Empiricism

A particular view of the world and of science, in particular, is empiricism. In some senses it is a British phenomenon – Locke, Berkley and Hume are generally regarded as the ‘British empiricists’, and their influence does pervade the British, and plausibly, the English speaking world. That is not to say that the three agreed. Berkley rose to be a bishop, Hume was possibly an atheist, and Locke is often regarded at the forefather of Deism. Even within that, Hume regarded Berkley as a sceptic and Locke died having a Psalm read out to him. Even Hume was either too cautious or too sceptical of his own ability to discourse on a deity to be particularly clear as to his religious convictions.

Paul Avis observes (Avis, P. (2014) In Search of Authority: Anglican Theological Method from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, London, T & T Clark.) that recent historiography has attempted to understand figures who are recognised as precursors to the modern, scientific, worldview as atheists or, at least, sceptics to such a degree as their own religious beliefs are underplayed. For example, there is no evidence that Sir Francis Bacon was an atheist – he was brought up as a Puritan and never seems to have strayed far from the Church of England as founded. A thorough search of his writings can turn up ideas that might be seen as opposing Christian doctrine, but that is also true of most theologians. Expressing an idea which is opposed to orthodoxy is not, in itself, an admission of unorthodoxy, heresy or anything else. It might be being intellectually honest.

Within the world of empiricism, it is a bit hard to make the ‘leap’ to God. The empirical is based on those things which we can perceive. Hume is very clear – everything we can conceive is either based on perception (I can hear the birds singing) or memory (I hear this cheeping noise and I know that birds make that noise, so I know the birds are singing). Everything else is a product of putting these things together – perceptions and our memories of them.

There are problems here, naturally. Essentially, the danger of strict empiricism is that we start without knowledge of the world and do not seem to be able to obtain any. So we have to start from knowing something (that the world exists) which means that not everything can be a perception. Foundationalism, the idea that knowledge must start with something we can know incorrigibly, cannot be strictly correct. The mind cannot be a blank sheet on which the world is inscribed, together with our ways of connecting those impressions.

Science is, in some of its forms, a type of empiricism. There is an idea in the philosophy of science called ‘constructive empiricism’, whereby a theory is empirically adequate if what it predicts is true. Hence, we can live happily with a theory which uses the concept of an electron, so long as it predicts things which are true (say, about electric currents flowing which we can measure). We do not have to believe in the existence of electrons at all.

The problem here is that physicists, in general, do believe in the real existence of electrons. Their theories might be empirically adequate and, as we have seen, ultimately unprovable, but most physicists actually believe that there are in the universe entities which we label electrons. There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that electrons do exist as entities, and that evidence arises from different experiments and theoretical endeavours.

Electrons are, of course, very small (actually, they have no measurable radius, and are usually taken to be mathematical points). At such a small scale they behave oddly, counterintuitively. The scale of action of a single electron is so small that we cannot imagine it, imagine what is going on at that level or what an electron might see. All we can do is apply some ideas of quantum mechanics and mathematics and compare the results with what we see at the human scale. We cannot ‘understand’ an electron.

Our knowledge of what is true in the world is therefore not as great as we might like, or might be led to believe. That does not stop us, of course, from behaving as if many things are true, such as believing that it is raining at the moment, or that if I fall I shall hurt myself. We need to know a lot of things that are true in order to survive at all. Imagine how difficult life would get if we needed to convince ourselves every mealtime that it is true that we need to eat to survive. Some psychological cases along those lines exist, and they are often tragic, but fortunately, most of us will simply have something to eat because we are hungry.

There are a lot of things, therefore, tied up in what we know, what we believe to be true. Sense perceptions are some of them, a big factor, but they are not the only factor. One day I was driving to work in the dark and I say in front of me two rear lights from a van, one on the extreme left of the inside lane of the dual carriageway, one on the extreme right of the outside lane. I thought ‘that is a very wide van’. Immediately, however, the idea of a two-lane wide van was rejected by some other part of my mental apparatus and I looked again and noted the car which was blocking my sight of both the other rear lights. Perception is important but does not rule without question.

It is part of philosophical folklore history that Hume shocked Kant out of his ‘dogmatic slumbers’ into his idealism, although I cannot, for the moment, put my hands on the book that downplays Hume’s influence. Nevertheless the problem remains. Kant’s idealism does not really solve the problem, but places it within us. All we can perceive is the phenomenal and that perception is essentially the same problem as that tackled by Hume, the problem of getting from perception to our minds, and from perception to what is “out there”.