Empiricism

Empiricism is the position that, in a given subject area, experience is our only source of knowledge and of the concepts we use. In the SEP's wording: "We have no source of knowledge in S or for the concepts we use in S other than experience" sep-rationalism-empiricism. Its classic exponents are John Locke and David Hume, the British side of the early-modern quarrel with rationalism.

Where the line actually falls

The usual picture sets reason against the senses. The SEP entry draws the line somewhere narrower. Empiricists also accept intuition and deduction, but only for "relations of the contents of our minds". What they deny is innateness: that we have some knowledge, or some concepts, "as part of our nature" sep-rationalism-empiricism. So a working empiricist can reason a priori about mathematics and still be an empiricist, as long as the truths reasoned about are not claimed to be inborn.

The entry also makes both positions relative to a subject. One can be a rationalist about mathematics and an empiricist about the physical world, and the two only clash "when formulated to cover the same subject."

The two exponents

• Locke attacks innate knowledge with a dilemma (narrow innateness has counterexamples, broad innateness makes everything innate) while granting reason "equal footing with experience" for morality and mathematics. His ideas about ideas sit close to Descartes'.
• Hume splits knowledge into relations of ideas and matters of fact, reads causation as a habit of the mind, and tests each concept by asking which impression it comes from. That test is the scepticism Kant said woke him: in critique-of-pure-reason Hume is the one who "came the nearest of all to this problem."

Why it matters to this spoke

Until 2026-10-06 the corpus named empiricism only as the foil: rationalism promised to fill it in, epistemology called it "still absent", and sep-kant cited Locke and Hume as the position Kant answers. One survey entry now speaks for it. No empiricist primary text is held yet; see the spoke synthesis, growth edge 2.

Related

rationalism · epistemology · sep-rationalism-empiricism · immanuel-kant · critique-of-pure-reason · rene-descartes