Theories Of Empiricism

1. Empiricism is the theory that the origin of all knowledge is sense experience. It emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, and argues that the only knowledge humans can have is a posteriori (i.e. based on experience). Most empiricists also discount the notion of innate ideas or innatism (the idea that the mind is born with ideas or knowledge and is not a "blank slate" at birth).

2.Ontology and Epistemology are probably the most complex terms that one might come across while studying philosophy. Ontology and Epistemology are branches of philosophy. Let us try and simplify these complex topics. The word ontology is derived from the Greek words ‘ontos’ which means being and

We might call Locke the “founder of modern empiricism” for the way he steered philosophy, at least in Britain, away from the rationalism of continental Europe (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) and toward empiricism. Like Aristotle, Locke considered our minds to be a “blank slate” (tabula rasa) prior to experiences from our senses. We have sensations of the world and reflections on the workings of our own minds that result in simple ideas (each part of a flower, the color blue). Our minds then rightly connect simple ideas into more complex ideas (a blue flower). At the same time, Locke continued to believe that the things we experience have “substance” behind them. The substance behind our sensations is matter, and the substance behind our reflections is mind. Thus like Descartes he believed that the world consisted of two basic substances, mind and matter, in a mind-body

W. V. O. Quine (1908-2000) did not conceive of philosophy as an activity separate from the general province of empirical science. His interest in science is not best described as a philosophy of science but as a set of reflections on the nature of science that is pursued with the same empirical spirit that animates scientific inquiry. Quine’s philosophy should then be seen as a systematic attempt to understand science from within the resources of science itself. This project investigates both the epistemological and ontological dimensions of scientific theorizing. Quine’s epistemological concern is to examine our successful acquisition of scientific theories, while his ontological interests focus on the further logical regimentation of that theory. He thus advocates what is more famously known as ‘naturalized epistemology’, which consists of his attempt to provide an improved scientific explanation of how we have developed elaborate scientific theories on the basis of meager sensory input. Quine further argues that the most general features of reality can be examined through the use of formal logic by clarifying what objects we must acknowledge as real given our acceptance of an overarching systematic view of the world. In pursuing these issues, Quine reformulates and thus transforms these philosophical concerns according to those standards of clarity, empirical adequacy, and utility that he takes as central to the explanatory power of empirical science. While few