Empiricism is a doctrine that professes that all knowledge is based on experience or observation.
Contrary to the claim that the human mind possesses innate ideas, John Locke and other empiricists accept that by birth reason is a tabula rasa (pure plate) and the only ideas it can possess are those acquired in the course of experience.
Some empiricists (such as Charles S. Peirce) accept, however, that even if certain ideas are innate rather than derived from experience, they can only be verified if they are related to experience. For these empiricists, the fit (not the origin) of our ideas is crucial.
Empiricism is sometimes used in a negative sense to denote the naive orientation of those who claim that the facts speak for themselves and hence that the task of interpretation can be avoided. In contrast to this orientation, others not only argue that facts need to be interpreted, but that what is taken for granted is changing.
For them, facts are the product of complex processes involving intervention (for example, the experiments of physicists or the observations of anthropologists).
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