Empiricism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Empiricism is an epistemology, or theory of knowledge, that claims that the foundation of all knowledge is ultimately located in the human sense experience of the world. Invariably, empirical theories offer a method for distinguishing between those forms of experience that are valid, reliable, and fundamental and that represent how the world really is from those forms of experience that tend to mislead us about the world. In addition to being a form of foundationalism, empirical theories of knowledge have tended to essentialism as well. Essentialism is the idea that there is a single quality or set of qualities that define an object, phenomenon, or experience, that is, that constitute the phenomenon as it is most essentially.

Empiricism is often contrasted with rationalism. Rationalist theories of knowledge claim that the foundation of all knowledge is ultimately traceable to the ability of human reason to identify the essential truth of the world by pure reason alone. In other words, the foundations of knowledge, as Rene Descartes tried to prove, are knowable a priori, prior to experience. It is important to keep in mind that empiricists do not deny the usefulness of human reason. They claim only that pure reason alone cannot identify what is most foundational in knowledge. Similarly, rationalists do not deny the usefulness of empirical observation. They do insist that observation does not represent what is most essentially true about the world.

Modern Empiricism

Modern empiricism begins with the work of John Locke. Locke argued in his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1690) that when human beings enter the world, their minds are blank slates, void of any ideas or understanding. Through contact with the world by means of the senses, the human mind becomes inscribed with experience of the world around it. In recording this experience, or sense data, the human mind often reflects on it, combining or dividing various sensations, examining those sensations from a variety of perspectives or in light of other sensations. But the human mind cannot provide anything new to the collection of sense data with which it is inscribed.

David Hume, a Scottish philosopher, offered a more thorough account of empiricism. Hume argued in his similarly titled 1766 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding that all statements that claim to embody knowledge can be divided into two categories, statements about relations between ideas (e.g., logic or mathematics) and statements of fact about the external world that could be tested for their truth and error. Statements of fact were tested relying on sense impressions, which themselves are organized in the human mind by three principles of association. Associations of resemblance cause us to connect sense impressions that resemble one another. Associations of contiguity enable us to connect sensations of objects or experiences that are in close proximity to one another. But most important are associations of cause and effect. Our experience of the world leads us to recognize that some events are always or very often preceded by other events. In such cases we are led to associate the first with the latter, which is understood as the cause of the former. This, for Hume, was what was most important in science, the accumulation of experience based on causal relationships.

In the twentieth century, empiricism was updated in the work of logical positivists. Logical positivists claimed that many of the traditional problems of knowledge, including empiricism, were problems related to language. Drawing on both Hume and Immanuel Kant, they argued that all meaningful statements are of two types: analytic or synthetic. Analytic statements are those that are true by virtue of the meaning of the terms (e.g., all bachelors are unmarried). Synthetic statements are those that claim to tell us something substantive about the world and are open to verification. Logical positivists argued that statements that fall into neither category are meaningless because they have no cognitive value; they convey no factual information about the world. Among those statements that they deemed to be meaningless are statements of ultimate principles concerning values, ethics, religion, politics, aesthetics, and morality.

The Behavioral Revolution

In the post–World War II period, a new generation of political scientists called behaviorists, adopting the logical positivist criteria for meaningful and meaningless statements, attempted to establish an empirical, scientific approach to the study of politics. Behavioralists argued that the traditional study of politics had relied too heavily on an examination of the power and authority of formal institutions and on the history of political thought. Moreover, the traditional approach was often preoccupied by normative questions related to morality and ethics rather than to offering a scientific description of the political world. A more robust scientific approach would focus on the behavior of political actors including voters and informal institutions, such as interest groups and political parties, as well as the actual behavior of those who occupied positions within for mal institutions, such as legislators and judges. It would also divest itself of normative questions that had traditionally preoccupied political philosophy.

The ideal that drove what became known as the behavioral revolution was adopted from the natural sciences. If a single, theoretical perspective could be adopted by the entire profession of political science, including fundamental, shared concepts, then political science could become a cumulative science in much the same way the natural sciences had become. Toward that end, behavioralism stressed the importance of the operationalization of the terms of political discourse. This required that concepts be defined in ways that allowed investigators to use them to describe precisely the political world. As such, they had to demonstrate two qualities: reliability and validity. Validity refers to the idea that a concept actually describes what it claims to describe. Reliability refers to the idea that a concept can be used to achieve the same results by a range of investigators. For example, in physics, Force = Mass × Acceleration (F = ma) would be an example of a term that both is valid (it measures force rather than some other quality such as momentum) and is used by physicists throughout the world. By the late 1960s behavioralism had become the dominant theoretical perspective in the profession of political science. Despite the substantial presence that it had, however, several reservations remained, and competing theoretical perspectives emerged to challenge behavioralism and the empiricist philosophy of science on which it relied.

Competing Perspectives

First, no sooner had logical positivism established itself as a dominant theory of knowledge than it was challenged internally. Specifically, Willard Van Orman Quine argued that the analytic-synthetic dichotomy that was the basis for distinguishing between meaningful and meaningless statements was linguistically unsustainable. One implication of this is that a dichotomy between facts and values, between descriptive and normative discourse, is similarly unsustainable. Moreover, the assumption that truth claims can be reduced to statements in a neutral vocabulary about an independent, objective world is similarly unsustainable, according to Quine. Adding to this line of argument, Wilfred Sellars argued that empiricism was mistaken in assuming what he referred to as the “myth of the given.” This is the assumption that the knowable world exists prepackaged in ways that our language can merely represent. In effect, both Quine and Sellars were challenging the very foundations of empiricism. These and similar developments led philosophers such as Richard Rorty to argue that the entire foundationalism and essentialist projects that characterized empiricism needed to be abandoned.

Second, and drawing in part on the work of Quine,Thomas Kuhn argued that the empiricist philosophy of science was inconsistent with the historical record of scientific revolutions. This is because empiricism failed to take seriously enough the ways in which theory determines evidence and disqualifies or ignores those truth claims that are inconsistent with the theoretical assumptions of a given paradigm.

Third, from within the behavioralist ranks, some political scientists argued that the drive for basic science made much of political science irrelevant in addressing pressing problems that the United States faced. David Easton, one of the leading proponents of behavioralism, made a case for what he called postbehavioralism. The latter, while not abandoning the scientific principles that behavioralism embraced, would turn its attention to issues that the United States and the world faced, such as poverty, civil rights, the Vietnam War (1959–1975), nuclear proliferation, and so forth.

Finally, a range of competing theoretical perspectives emerged to challenge the very foundations of behavioralism and its empirical approach to the description and explanation of political life. Rational choice theory, Straussianism, critical social theory, genealogical (sometimes referred to as postmodern) theories, and interpretive or hermeneutic approaches combined to challenge empiricism, and positivism generally, on a number of issues. Among these are the nature of political explanation; the essential contestability of the vocabulary of political science, the fact-value dichotomy; issues of culturalconceptual imperialism; and the significance of history for the nature of political life. The result has been the emergence of a theoretical and methodological pluralism that contests the older positivist will to a methodologically defined discipline of political science.

Despite these challenges, empiricism remains one of the dominant, if not the dominant, paradigm in political science. What remains to be answered is how it will respond to the growing challenges to its preeminence, whether its proponents will pursue an ethos of exclusion of other perspectives or an ethos of engaged dialogue with other perspectives.

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