[M.D. Holloway]

For my Sr. Thesis to obtain my degree in Philosophy, I explored the concept of
what empiricisms effect was on society. I recently came across some old notes and it got me thinging again...

Let us now move from ontology to epistemology and from materialism to realism. In epistemological terms, we have three major directions: idealism, empiricism, and realism. Epistemological idealisms all in one way or another suggest that knowledge is knowledge only ultimately of knowledge: i.e. that the forms of human consciousness refer only to each other and not to an objective reality, a reality that exists outside of and independent of these forms of consciousness. Epistemological empiricisms suggest that knowledge is merely the passive reflection of what is generated outside of consciousness and passed on to consciousness through sensation: consciousness is a merely passive response to external stimuli and it merely copies, in a photographic sense, what exists outside of consciousness.

From a realist perspective, the chief problem with empiricism is that empiricism fails to account for the full complexity of both knowledge and reality. Reality is more than mere appearances: reality includes much which is not readily apparent. Since what we perceive by means of our senses is only that which appears to us, knowledge gained by means of sense perception alone is therefore inadequate. Knowledge must involve more than sense perception alone: it must involve the use of reason, and it must make use of principles and categories which do not simply emanate directly from the objects of our knowledge, but rather involve reflection upon what precedes and exceeds appearances. At the same time, because what we perceive through our senses is mediated by the intervening influence of social and cultural factors, sense perception is not the natural, neutral, and independent process which many empiricisms maintain. Empiricism, moreover, is also at fault, from a realist vantage point, in its tendency to depict the knower as a mere passive receptacle for, or a mere passive register of, knowledge that is produced entirely outside of this knower. If we consider the limitations in conceiving of knowledge of an object as merely like a photograph of it and the knower of this knowledge as merely like the camera which takes the picture, we can better understand the problems a realist finds with empiricism.

From an empiricist vantage point, moreover, ontology and epistemology are virtually identical because what is known is understood to be virtually equivalent with what is. Some empiricisms do attempt to go beyond this. They explain complex ideas and complex modes of cognitive processing which seem not to be traceable merely to sensory perceptions of real appearances as in fact reflecting complex kinds of appearances and complex modes of sensory perception which we are not yet able fully to explain but which nonetheless are simply "there" and which we will, eventually, with further scientific progress, be able to see as such for ourselves. At the same time, some empiricisms also recognize that reason and understanding operate in ways which at least seem to be independent of what is manifest to us through our senses by producing ideas for which no empirical correspondent is immediately at hand. And yet, these same empiricisms nevertheless still claim that the true test of whether we actually know what we think we know in even these cases is always whether or not we are able to find a correspondent in empirical reality itself to confirm the truth of what we have imagined, hypothesized, or conjectured.