This outlines the way in which experience preceded the intricacies of the modern scientific method. The observation of the nature of things, their causes and effects, and the necessity of experience in this process, is the bedrock of modern science. This empiricist position on knowledge acquisition is indebted to the work of Aristotle. (For more on Aristotle, you can explore our guide on his concept of the four causes.)
With these examples of ancient empiricism in mind, we can see how fundamental experience is to much of today’s world view. It has proposed an answer to two of the great epistemological questions: “what is knowledge?” and “how do we come to know things?” Empiricism outlines a particular condition for knowledge — that knowledge is garnered from sense experience — one that appears in some of the earliest known philosophical thought and continues to hold credence today.
British empiricism
Significant developments in our contemporary understanding of empiricism were made by seventeenth and eighteenth-century British Enlightenment thinkers. Crucially, philosophers such as John Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume (1711–1776) provided examples of the essential components of empiricist theory. These thinkers are among the first British empiricists, carving out a unique intellectual history in Britain.
John Locke was a significant proponent of the theory that the mind is a black slate, a tabula rasa. With its roots in Aristotelian empiricism, this theory proposed that the mind possesses no innate ideas or structures. Locke uses the example of a newborn baby, claiming that “infants” are all born “weak and helpless, without knowledge or understanding” (Complete Works of John Locke, 1689, [2019]). He theorizes that, because that baby has no experience of the world, it has no content in its mind; it is a blank slate. As the baby gains experience and as its senses develop, the world begins to imprint on the baby’s mind. This is how, according to Locke and empiricism more broadly, we come to have knowledge of the world. The concept of the mind as a tabula rasa again refutes the rationalist proposition that we can know things a priori; independent of experience. Where rationalism believes that the mind has the capacity to gain knowledge through logic and deduction, presupposing innate mental structures and functions, empiricism considers the mind to be a receptacle for our experiences of the world.
David Hume built on this empiricist theory of mind. He considered the capacity of the mind to generalize and conceptualize, while still believing it to be a blank slate. If we see one swan, and another swan, and another, we build a mental category of “swans.” We have no concept of this mental category at birth, we develop it through experience. Furthermore, if we have seen a multitude of swans in our lives, and all of them have been white, we are likely to conclude that all swans are white. This is called inductive reasoning and it is a habit of the mind, one that assumes the future will conform to our past experiences. Hume applies this mental tendency to cause and effect, asserting,