Giselle asked:

What is empiricism?

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It ís about time this question was asked. There is no empirical answer to the question, what is
empiricism? That is a good thing. If there were we could find the answer by weighing or measuring
something or by performing an experiment or solving an equation. But we can't. We could always go
to a dictionary or to an encyclopedia but that would be easier than asking a philosopher.

Take stuff. For an empiricist, stuff is the sort of stuff you can kick or bite or taste or smell or see 'that
sort of thing' and the world is mostly made of it. Or appears to be. Other sorts of stuff, meanings,
beliefs, intentions you cannot really do that with. And there is another kind of stuff, even more remote
than meanings and beliefs, etc., that you cannot bite or kick either and this is made up of
things-in-themselves (ultimately real things, where our questions stop). Kant called these noumena
and contrasted them with phenomena which we are able to rub up against or which manifest
themselves directly through our sensory mechanisms.

If you try to see beyond the surface of a thing (by scraping the paint off, for example) you just run up
against another surface, this time unpainted, which also refracts light which impinges on your retinas,
optic nerve, cortex, and much more, but ít doesn't get you any closer to the real stuff, because the
light refracted by the paint did the very same thing and you are no farther along. The real stuff cannot
be got at by scraping the paint or peeling the banana. So you might as well have stopped there
unless you want to eat the banana. Then it should be peeled.

Plato thought this was a bad thing. He derided sense experience as providing us with only bad copies
of real stuff, the Platonic forms or eide. These you can't see or bite, etc. They are unchanging and
timeless. Mere stuff, stuff in the world, depends on them. The world is constructed top down. In
empiricism it is constructed bottom up, starting with sense data, or sense experience, and ending,
perhaps, in abstract concepts, such as humanity, by a route that has yet to be convincingly explained.

Paul Trevor