Main Philosophical Directions

Directions of Epistemological Theory

Naive Empiricism

The development of philosophical thought has yielded three general responses to the questions of the origin and essence of knowledge, indicating three possible theoretical directions of cognition. The first of these responses, in its broadest form, states: "All knowledge arises from experience." According to the second, "True knowledge has its source in thought or in those faculties of our mind from which thought arises, as the primary activity of our spirit." The third response posits that "All knowledge is the product of two factors: the material given in experience and the form imparted to this material by our thinking; thus, the possibility of knowledge and its boundaries depend on the relationship between these two factors." The directions defined by these three general responses are empiricism, rationalism, and criticism.

Consequently, "empiricism" is typically understood as any direction that considers experience to be the sole or, at least, the principal source of knowledge. From this limitation, it is evident that this direction allows for various deviations, which are nonetheless usually classified as empiricism as long as they recognize experience as the principal source of knowledge. While this broad interpretation of "empiricism" introduces a degree of ambiguity, this ambiguity is further compounded by the instability of the concept of experience itself: sometimes it refers to any content of knowledge that contains elements given to us rather than produced through our own cognitive functions; at other times, it is attempted to restrict it, to a greater or lesser degree, to that which is exclusively given in our knowledge and not altered by our cognitive functions. The concept of empiricism cannot be freed from this instability, as the development of the empirical direction largely consists in the evolution of the concept of experience. However, within the development of this direction, three characteristic stages can be distinguished: naive, reasoned, and pure empiricism.

Naive empiricism is not only the most primitive stage within the empirical direction but also in philosophy and science overall; it represents a perspective of practical life, from which all science fundamentally arises. At this stage, the concept of experience remains unexplained; countless elements of knowledge, which later reveal themselves to be products of reflection—albeit naive and cursory—are considered directly given and empirical. Therefore, the initial naive empiricism uncritically merges with a similarly naive apriorism, forming a whole that nevertheless retains the fundamental character of empiricism: all content of knowledge here is viewed as empirically given. Hence, the common trait of this stage of knowledge is that elements arising from subjective reflection are classified as part of experience, rather than the reverse. This trait is particularly characteristic of naive empiricism, as it clearly reveals the naivety of such a way of thinking, which stands in complete opposition to the critical distinction between aprioristic and empirical elements. Furthermore, naive empiricism, with its unconscious incorporation of aprioristic elements, not only continues to dominate practical life but is often encountered in the sciences of later times.

However, this perspective gradually begins to recede from the scene from the moment the distinction between the psychological processes of our consciousness emerges—this distinction becomes crucial for subsequent scientific inquiry into reality. Initially, the real life is differentiated from dreams through signs that appear in consciousness once it has transcended the mythological stage of thought. If at this stage the experiences of dreams are still considered another reality, governed by different laws, then in the stage of heightened reflection, tainted by doubt, they transform into phantoms, which, while imitating the existence of things, never fully express it, and thus, due to their contradiction with reality, are gradually deemed invalid. To this distinction is added another that asserts its legitimacy within waking consciousness, free from the unknown conditions accompanying the occurrence of dreams, which undoubtedly contributed to the gradual eradication of mythological understanding; this is the delineation of sensory illusion from reality. Thus, the interrelated concepts of being and phantom, when transferred from dreams to waking consciousness and then back to dreams, long before the emergence of scientific thought, unsettled the immediate belief in the perceived reality, regarding which we might more likely assume, based on general psychological facts, than actually prove, that it represented the first pure form of the naive-empirical mindset.

Therefore, philosophy, even in its earliest beginnings, never manifests as naive empiricism in its original form; it embodies naive empiricism only in that stage of its development where it begins to dissipate, at which doubt in the reality of the directly sensed content of experience emerges. This doubt has played a tremendous role in the evolution of nascent science. With the distinction between phantom and being, which even today characterizes the thinking of children during the first great revolution through which they, in essence, become thinking beings, scientific reflection undoubtedly awakens. This can be observed in the earliest cosmological reasoning of the Greeks. It is imbued with the conviction that the essence of things lies not in the full diversity of the world of phenomena but in some ultimate principle that underlies the connection of the latter; however, here this principle is perceived either, as with the ancient Ionians, in some sensibly perceivable substance, such as water, air, or another indeterminate substrate conceived in analogy with sensory objects, or, as in the teachings of the Pythagoreans, it is attributed certain geometric forms, known also from immediate contemplation. The first movement of thought beyond the limits of this stage of naive empiricism, softened more by the striving for a unified worldview than by doubt, occurs in the teachings of the Eleatics and Heraclitus. However, this movement immediately leads to a chasm that opens before naive thought, as soon as it leaves the secure foundations of immediate reality given in experience and turns to criteria that must distinguish actual existence from deceptive illusion. Inevitably, such being dissolves into an inaccessible concept that renders the genuinely non-existent as real and the unknowable as the object of knowledge. Thus, the immutable being of the Eleatics, as well as Heraclitus's notion of constant becoming, ultimately leads to an absolute negation of empirical reality. Unable to find an exit from the recognized shaky ground of naive empiricism, thought inevitably falls into skepticism.

Younger cosmologists and the metaphysical doctrines that emerged under their influence in the later systems of ancient philosophy avoided this fate only by their resolute intention to resolve the primary problem of knowledge through the synthesis of empirical and rationalist perspectives, which allowed for the establishment of a mediation between the world of phenomena, given in immediate experience, and the real world, acknowledged as the foundation of the latter. In this regard, the influence of naive empiricism manifests in that the fundamental elements of things were established based on truly existing sensory objects: Empedocles’s four elements and Democritus’s atoms were arbitrarily singled out as typical elements—the former from the qualitatively distinct primary types of objects and the latter from the spatial forms of these last. Admittedly, this reflects the need to reduce all inquiry to simple principles, but here there is also an inability to conceive of these simple principles, presented as elements or primary substances, in a manner different from individual empirically given bodies.

Furthermore, amidst these teachings concerning the elements, a new question emerges that gradually unfolds the very problem of knowledge itself: the question of the origin of sensory perception. Whereas previous speculation dealt solely with the essence of empirical objects presented in the objective world, a further issue now arises, specifically regarding how these objects are subjectively possible or how it is that external objects evoke in us images that resemble them in some respect. Empedocles first provided a resolution to this problem in the spirit of naïve empiricism; this was later adopted by Democritus with modifications influenced by his atomic worldview. According to his doctrine, particles or small images of objects, having separated from these objects and penetrated our sense organs, primarily the eyes, produce in the perceiving subject representations that resemble the objects, resembling them precisely because the particles that produce them are akin to the objects themselves. This understanding was largely retained by later philosophers.

If Plato asserted that only similar things can influence one another, then, for instance, light qualities must already be present in the eye from the outset, which, under the influence of external impressions, produce sensations. Moreover, if Aristotle pointed to the activity of a transparent medium, which, situated between the object and the perceiving subject, mediates the act of perception, these further clarifications do not alter the perspective of naïve empiricism. The same can be said regarding Plato's view that sensory experience, in general, provides only a vague and limited understanding of things, as well as Aristotle's teaching that in sensory perception, it is the form of things rather than their matter that affects the perceiver. Despite these assumptions, rooted in an aprioristic mode of thinking, the empirical components of these ancient theories of knowledge nonetheless remain at the stage of naïve empiricism. Therefore, although ancient thought endeavored to provide a positive resolution to the problem of perception, it never transcended this level of empiricism.

Of course, the contradictions engendered by the perspective of naïve empiricism within experience were already felt. Initially, in sophistry, and later in skepticism, it became increasingly evident that the same thing appears different not only to various individuals and to a single individual at different times but also—and this was the most compelling argument—to different senses; for instance, honey seems yellow to our sight and sweet to our taste. However, all these considerations merely led to doubt regarding the objective existence of things in general. They compelled naïve empiricism to transition into skepticism, but they did not succeed in fostering further progress within the empirical direction itself. The basis for such a failure undoubtedly lies in the complete absence of a scientific analysis of phenomena. Aristotle's physics, the most significant work of antiquity in this domain, sought to achieve an understanding of objective processes solely through the analysis of immediately given subjective sensations. However, in this method, a point of view rooted in naïve empiricism is already presupposed, namely, that subjective sensations fully correspond to their objective causes. Consequently, it is impossible to eliminate this perspective through such a method.