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A person who supports the theory that all knowledge is based on experience derived from the senses.
‘most scientists are empiricists by nature’
‘Logical empiricists can readily incorporate this point in an account of the relative merits of different types of inductive inference.’
‘He was an empiricist who made empiricism more radical by treating pure experience as the very substance of the world.’
‘Feminist empiricists prefer the tools of analytic philosophy of science.’
‘But even the great empiricist John Locke subscribed to a rational foundation for the basic principles of morals.’
‘Russell took this to refute the older empiricists, for whom all knowledge rests solely on sense experience.’
‘Critics rightly describe him as a great empiricist, but he was certainly no prisoner of fact.’
‘Locke, as a moderate empiricist, accepted that there were both material and immaterial substances.’
‘Perhaps social situation is partially responsible for the rise of the medical empiricists.’
‘They were men of science, Baconian empiricists, Protestants, and improvers.’
‘One does not have to be an atheist to be a rationalist, empiricist or skeptic.’
adjective
Philosophy
Relating to or characteristic of the theory that all knowledge is based on experience derived from the senses.
‘his radically empiricist view of science as a direct engagement with the world’
‘He believes that the motive of benevolence, so dear to empiricist morality, is a species of mere inclination, and therefore morally neutral.’
‘The empiricist position has been taken in recent times by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle.’
‘This openness has also been why psychoanalysis has often been dismissed as not sufficiently empiricist or objective in its methods.’
‘Borrowing heavily from Western empiricist thought, these intellectuals attacked all forms of traditional Chinese teachings, ritual, and institutions.’
‘In putting the question this way, James takes issue with Hume's empiricist critique of identity.’
‘Orwell's notion of language involves similar empiricist assumptions, in its naive belief that one first has a concept and then fits a word to it.’
‘He dismisses the theories of those who do not share his strict materialist and empiricist approach to brain-function.’
‘To some extent he is criticizing assumptions common to the whole school of empiricist philosophers - Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and many others.’
‘It is a common empiricist assumption that I can know my experience simply by observing it.’
‘Locke and his successors in the empiricist tradition argued that the foundation of contingent knowledge about the world lies in sensory experience.’