Thomyum2 wrote: ↑June 14th, 2019, 5:11 pmI think the rather bland and limited definition here does no justice to empiricism.Consul wrote: ↑June 14th, 2019, 1:54 pm "Empiricism may be defined as the assertion 'all synthetic knowledge is based on experience'."So I think here is the gist of the problem - if we accept that knowledge is based on experience, then the question that naturally follows is 'whose experience?' Each of us is too limited to be able to individually experience the universe in all its aspects, so we have to rely on each other and form consensus in order to have knowledge.
(Russell, Bertrand. Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. 1948. Reprint, Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. p. 437)
It is simply not just personal experience, but all scientific experiment, and witness statements from others can be assessed. Not just any experiments but those that can satisfy the rigors of scientific method. Not just all witness statements, but statements that can be verified. Experiments that are repeated, if the results are not replicable then they are invalidated.
Beyond these constraints there is no valid knowledge.
There is no knowledge at all without empiricism, except abstracted schemes in which the rules are self fulfilling such as maths.