Empiricism — An epistemological tradition holding that sensory experience is the source, the criterion, and the limit of human knowledge. The term derives from the Greek empeiría (“experience”), and the position stands opposed to rationalism, which admits innate ideas and grants reason an access to reality independent of the senses. For the empiricist, all the mind’s content comes, directly or indirectly, from what the senses supply: knowledge is, in this sense, a posteriori. Classical British empiricism offers its most influential formulation. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke rejects innate ideas and describes the mind as a tabula rasa, a blank sheet filled in by sensory experience and inner reflection. George Berkeley radicalizes the thesis: material things reduce to bundles of perceptions, for “to be is to be perceived” (esse est percipi). David Hume pushes the program to its skeptical conclusions, holding that all ideas are faint copies of sensory impressions, and that our belief in causation is not a rational truth but a habit formed by observing constant conjunctions. A concrete example: the notion of “heat” does not arise from a pure concept but from the repeated impression of fire upon the skin. In the twentieth century, the logical empiricism (or logical positivism) of the Vienna Circle revived the empiricist spirit by formulating the verification principle, according to which a proposition has cognitive meaning only if it can, in principle, be verified by experience — dismissing metaphysical claims as empty.
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