Why What You Experience is Everything

Have you ever stopped to think about how you know what you know? For instance, how do you know that snow is cold, or that fire is hot? How do you know that the sky is blue or that lemons are sour? If you think about it, you might realise that you know these things because you’ve experienced them with your senses. You’ve felt the cold snow, felt the heat of a fire, seen the blue sky, and tasted a sour lemon. According to a philosophical idea called empiricism, this is how we get all our knowledge about the world around us.

What is Empiricism?

Put simply, empiricism is the view that all the knowledge we have about anything that actually exists comes from experience. This means that our senses – sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch – are the fundamental way we learn about the world. Empiricism is based on the idea that our minds are not born with knowledge already in them. Instead, our minds are like a blank slate, or a blank tablet, when we are born, and experience is what writes on this blank slate.

From this perspective, the raw information about the world comes to us through our senses, and our perception of this information is the starting point for us to form ideas and beliefs. As we gather information from our experiences, our knowledge starts simple and then becomes more complex as we reason about these observations.

Knowledge Comes from Experience

The central belief of empiricism is that all knowledge is based on, or tightly connected to, experience that we get from our senses. This kind of knowledge, which requires us to investigate and observe how things actually are in the world, is sometimes called a posteriori knowledge. To check if a statement like ‘coal is black’ is true, you need to look at a lump of coal. This is an example of needing experience to establish truth.

Some philosophers who support empiricism believe that experience is the only source of significant knowledge. Even though they might agree that we have the ability to reason, they think that this ability works on the information provided by our senses. Without the raw data from experience, our reason would have nothing to work with.

Think about learning what a tree is. According to this view, you don’t know what a tree is just by being born. Instead, you gain knowledge by experiencing many different trees with your senses. You see their shapes and colours, feel the roughness of their bark, and maybe smell the forest. Your senses give you impressions of these particular things. Then, by using your ability to reason, you can take these experiences of individual trees and form a general idea or concept of what a tree is. You build up your ideas from the information your senses transmit to your mind.

Rejecting Knowledge Before Experience

Empiricism stands in contrast to another philosophical idea called rationalism. Rationalism suggests that at least some knowledge can be gained without relying on the senses, purely through the use of reason. Rationalists often believe that humans are born with some fundamental principles and knowledge already present in their minds – ideas that are ‘innate’.

However, empiricists strongly reject this idea of innate knowledge. They argue that if humans were born with innate knowledge, we would expect certain principles to be universally accepted by everyone. But, looking at the world, we see that people differ in their ideas, for example, in their moral ideas. Empiricists suggest that there is no empirical evidence to support the idea that minds are anything other than blank at birth. The ability to apply reason to sensory information is all that is brought to the process.

Even if some ideas seemed to be universal, empiricists would argue that this universality could be explained by the fact that all humans share the most basic ways of experiencing the world, not by claiming the ideas were innate.

Experience as the Guide to Truth

According to the empiricist perspective, while rationalists rely on reason alone, which can be seen as unreliable, the information we gather directly through our senses serves as the fundamental guide to what is actually true about the world. Seeing and touching a familiar object is considered a more reliable way to gain knowledge than relying solely on unaided reason. Knowledge that is empirical is knowledge acquired by observation or experience rather than through reasoning alone.

Some empiricists argue that even when it comes to complex reasoning, the conclusions we draw are based on the simple ideas formed from the impressions our senses create. Therefore, even complex knowledge is ultimately tied back to sensory experience. For empiricists, all claims to knowledge ultimately have to answer to perception. It’s not possible to have knowledge without perception. In perception, we are in contact with objects around us that affect us, and this contact is the source of our knowledge.

In contrast with the idea that knowledge comes solely from reason, if you were presented with something entirely new to you, no amount of pure reasoning could tell you its causes or effects; you would need experience.

Finding Certainty in the Immediate

For empiricists, the certainty we can find is rooted in our immediate experience. The information we get directly from our senses, such as sensations, feelings, and emotions, forms the basis of our understanding. While complex ideas might be copies or combinations of these basic impressions, the impressions themselves are the most direct contact we have with reality.

This focus on immediate, direct perception is seen by some as the reliable foundation for knowledge, as opposed to the potentially shaky ground of abstract reason or inferred truths. It is the information that comes to us without requiring complex chains of reasoning or relying on supposed innate knowledge. This emphasis on experience as the source of truth set the stage for many scientific and philosophical advancements.

Sensations Are All We Directly Interact With

Most people naturally assume that physical objects are pretty much how we perceive them to be. But some empiricists challenge this. They propose that we only have direct access to the inner ‘ideas’ or ‘sense data’ that our senses provide. So, what seems like a solid, material apple is, in our experience, a collection of these sensations – the redness, the round shape, the smooth feel, and the sweet smell. These sensations are all we directly interact with.

From this perspective, the world as we experience it is a world of ideas or sensations. When you perceive a house, a mountain, or a river, what you are directly aware of are the sensible qualities of these things as they appear in your mind. Some philosophers who took this view went so far as to conclude that reality consists only of minds and their ideas. They argued that there’s nothing “behind the veil” of our perceptions to connect with. In this view, the only “substance” we directly encounter in our experience is experience itself, or the contents of the mind.

This way of thinking doesn’t necessarily mean that a world made of physical matter doesn’t exist. It simply highlights that our direct knowledge and our experience are limited to the realm of sensations and ideas within our minds. We don’t have direct evidence of a material world existing independently of being perceived. Our sensory perceptions are always open to interpretation and could be influenced by the structure of our own minds.

To imagine or understand what a world truly independent of our minds and senses might be like, we would theoretically need to strip away everything that is contributed by our perception and thought – all the colours, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures that seem to reside only in consciousness. The challenge is that this is impossible to do!