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The term empiricism refers to both a philosophical approach toward understanding the world and the principles and methods that ground modern scientific practices. The philosophy of empiricism, which was first stated by Aristotle and other classical philosophers, came to fruition in the writings of Enlightenment-era scholars including David Hume and John Locke. A key philosophical question at the time was whether knowledge should be generated based on experience, as the empiricists argued, or on a combination of intellect and intuition, as proposed by rationalists such as Rene Descartes. An increased acceptance of the empirical approach to understanding the world fostered the growth both of modern science and the Industrial Revolution.
Empiricist philosophy has become codified as modern principles of scientific inquiry which include the formulation of verifiable hypotheses that are tested through unbiased and repeatable experiments. While physical sciences allow for precise measurement of phenomena of interest, this is more difficult in the social sciences for several reasons, including the ”observer effect,” where people who are aware they are under scientific observation may change their behaviors to conform with or thwart researcher expectations, and the fact that the effects of social pressures cannot be measured directly. The founders of sociology, including Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, helped create an empirical approach to studying society when they addressed these issues.
Durkheim helped found the scientific approach to the study of society with his publication Rules of Sociological Method in 1895, which explains that sociology rests on the observation and measurement of the effects of social forces on people through measurable phenomena such as crime and suicide rates. The hermeneutic approach to sociology provides an alternative approach toward understanding the effects of society on human behavior, by using methods such as interviews, textual analysis, and self-observation to understand social phenomena. Max Weber is considered a foundational researcher in this approach primarily as a result of his study The Protestant Ethic, which argued that the Protestant belief system provided a strong foundation for the growth of capitalism.
The scientific approach to sociology popularized by Durkheim and the hermeneutic approach roughly correspond to the modern quantitative and qualitative approaches to sociology. Within each of these camps there is a further division over the role that social theory should play in driving social research. Researchers who support the deductive or ”theory-driven” approach argue that studies should focus on testing existing social theories, while supporters of the inductive or ”data-driven” approach argue that researchers should approach social phenomena with few preconceived notions and then allow their theories and research questions to evolve over the course of their research.
Bibliography:
- Durkheim, (1982) [1895] Rules of Sociological Method. Free Press, New York.
- Weber, M. (2001) [1905] The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Routledge, New York.
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