Abstract
Tom Lehrer has a song which begins “Whatever Happened to Hubert?”. I should like to change that to “whatever happened to empirical knowledge?”. By empirical knowledge I mean, to borrow phrases of David Hume, knowledge of matters of fact based on experience. Hume, as you know, declared that all knowledge of matters of fact is based on experience, and I am inclined to believe that almost all philosophers hold the converse, namely that all knowledge based on experience is knowledge of matters of fact. Yet a perusal of the recent literature leads one to wonder whether either of these generalizations can be maintained, and whether there is indeed any interesting empirical knowledge. Where by interesting empirical knowledge I mean what Hume called knowledge of matters of fact “beyond the present testimony of our senses, or the records of our memory”.1 Let me hasten to assure you, however, that despite these references to Hume my concern is not with scepticism.
A philosopher constantly afraid of stepping into another domain runs the danger of asserting empty generalities, because his philosophy is not sufficiently anchored in the specific sciences.
Hans Reichenbach, The Philosophy of Space and Time.
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Notes
Peter Unger ‘Experience and Factual Knowledge’, Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967) 152–173.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago 1962, passim.
Louis Althusser et al., Lire Le Capital, Paris 1965, vol. I, p. 216.
Rudolf Carnap, ‘The Methodological Character of Empirical Concepts’, in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science (ed. by Herbert Feigl and Michael Scrive), vol. I, Minneapolis 1956, pp. 38–76.
Rudolf Carnap, Philosophical Foundations of Physics, New York 1966, p. 270.
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© 1969 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Putnam, R.A., Compton, J. (1969). On Empirical Knowledge. In: Cohen, R.S., Wartofsky, M.W. (eds) Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science 1966/1968. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3378-7_14
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