Basic Propositions, Empiricism and Science

Abstract

In recent years ’empiricism’ in one or other historically specific sense has been both championed and attacked, but I think that it is defensible to say that from a broader historical perspective much of the discussion in epistemology and the philosophy of science has been carried on within the empiricist framework, with the concept of empiricism itself undergoing continual transformation over time. While there certainly have been suggestions of a rationalist or of an anarchist sort, most of the protagonists (from Lewis and Carnap to Quine and Hesse) have been striving to get clear about the sense in which the deliverances of sense function as checks on our systems of factual knowledge. In what sense is our sensory input the source of our knowledge of the world about us? That it is, is not the issue at hand. The debate centers on the appropriateness of categorizing this sensory input in terms of epistemologicallybasic propositions and the specific mode of basically accorded these propositions.