Empiricism (CR Critique)

Empiricism is the doctrine that knowledge derives from sensory experience: we observe the world and our theories are built up from, and supported by, what we see. In its strong, inductivist form it pairs with induction to claim that repeated observations justify general conclusions, treating the mind as a passive receptacle into which nature pours data.

Critical Rationalism attacks the core mechanism, not the use of evidence. Popper argued there is no such pouring-in: all observation is selective and theory-laden. You cannot just “observe” — you must first have ideas telling you what to look at and how to interpret it, because reality offers vastly more detail than attention can hold. So sense data never arrive raw or self-certifying; interpretations are fallible like any other guess and cannot serve as a justificatory foundation. This is the empiricist version of the broader rejection of justificationism.

What CR keeps is the role of evidence as a tool of criticism. Experiment can refute a hypothesis that contradicts it, but it never supports or confirms one — there is evidence against, not evidence for. Empirical testing is therefore one important source of criticism within conjecture and refutation, not a separate inductive engine.

CF inherits this position and sharpens the contrast with reason versus observation: it insists that explanation and non-empirical criticism do real work even in science, so testing alone is never sufficient. CF criticizes strong empiricism alongside inductivism, rejecting the idea that experience can substitute for structured argument and error correction.