---
title: "Empiricism"
chunk: 7/7
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:11:00.706456+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

In his Harvard "Lectures on Pragmatism" (1903), Peirce enumerated what he called the "three cotary propositions of pragmatism" (L: cos, cotis whetstone), saying that they "put the edge on the maxim of pragmatism".  First among these, he listed the peripatetic-thomist observation mentioned above, but he further observed that this link between sensory perception and intellectual conception is a two-way street.  That is, it can be taken to say that whatever we find in the intellect is also incipiently in the senses.  Hence, if theories are theory-laden then so are the senses, and perception itself can be seen as a species of abductive inference, its difference being that it is beyond control and hence beyond critique—in a word, incorrigible.  This in no way conflicts with the fallibility and revisability of scientific concepts, since it is only the immediate percept in its unique individuality or "thisness"—what the Scholastics called its haecceity—that stands beyond control and correction.  Scientific concepts, on the other hand, are general in nature, and transient sensations do in another sense find correction within them.  This notion of perception as abduction has received periodic revivals in artificial intelligence and cognitive science research, most recently for instance with the work of Irvin Rock on indirect perception.
Around the beginning of the 20th century, William James (1842–1910) coined the term "radical empiricism" to describe an offshoot of his form of pragmatism, which he argued could be dealt with separately from his pragmatism—though in fact the two concepts are intertwined in James's published lectures. James maintained that the empirically observed "directly apprehended universe needs ... no extraneous trans-empirical connective support", by which he meant to rule out the perception that there can be any value added by seeking supernatural explanations for natural phenomena.  James' "radical empiricism" is thus not radical in the context of the term "empiricism", but is instead fairly consistent with the modern use of the term "empirical". His method of argument in arriving at this view, however, still readily encounters debate within philosophy even today.
John Dewey (1859–1952) modified James' pragmatism to form a theory known as instrumentalism.  The role of sense experience in Dewey's theory is crucial, in that he saw experience as a unified totality of things through which everything else is interrelated.  Dewey's basic thought, in accordance with empiricism, was that reality is determined by past experience.  Therefore, humans adapt their past experiences of things to perform experiments upon and test the pragmatic values of such experience.  The value of such experience is measured experientially and scientifically, and the results of such tests generate ideas that serve as instruments for future experimentation, in physical sciences as in ethics.  Thus, ideas in Dewey's system retain their empiricist flavour in that they are only known a posteriori.

== See also ==

== Notes ==

== References ==

== External links ==

Fasko, Manuel; West, Peter. "British Empiricism". In Fieser, James; Dowden, Bradley (eds.). Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 2161-0002. OCLC 37741658.
Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). "Rationalism vs. Empiricism". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 1095-5054. OCLC 429049174.
Rationalism vs. Empiricism at the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project
Empiricism on In Our Time at the BBC
Empiricist Man