Empiricism and the Philosophy of Science or, n Dogmas of Empiricism

Abstract

Thomas Reid remarked of what he believed to have been Descartes’ achievement: “To throw off the prejudices of education, and to create a system of nature, totally different from that which had subdued the understanding of mankind, and kept it in subjection for so many centuries, required an uncommon force of mind.” So it is now, in turn, with the Cartesian heritage. Part of the difficulty, for us, of casting off that albatross comes, I believe, from the special empiricist version of the Cartesian view that has dominated philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition. This is true of philosophy in general and a fortiori of philosophy of science in particular. I shall try to illustrate this thesis by pointing to tenets characteristic of each of the major British empiricists that have, in my view, contributed to the impasse in which twentieth century thought has found itself. A necessary condition for the empiricists’ missteps, of course, was the Cartesian alternative itself, between pure intellective mind on the one hand and bare inert monolithic matter on the other; but that singularly abstract and unlikely division acquires additional malignity in the still more abstract and unlikely caricature of experience characteristic of empiricist thought, at least in its British version, which is all I shall be looking at. Presumably there are equivalent absurdities to be found in such writers as Condillac; and philosophy of science, of course, had one of its chief origins in continental positivism, an analogue of our empiricist tradition. The lessons I am looking for can be gleaned, however, from the empiricist writers most familiar to English speakers, and, if only out of ignorance, I shall confine myself to them. In each case I shall also try to indicate very roughly what a more adequate alternative to the errors in question might look like. Mind you, I am not saying that Locke, Berkeley and Hume did all this on their own, but only that we can get a kind of profile of the philosophy back of philosophy of science as it has looked until recently if we glance at some of the doctrines of some of its forebears. What this backward glance produces will be, I fear, rather a jeremiad than an argument. That’s the trouble with being an historicist: our philosophical situation appears to me so desperate, and I find myself (lacking the uncommon force of mind aforementioned) so entirely powerless to alter that situation, that by now all I can do is scream.