EMPIRICISM, is the philosophical doctrine that emphasizes the role of experience in human knowledge and minimizes the role of reason. The term “empiricism” is derived from the Greek word empeiria, meaning trial or experience. Empiricism as a doctrine is opposed to rationalism. To understand the doctrine, it is important to distinguish two central theories that are characteristic of empirical philosophies: a theory of meaning and a theory of knowledge.

经验主义，是强调经验在人类知识中的作用，并贬低理性作用的哲学学说。“经验”这个词源自希腊单词empeiria，表示试验或体验。经验主义作为一种学说与理性主义相对立。要理解该学说，重要的是区分具有经验哲学的两种中心理论：意义理论和知识理论。

Theory of Meaning. The empiricist theory of meaning has traditionally been stated as a theory about the genesis of our ideas or concepts. In Middle Ages it was summarized in the formula Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu (“Nothing is in the intellect that has not been previously in sensation”). This was essentially thesis of John Locke’s epoch-making polemic, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), against the rationalist doctrine of innate ideas. The mind at birth, Locke maintained, is like a blank sheet of paper, or tabula rasa, and every idea that it acquires must come from experience—either from vision, hearing, taste, touch, and other sense experiences or from observing the operations of our own minds by means of what Locke called “inner sense.”.

意义理论。经验主义的意义理论在传统上被陈述为一种有关我们观念或概念的起源。在中世纪，它在惯用语词中被概括为Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu (“在智力中没有任何东西是以前所没有感知过的”)。本质上，这是约翰·络克反对先天观念的理性主义学说，划时代论战的《人类理解论》（1690年）的主题。洛克认为，出生时的思想就像一张空白纸，或白板，而它获得的每一个观念都必须来自经验—要么来自视觉、听觉、触觉以及其它感官体验，要么借助于洛克的所谓“内在感觉”来观察我们自己的思想运作。

David Hume, who restated this theory about the genesis of ideas in the opening paragraphs of his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), gave it greater strength and precision by drawing a distinction between ideas and IMPRESSIONS. All our ideas, he said, come from IMPRESSIONS, and IMPRESSIONS are defined to include sensations, passions, and emotions, as they occur in their original vividness.

大卫·休谟在其《人性论》（1739年）的开篇段落中，重申了这种观念的起源理论，通过对观念和印象进行区分，赋予了观念更大的强度和精度。他说，我们的所有观念都来自印象，定义的印象包括感觉、激情和情绪，因为它们以其新颖的生动性出现。

The contrasting rationalist position to which Locke and Hume were opposed is clearly stated in the writings of Rene Descartes and other 17^th century rationalist. Descartes distinguished two functions of the human reason: a discursive function that enables us to draw conclusions from premises, and an intuitive function that enables us to grasp certain ultimate truths and concepts directly. Although many of our ideas are acquired through sense experience, there are some—notably the idea of the soul and the idea of material substance—that must be acquired a priori (that is, independently of experience) by means of rational intuition.  

与洛克和休谟的反对形成对比的理性主义立场在勒奈·笛卡尔和其他17世纪理性主义者的著作中得到了明确阐述。笛卡尔区分了人类理性的两种功能：能使我们从前提中得出结论的话语功能，和能使我们直接掌握某些终极真理的直觉功能。尽管我们的许多观念是通过感官体验获得的—但有些观念，尤其是灵魂的观念和物质实质的观念—必须通过理性直觉先验地（换言之，不受制于经验）来获得。

In the 20^th century, empiricists have tended to formulate their theory of meaning not by reference to the genesis of our concepts, but by reference to the experiences that determine whether a concept has been applied correctly. One outstanding example of this change of emphasis is the pragmatic theory of meaning, which was originally formulated by Charles Sanders Peirce in the maxim: “Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical hearings you conceive the object of your conception to have. Then, your conception of these effects is the whole of your conception of the object.”

在20世纪，经验主义者倾向于不参照我们概念的起源，而是参照决定概念是否被正确应用的经验来构想他们的意义理论。这种重要性改变的一个著名例子是意义的语用理论，它起初是由查尔斯·桑德斯·皮尔斯在格言中表达的：”考虑一下，你设想了你所拥有的概念对象可能会产生什么样的实际听证效果。那么，你对这些效果的概念就是你对该对象的全部概念。“

The verifiability theory of meaning, which is closely associated with the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the school of logical positivism, represents a very similar position. However an empiricist theory of meaning is formulated, there are certain basic terms that are usually excluded as meaningless unless reinterpreted in a purely empirical way. This for the typical empiricist the soul can be conceived only as a stream of conscious experiences, matter only as a pattern of sensible qualities, and necessary causal connections only as uniform sequences of events.

意义的可验证性理论，与路德维希·维特根斯坦的哲学和逻辑实证主义学派密切相关，代表了一种非常相似的立场。无论怎样阐述经验主义的意义理论，由于毫无意义，有些基本术语通常是被排除在外的，除非用纯粹的经验主义方法来重新解释。对于典型的经验主义者来说，这种灵魂只能构想为一连串意识的体验，只作为一种理智品质的模式，并且只作为事件的统一序列必要的因果联接。

Theory of Knowledge. Whatever the source of our concepts, further question arises concerning the source of human knowledge and the justification of our beliefs. Rationalists have traditionally maintained that there are some general truths such as “Every event has a cause,” the elementary propositions of mathematics, and sometimes the basic principles of ethics, which are self-evident and known a priori by means of rational intuition. Empiricists have denied that we have such a faculty of rational intuition. They have usually conceded, however, that the truths of mathematics are indeed a priori and thus to be sharply distinguished from the truths of physics, biology, psychology, and other natural sciences. In the natural sciences our knowledge is obtained a posteriori by means of experimentation, observation, and induction, whereas this experimental method has no place in the solution of problems of pure mathematics.

知识的理论。无论我们概念的来源是什么，关于人类知识的来源和我们信仰的理由会出现进一步的问题。传统上，理性主义者认为，有一些普遍的真理，诸如“凡事皆有原因”，数学的基本命题，以及间或伦理学的基本原则。经验主义者否认我们有这样的理性直觉能力。然而，他们通常承认数学真理确实是先验的，从而认为与物理学、生物学、心理学及其它自然科学的真理截然不同。在自然科学中，我们的知识是通过实验、观察和归纳后验所得，而这种实验方法在解决纯数学问题时没有立足之地。

To account for this distinction the empiricist usually maintains that the truths of mathematics are merely propositions that EXPRESS the relations of meaning that hold among our concepts. Thus “2+2=4” is true simple because of the way “2,” “plus,” “equals,” and “4” are defined, and the theorems of geometry are true simply because of the way such terms as “line,” “point,” and “between” are defined. In other words, all such mathematical propositions have the same epistemic status as the statement “Every wife has a husband,” which is true because a wife is defined as a woman who has a husband. They are all, in a broad sense of the word, tautologies. Hume stated this empiricist theory of mathematics by distinguishing between “relations of ideas” and “matters of fact”: the propositions of mathematics merely EXPRESS the relations among our ideas or concepts, whereas all knowledge about matters of fact (that is, about the actual world) must be derived from experience.

为解释这种区别，经验主义者通常认为数学真理仅仅是在我们的概念中拥有的表达意义关系的命题。因此，“2+2=4”为真，很简单，是因为定义“2“，”加“，”等于”和“4”的方式，而几何定理为真，很简单，是因为定义“线”，“点”和“介于两者之间空间”这种术语的方式。换句话说，所有的这种数学命题都具有与陈述“每个妻子都有丈夫”相同的认识状态，该陈述为真，因为妻子被定义为有丈夫的女人。从该词的广义上说，它们都是重言式。休谟通过区分“观念关系”和“事实问题“阐述了这种经验主义理论”：数学命题仅仅是表达了我们的观念或概念之间的关系，而有关事实问题的所有知识（换言之，关于现实世界）必须来自经验。

Immanuel Kant’s use of the terms “analytic” and “synthetic” has enabled subsequent philosophers to state the issue even more precisely. A judgment is analytic, as Kant uses the word, if it can be shown to be true merely by analysis of the concepts in it. A judgment is synthetic, on the contrary, if its predicate really adds something new to the subject. Using these terms, therefore, we may define an empiricist as one who believes that all rational (a priori) truths are analytic. Kant’s own Critique of Purfe Reason (1781; revised 1787) is a defense of the rationalistic thesis that there are some synthetic a priori truths. However, Kant denies that these truths extend beyond the range of possible human experience.

伊曼努尔·康德使用的“分析”和综合“术语使后来的哲学家更加准确地阐述该问题成为了可能。正如康德使用的这个词，如果仅仅通过该词中的概念就可以证明它为真，那么判断就是分析的。反之，如果其谓语确实为主语增加了新东西，那么判断就是综合的。因此，使用这些术语，我们可以将经验主义者定义为他认为所有理性的（先验的）真理都是分析的。康德自己的《纯粹理性判断》（1781年；1787年修订）是对存在的一些综合先验真理的理性主义论题的辩护。然而，康德否认这些真理超出了人类可能的经验范围。

After 1940, certain philosophers, notably Willard Van Orman Quine and Morton Gabriel White in the United States, challenged the validity of the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic. They suggested the possibility of an empiricism even more thoroughgoing than that of Hume—an empiricism that would deny a priori knowledge altogether.

1940年之后，某些哲学家，尤其是美国的威拉德·范·奥曼·奎因和莫顿·加布里埃尔·怀特对分析与综合之间区分的有效性提出了质疑。他们提出了比休谟更彻底的经验主义的可能性—一种会完全否认先验知识的经验主义。

See also EPISTEMOLOGY; LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS; PRAGMATISM.

                                       RODERICK FIRTH

                                       Harvard University

                                         2024年5月5日译

（译者注：该词条位列《大美百科全书》1985年版，第10卷，第315页至316页）