John Locke, empiricist philosopher (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

                                                 

                    

                                David Hume, empiricist philosopher (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

In the modern world, the core belief set of most people in the West is the one called Science. Under its view, what scientists seek to know is what is real. What is this ocean of stuff in which we swim and how do the things in it work? But the harder we think about this question, the more it leads us to a deeper one. The crucial question is not “What is real?” but “How can I know what is real?” How reliable is the system we use to absorb and understand the impressions our senses give us about reality? Trying to answer these questions leads us into the branch of philosophy called epistemology, which is the study of the origin, nature, methods, and limits of knowledge, and what distinguishes opinions from justified beliefs.

The epistemological view of most scientists and philosophers in the West today is called empiricism. It is a beginning point. Empiricism bases its conclusions on empirical evidence, which is information acquired by observation or experimentation. Empiricism assumes that all we can know is sensory experiences and memories of sensory experiences. This includes the concepts we have learned that enable us to sort those experiences and memories, to plan responses to events in my world, and then to enact the plans. We keep and use those concepts that in the past have reliably guided us to more health and vigour and less pain and sickness, and we drop the concepts that have been shown to be mistaken and so mostly useless.

Our sense organs are continually feeding bits of information into our minds about the textures, colours, shapes, sounds, aromas, and flavours we experience. Even when we are not consciously paying attention, at other, deeper levels, our minds are aware of these details. For example, I know when I hear noises outside of a car approaching or a dog barking. Even in my sleep, I detect headlight beams sweeping across my yard or gravel crunching in the driveway. One spouse awakes to the baby’s crying; the other dozes on. One wakes when the furnace isn’t cutting out as it should be; the other sleeps. The ship’s engineer sleeps through steam turbines roaring and props churning, but she wakes when one bearing begins to hum a bit above its normal pitch. She wakes because she knows something is wrong. Empiricism is the modern way of understanding this complex information-handling system.

In the empiricist model of knowing, the mind notices how certain patterns of details keep recurring in some recognized situations. When we notice a pattern of details in encounter after encounter with a certain kind of situation, we make mental files—for example, for round things, red things, sweet things, or crisp things. We then save the information about that type of situation in our memories. The next time we encounter that type of situation, we simply go to our memory files. There, by cross-referencing, we discover: “Apple. Ah! Good to eat.” All generalizations are built up in this way.

Scientists now know that most of the concepts we use to recognize and respond to things are concepts we were taught by the mentors and role models we had as children; we don’t discover very many concepts on our own. Our childhood programming teaches us how to cognize things. After that, almost always, we don’t cognize things, only recognize them. (Why our childhood mentors programmed us in the ways they did will be explored in upcoming chapters.)

Empiricists claim that all human knowing and thinking happens in this way. Watch the world. Notice the patterns that repeat. Store them up in memories. Pull the memories out when they fit, then use them to make smart decisions and react effectively to life. 

Remember what works and keep trying. For individuals and nations, according to the empiricists, that’s how life goes. The most effective way of human life, the way that makes this common-sense process rigorously logical and keeps getting good results, is Science.