Empiricism?

The question of knowledge is a very interesting one. What is it and how do we attain it? These are two fundamental questions in philosophy, but here I’m going to focus primarily on the latter, and a particular answer to it at that. This answer is empiricism, the theory that all knowledge comes via sensory experience. To make a few clarifications this theory isn’t quite the same as  hard scientism, which suggests that only the scientific method can verify or falsify that which is claimed to be true, although scientism could be thought of as a type of empiricism. Empiricism is simply the claim that all of our beliefs must be justified on the bases of sense perception/observation.

But is this true? It certainly seems to have some credence to it, after all, the natural sciences are certainly some of the most successful intellectual projects in the history of mankind. Even more so language, art and virtually all of our ideas and concepts seem to be based to varying degrees in what we have observed. Indeed, I think this is where much of the truth of empiricism lies.

It seems to me that while it may not be true that we could never think as an un-embodied mind devoid of all senses, it is nevertheless true that observation is a necessary step towards knowledge and reasoning. This is simply because of the basic fact that in order to perform analysis, or reasoning, we must first have data, but if this is true we must first gather data before we can analyze it, and what other data gathering tools do we have other than our senses? So observations allow us to form languages (even though those languages obviously won’t be directly based on our observations), ideas, art, science etc. But, notice, after data is gathered, it is reasoning that produces new information, new ways to use our senses to gather more information among many other things. Thus, observations by themselves are next to useless if there is no reason to interpret them. It is this fact that makes me doubt empiricism is true, for obviously we can use reason to justify beliefs, apart from mere observation.

Take Hilberts hotel for instance. Suppose we have a hotel with an infinite number of guests in it, filling the hotel. One day a bus, carrying an infinite number of new guests arrives, what is the hotel owner to do? Well, its quite simple, all he has to do is have every guest move to the room number which is double their own. Magically, this frees up an infinite number of rooms, thus infinity can be added to infinity and result in infinity. But it gets worse, as you could do this an infinite number of times. But it gets even worse than that, for what if an infinite number of guests decide to leave the hotel. Well, if the hotel owner has every room emptied there would be no one left in the hotel. However, if the owner of the hotel instead has everyone in an odd numbered room leave, he would still have an infinite number of people in his hotel in the even numbered rooms. So subtracting infinity from infinity can equal zero but it can also equal infinity. But it gets even worse than that, for if the owner has every one in a room with the number 1 in it leave, then has every one in a room with a number 2 in it leave etc on to infinity, the owner of the hotel could have an infinite number of people leave the hotel over and over again an infinite number of times, and still have an infinite number of people in his hotel. With this in mind, one must ask the question, how could an infinite number of anything really exist? I fail to see how.

This thought experiment is important because it demonstrates how useful reason can be without using observation as even supporting evidence. All observation does in this experiment is allow us to conceive of a hotel, people in the hotel etc. Therefore, given this I think any form of strong empiricism is unjustified.

But there is still weak empiricism, which could be framed as follows; observation provides the strongest possible support for our beliefs. And this I’ll investigate in another post.