Empiricism

Empiricism is a direction in epistemology (epistemology), according to which all knowledge arises as a result of sensory perception and is based on it. Empiricism can be contrasted with the other two often but not necessarily associated with each other doctrines:

• nativism, which claims that some knowledge is given to us from birth;
• rationalism, which asserts that it is reason, and not sensory experience, that gives us the surest foundations of knowledge.

These disputes go back to the fifth century BC. Empiricism emerged as a reaction to rationalism, the origin of which is associated with the name of Parmenides, and further development — with the name of Plato. Proponents of rationalism drew a sharp line between opinion, or misconception, and knowledge, or external (objective) and provable truth. They believed that sensory experience only gives people an opinion about the changing world of ghosts (appearances or appearances), and since ghosts can be misleading, you can not rely on sensory perception. Thus, the rationalists were encouraged not to trust the feelings and to search for knowledge through reason. An opinion may or may not be true, depending on the chance coincidence of opinion and observation; unlike an opinion, knowledge must be provably and objectively true, and only logic — reason — can provide proof and give certainty. Rationalists, as a rule, also believed that knowledge is mainly given to people from birth, while learning is the "extraction to the surface" of what is for the time being implicitly present in the soul or in the brain.

The name Empedocles is associated with the emergence of another philosophy of empiricism, which expressed distrust of the main idea of rationalism with its tendency to bizarre metaphysical speculations and tried to show that observation leads to knowledge. Proponents of empiricism in its extreme form argue that observation is the only reliable source of knowledge. Even if the rationalist rejects experience, it is the duty of the empiricist to prove that perception was in fact the source of correct knowledge: to confirm the possibilities of perception, the empiricist must study it. This is where psychology begins. To convince us of the correctness of their own system of views, an empiricist like Empedocles must explain to us how perception "works" — and this, of course, is the field of interest of psychology. Perception theories are among the most ancient psychological theories created to solve the problems of philosophy. Empiricists also distrust the nativist claims of rationalists as appeals to the world of the incomprehensible.

Modern philosophy dates the beginning of the discussion between rationalists/nativists and empiricists to the sixteenth century and connects it with the names of Rene Descartes, the founder of modern rationalism, and John Locke, the most prominent representative of modern empiricism. Empiricism is represented by two schools — moderate and radical. The moderate empiricist agrees with those who believe that the source of all ideas is perception, but admits that the "apparatus of the mind", i.e. its functions such as memory, imagination and language, are given to man from birth. Proponents of extreme views, including John Stuart mill, do not limit themselves to this and argue that the result of learning is not only what a person thinks about, but also how they think, i.e., the thought processes themselves.

A peculiar synthesis of the ideas of rationalism and empiricism is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who believed that science — the highest form of human knowledge — begins with experience and with the systematization of its results. However, Kant believed that due to the innate properties of the human mind, human experience inevitably "takes a certain form", which becomes the source of an ordered phenomenon studied by science. Therefore, science is based on a logically provable Foundation inherent in reason from birth, and therefore prior experience.

In modern times, the debate between empiricism and rationalism has virtually ceased, giving way to the more familiar psychological debate between nativism and empiricism, or the debate about the role of nature and nurture in development. Although empiricism is the dominant philosophical teaching, there are exceptions to this General rule. For example, N. Chomsky in his work "Cartesian linguistics", challenging the empiricism of behaviorists, claims that most of the syntax a person receives at birth. He bases linguistics on intuition rather than behavior, and sees language as a logical system that is virtually unchanged by external motivation.