That which is based on and associated with experience and practice
The word empirical is used extensively in our language as an adjective to qualify what is based on and associated with experience, practice and observation of events.
Empirical knowledge comes from experience
Normally we use this word associated with knowledge, because empirical knowledge will imply direct contact with the real, that achieved through experience. Everything that a person knows, knows, without having scientific knowledge is empirical knowledge. We know that an ice cube on the skin will cause a cold shock because it was felt and the same happens with fire, for example, we know that being close to it produces great heat, because we have felt it ...
Empiricism, a philosophical current that proposes that knowledge arises from each one's own experience and from nothing else
It is also designated with the term of empirical to everything proper or related to Empiricism. Meanwhile, Empiricism designates that system or philosophical current that proposes that knowledge arises from each one's own experience and from nothing else.. For example, the follower of this proposal will be called as empirical.
Preeminence of experience and the senses
At the instigation of Philosophy, the philosophical theory of empiricism supposes the supremacy of experience and perception product of the senses with regard to knowledge and formation of ideas and concepts..
According to empiricism For a knowledge to be considered valid, it must first be tested by experience, this being then the knowledge base.
The observation of the world will then be the method par excellence that this theory of knowledge will use, leaving then reasoning, revelation and intuition, subject to what experience says in the first place.
It arises in the seventeenth century from the hand of the English thinker John Locke
Empiricism arises in the seventeenth century and directly links sensory perception with the formation of knowledge. In this sense, a knowledge that is not approved by experience cannot be admitted as true by empiricism. The basis of empirical knowledge is experience.
The English thinker John Locke is considered the father of empiricism , since he was the first to hold it and expose it explicitly to the whole world. Locke, who exercised a very important influence thanks to his ideas during the seventeenth century, argued that newborns are born without any type of innate idea or knowledge and that then, it will be the different experiences that they face in their development that will leave marks on it and they will shape your knowledge. According to Locke nothing could be understood if experience did not mediate. For him, the consciousness of the human being is empty until it is born and is filled with knowledge as a result of the experience that is being gathered.
Rationalism, its opposite
In front of and in clear opposition to the Empiricism that Locke made grow, is the rationalism, which holds, quite the opposite, that it is reason the product of knowledge and not the senses, much less the experience.
Rationalism, a philosophical current contemporary to Empiricism, also developed in Europe in the seventeenth century, with René Descartes being its fundamental ideologist. For Rationalism the only source of knowledge is reason and therefore rejects any intervention of the senses because it considers that they are capable of deceiving us.
He also denies Locke with regard to innate knowledge, considering that these exist, that we are born with knowledge, we just have to remember them as we develop.
