Grounded Empiricism

Votsis, Ioannis (2025) Grounded Empiricism. European Journal for Philosophy of Science. ISSN 1879-4912 (In Press)

Abstract

Empiricism has a long and venerable history. Aristotle, the Epicureans, Sextus Empiricus, Bacon, Locke, Hume, Mill, Mach and the Logical Empiricists, among others, represent a long line of historically influential empiricists who, one way or another, placed an emphasis on knowledge gained through the senses. In recent times the most highly articulated and influential edition of empiricism is undoubtedly Bas van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism. Science, according to this view, aims at empirically adequate theories, i.e. theories that save all and only the observable phenomena. Roughly put, something is observable in van Fraassen’s view if members of the human epistemic community can detect it with their unaided senses. Critics have contested this notion, citing, among other reasons, that much of what counts as knowledge for scientists, especially in the natural sciences, concerns things that are detectable only with instruments, i.e. things that are unobservable and hence unknowable by van Fraassen’s lights. The current paper admits the objection’s judiciousness and, in reaction, investigates what gives sensory organs epistemic credibility. It turns out that their credibility can be traced to some principles that are also satisfied by certain instruments. On the basis of this work, a liberalised conception of observability is proposed and defended, along with a closely linked, and accordingly liberalised, conception of empiricism. ‘Grounded observability’ and ‘grounded empiricism’, as we call them, remain true to the spirit of empiricism, but acknowledge that epistemic credibility extends far beyond biological sensory organs to include scientific instruments.

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