Revolution - The Empiricism

The Empiricism, formulated by Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), became a central epistemology for scientific development in the Age of Discovery and a main philosophical approach of the scientific establishment ever since. The Empiricist philosophy rejects all previous philosophies. It declares that a-priory knowledge cannot be considered as valid and that a philosophical debate as an epistemological technique to reach knowledge is futile. It claims that since all interpretation is based on the interpreter's view, any new understanding is confined by their previous knowledge. Thus, newly revealed facts always match the preliminary assumptions. The main claim of the empiricist stance is that only a-post-priory knowledge can be considered as valid. The only acceptable sources for human knowledge are sensory experiences and scientific observations. One might say that as opposed to the church's dogmatic insistence, stands the scientific establishment with the same dogmatic attitude. After all, Bacon is commonly credited for being the originator of the say "knowledge is power"(Russell 1986), for providing the declaration that scientific empiricist methodology is the only valid path for attaining knowledge, and for discrediting any form of interpretive knowledge.

Along the following centuries the scientific intransigent empiricist front has been cracked once in a while, mainly by philosophers who challenged its exclusive assertion for validity, suggesting that attaining knowledge with absolute certainty is mostly a wishful thinking. The Scottish philosopher, David Hume, undermined the credibility of scientific induction as a valid method of reasoning. Hume argued that reaching a conclusion which points towards causality is an understanding derived from our own personal experience of observing sequential processes. When an event is repeated over and over again, our tendency for pattern detection, leads us to conclude an existence of universal physical laws. When we observe repeated circumstances which develop through identical sequence of events, we identify in those circumstances a causal connection, concluding the first event as the cause for the appearance of the second event. Hume claimed that inner feeling of detected causality is originated by our anticipation. Our belief in causality is instinctive, and similarly to mechanisms in other animals, based upon the habits of our nervous system. The impression of causality exists solely at the observer's mind. Therefore, embracing this idea will be no different from an idea of a rooster concluding that he is the reason for the sunrise, just because he calls every morning just before it. The conclusion allegedly made by the rooster is based on induction but it's easy for us as observers to detect the rooster's mistake as naïve etiology (Russell 1986; Schmidt-Biggemann 2004).

Many important philosophers along the years doubted the possibility of reaching clear and valid etiological conclusions through observations. They pointed out the limitations of the empiricist epistemology, as it is a single path which bridges between the human perception and true nature of reality (The author claims instead, that empiricism is merely a stage in the path.). Those understandings brought the philosophy of the natural sciences in the last century to a stage where it became well accepted that obtaining definite understanding through any theory may be considered as a mission impossible. The last nails in the coffin of pure positivist dominance over science were pinpointed in the 1930's by the intellectuals of logical positivism and modern physics (Eidlin 2011).