure experience. Any metaphysical claims, such as the objective existence of the external world or of causation, which transcends experience and cannot be verified by experience, must be rejected as a construct of the mind. Philosophy should be based on scientific principles. This position influenced logical positivism and James’s pragmatism. Lenin severely attacked it in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908) and even claimed that this type of philosophy represents the interests of capitalism. What he criticized was the espousal of Mach’s views by his fellow Bolsheviks Bogdanov, Bazarov, and others. “I shall refer to those arguments by which materialism is being combated . . . Machians. I shall use this latter term throughout as a synonym for ‘empirio-criticists’. . . .” Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism