Empiricism

Empiricism is a long-standing and highly influential philosophy, particularly within geography, which begins with the assertion that the only valid form of knowledge is experience and sense perception. That which is not observable is held to be nonexistent or meaningless.

Although its origins may be traced to scholars such as Francis Bacon, empiricism was largely a child of the British Enlightenment, in which intellectuals such as John Locke, David Hume, and George Berkeley emphasized the primacy of logic and empirical reality in the face of medieval metaphysics—that is, evidence rather than faith; in this sense, empiricism was a progressive ideology in its day. British empiricists also deployed the philosophy in their debates with continental rationalists such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, who held that knowledge came from innate ideas alone. Without sensations and experience, empiricists maintained, the mind would have nothing to work with.

At the core of empiricism is the notion that statements about the world, that is, claims regarding sensations and data, are true or false without appeal to theory. The word data derives from the Latin dar, “to give,” indicating that data are given, not made. In this view, a fact is simply a statement about what is, an assertion of verified information that exists beyond reasonable doubt. (Ironically, the Latin factus refers to that which is made, not simply given.) There is thus an iron wall that separates facts and opinions, which empiricists dismiss as subjective. Facts—and the truths they lead to-exist independent of their interpretation and are thus true whether or not anyone knows or believes them, indicating that truth has an objective existence independent of the knower.

Empiricism shares some aspects with logical positivism, which also holds to a sharp dichotomy between fact and theory, the objective and the subjective, and a disregard for the role of the observing subject. However, unlike empiricism, positivism maintained a healthy regard for theory, particularly deduction, the view that if the premises of an argument are true, then so must be its conclusions. Deduction is thus the move from the abstract to the concrete; in this view, an observation is true because it consists of a special case of a broader principle. Empiricism, however, generally subscribes to inductive, not deductive, logic, that is, the attempt to move from the observed to the unobserved, from the concrete to the abstract, from the specific to the general, from pattern to prediction. The explanatory basis of empiricism is the attempt to form generalizations without explanations. Unlike rationalism or logical positivism, empiricism holds that all conclusions are only probable or tentative and cannot be known with certainty, introducing a degree of skepticism and humility. Moreover, empiricism offered a healthy distrust of theoretical overdetermination and armchair speculation.

Empiricism has been a long-standing tradition in geography; for most of the discipline's existence, it consisted of little more than the encyclopedic collection of data. The philosophy reached its zenith during the heyday of chorology in the early to mid 20th century and particularly in the work of Richard Hartshorne. In this line of thought, geography was the integrative but static description of regions, and explanation was the province of other disciplines. Empiricist geography tended to celebrate the unique and idiographic at the expense of the abstract and theoretical, and the discipline acquired a popular reputation for being an analytical dead end.

...