The Empiricist insists that moral standards are matters of discovery; that the laws of conduct must be derived from experience, just as must the laws of the physical sciences.
The Empiricist finds the origin of these divergent moral convictions in the divergent environments to which individuals in different places, times, and social situations are exposed.
The Empiricist insists that the morality of an act cannot be told from the intensity of approval or disapproval which it arouses in the individual.
The Empiricist does not deny that there are intuitions, or apparent intuitions.
In such a situation, to halt at appearances might seem the mark of a true naturalist and a true empiricist not misled by speculative haste and the human passion for system and simplification.
I think we must frankly confess that a man may try hard to be an empiricist and may not be wholly successful.
He cannot do it as the empiricist does it, by a reference to experienced fact, for he does not believe that the external world is directly given in our experience.
But, once recognize that the empiricist doesn’t have any such Realities at all, and the entire problem of the relation of change to reality takes a very different aspect.
The empiricist is he who feels that the chief obstacle which prevents scientific method from making way is the belief in pure thoughts, not derived from particular observations and hence not responsible to the course of experience.
But to see that to the empiricist this distinction is not verbal, but genuine, is the precondition of any understanding of him.
In all probability (and all the empiricist logically needs is just one case of this sort) the experience is simply and just of fright-at-the-noise.
To grasp this aspect of empiricism is to see what the empiricist means by objectivity, by the element of control.
These two opposing schools are those which we know as the sensationalist and the intellectualist, the empiricist and the rationalist.
But if you do this you will have to shelter yourselves behind theEmpiricist teaching.
If the empiricist denies the intellectual element in scientific knowledge, he must not claim absolute validity for his conclusions; but he may hold against the intuitionalist that absolute laws are impossible to the human intellect.
The empiricist has not carried the psychology of logic as far as the conceptualist, although the latter might be the loudest to disclaim the honor.
We will agree with the empiricist that the content of an image is representative, that it is a return, a revival, of a sense-content previously experienced through the activity of sense-organs stimulated from the periphery.
The empiricist would say that he needs the image to piece out the data upon which logical processes operate.
For the empiricist the processes of thought, observing, comparing, generalizing, etc.
It can hardly be a secretion of thought and a copy of sense-perceptions at one and the same time, unless the empiricist is willing to turn absolute idealist!
Being is not, as the empiricist would have it, ready at hand, ours for the looking, but is the fruit of critical reflection.
As an empiricist you cannot say so, for you have just declared activity to be only a kind of synthetic object, or conjunctive relation experienced between bits of experience already made.
Empiricist minds, putting the parts before the whole, appear to rationalists, who start from the whole, and consequently enjoy magniloquent privileges, to use epithets offensively diminutive.
This is hard for the flesh, and it may not be fair to ask an empiricist to be heroic in the interests of logic; but if he could screw his courage up for the plunge, his spirit might find itself perfectly at home in the new situation.
If he became a perfectempiricist he would trust experience only if it taught him absolutely nothing, even about his own past.
The transcendental ego seems nowadays in rationalist quarters to stand for everything, in empiricist quarters for almost nothing.
The future experience, however, may be of things outside the thinker; and that this is so the humanist may believe as freely as any other kind of empiricist philosopher.
And this cash-value, it is needless to say, is verbatim et literatim what our empiricist account pays in.
The "empiricist view" insists that, "as reality is created temporally day by day, concepts .
I have no space for polemics in this article, so I shall simply formulate the empiricist doctrine as my hypothesis, leaving it to work or not work as it may.
Understanding backwards is, it must be confessed, a very frequent weakness of philosophers, both of the rationalistic and of the ordinary empiricist type.
At any rate, it seems the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher.
But they should be taken as illustrations of the radically empiricist attitude rather than as argumentations for its validity.
If we look at the history of opinions, we see that the empiricist tendency has largely prevailed in science, while in philosophy the absolutist tendency has had everything its own way.
That means the empiricist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given up.
Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed.
In that case the rationalist will usually also be in favor of what is called free-will, and the empiricist will be a fatalist-- I use the terms most popularly current.
The rationalist finally will be of dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while the empiricist may be more sceptical and open to discussion.
The whole clash of rationalistic and empiricist religion is thus over the validity of possibility.
But a philosophy that breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist temper of mind.
It means the right kind of thing for the empiricist mind.
Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in existence as there are at the present day.
I wish now to add a word in further explanation of the claim I made at our last meeting, that pragmatism may be a happy harmonizer of empiricist ways of thinking, with the more religious demands of human beings.
It is a true claim when the individual rationalist is what is called a man of feeling, and when the individual empiricist prides himself on being hard- headed.
Such is the reaction of an empiricist mind upon the rationalist bill of fare.
Empiricist writers give him a materialism, rationalists give him something religious, but to that religion "actual things are blank.
It is quite possible to suppose that Sextus was an Empiricist a part of his life, and afterwards found the Methodical School more to his liking, and such a change would not in any way have affected his stand as a physician.
Strictly speaking, this is for the empiricist the limit of possible knowledge, but he would be a poor investigator who would be content with this and no more.
The empiricist tries to go a distinct step in advance of this.
The empiricist considers thought transformed, sublimated perception, while the rationalist sees in perception only confused and less distinct thought.
In eliminating a priori principles, and appealing exclusively to sense-experience, the empiricist removes all grounds of distinction between inductive inference and custom-bred expectation.
Herbart's doctrine of space, Lotze's local sign theory, also the empiricisttheories of the Mills and Bain, all rest upon this same assumption.
Skepticism cannot, therefore, be ruled out by any set of thinkers as a possibility against which their conclusions are secure; and no empiricist ought to claim exemption from this universal liability.
This is our ownempiricist criterion; and this criterion the stoutest insisters on supernatural origin have also been forced to use in the end.
A few remarks in deprecation of such an opinion, and in farther explanation of the empiricist principles which I profess, may therefore appear at this point to be in place.
In the end it had to come to our empiricist criterion: By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.
Even to-day to speak of a physician as an empiricist is to imply that he lacks scientific training, and that he is proceeding simply on the basis of what he happens to have got out of the chance medley of his past practice.
By the modern philosophic empiricist and by his opponent, experience has been looked upon just as a way of knowing.
As an empiricist I share in the dissatisfaction which even the most correct dialectical discussion is likely to arouse when brought to bear on matters of fact.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "empiricist" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
