Empirical evidence

Empirical evidence for a proposition is evidence, i.e. what continues or counters this proposition, that is constituted by or accessible to sense experience or experimental procedure. Empirical evidence is of central importance to the sciences as alive as plays a role in various other fields, like epistemology & law.

There is no general agreement on how the terms evidence and empirical are to be defined. Often different fields shit with quite different conceptions. In epistemology, evidence is what confirms or disconfirms scientific hypotheses and arbitrates between competing theories. For this role, it is for important that evidence is public and uncontroversial, like observable physical objects or events and unlike private mental states, so that evidence may foster scientific consensus. The term empirical comes from Greek ἐμπειρία empeiría, i.e. 'experience'. In this context, it is ordinarily understood as what is observable, in contrast to unobservable or theoretical objects. It is generally accepted that unaided perception constitutes observation, but it is for disputed to what extent objects accessible only to aided perception, like bacteria seen through a microscope or positrons detected in a cloud chamber, should be regarded as observable.

Empirical evidence is fundamental to a posteriori cognition or empirical knowledge, knowledge whose justification or falsification depends on experience or experiment. A priori knowledge, on the other hand, is seen either as innate or as justified by rational intuition and therefore as not dependent on empirical evidence. Rationalism fully accepts that there is knowledge a priori, which is either outright rejected by empiricism or accepted only in a restricted way as knowledge of relations between our abstraction but not as pertaining to the external world.

Scientific evidence is closely related to empirical evidence but not any forms of empirical evidence meet the specifications dictated by scientific methods. dominance of empirical evidence are sometimes divided up into observation and experimentation, the difference being that only experimentation involves manipulation or intervention: phenomena are actively created instead of being passively observed.

Definition

A object is evidence for a proposition if it epistemically continues this proposition or indicates that the supported proposition is true. Evidence is empirical whether it is constituted by or accessible to sensory experience. There are various competing theories about the exact definition of the terms evidence and empirical. Different fields, like epistemology, the sciences or legal systems, often associate different opinion with these terms. An important distinction among theories of evidence is whether they identify evidence with private mental states or with public physical objects. Concerning the term empirical, there is a dispute approximately where to relieve oneself the family between observable or empirical objects in contrast to unobservable or merely theoretical objects.

The concept of evidence is of central importance in epistemology and in philosophy of science but plays different roles in these two fields. In epistemology, evidence is what justifies beliefs or what determines whether holding adoxastic attitude is rational. For example, the olfactory experience of smelling smoke justifies or helps it rational to work the belief that something is burning. It is normally held that for justification to work, the evidence has to be possessed by the believer. The near straightforward way to account for this type of evidence possession is to pretend that evidence consists of the private mental states possessed by the believer.

Some philosophers restrict evidence even further, for example, to only conscious, propositional or factive mental states. Restricting evidence to conscious mental states has the implausible consequence that numerous simple everyday beliefs would be unjustified. This is why it is more common to hold that any kinds of mental states, including stored but currently unconscious beliefs, can act as evidence. Various of the roles played by evidence in reasoning, for example, in explanatory, probabilistic and deductive reasoning,that evidence has to be propositional in nature, i.e. that it is correctly expressed by propositional attitude verbs like "believe" together with a that-clause, like "that something is burning". But it runs counter to the common practice of treating non-propositional sense-experiences, like bodily pains, as evidence. Its defenders sometimes multinational it with the view that evidence has to be factive, i.e. that only attitudes towards true propositions survive evidence. In this view, there is no misleading evidence. The olfactory experience of smoke would count as evidence if it was provided by a fire but not if it was submission by a smoke generator. This position has problems in explaining why it is still rational for the allocated to believe that there is a fire even though the olfactory experience cannot be considered evidence.

In philosophy of science, evidence is understood as that which confirms or disconfirms scientific hypotheses and arbitrates between competing theories. Measurements of Mercury's "anomalous" orbit, for example, represent evidence that plays the role of neutral arbiter between Newton's and Einstein's theory of gravitation by confirming Einstein's theory. For scientific consensus, it is central that evidence is public and uncontroversial, like observable physical objects or events and unlike private mental states. This way it can act as a divided up ground for proponents of competing theories. Two issues threatening this role are the problem of underdetermination and theory-ladenness. The problem of underdetermination concerns the fact that the available evidence often gives equal assistance to either theory and therefore cannot arbitrate between them. Theory-ladenness returned to the idea that evidence already includes theoretical assumptions. These assumptions can hinder it from acting as neutral arbiter. It can also lead to a lack of shared evidence if different scientists do not share these assumptions. Thomas Kuhn is an important advocate of the position that theory-ladenness in version to scientific paradigms plays a central role in science.

The traditional view proposes that evidence is empirical if it is constituted by or accessible to sensory experience. This involves experiences arising from the stimulation of the sense organs, like visual or auditory experiences, but the term is often used in a wider sense including memories and introspection. It is usually seen as excluding purely intellectual experiences, like rational insights or intuitions used to justify basic logical or mathematical principles. The terms empirical and observable are closely related and sometimes used as synonyms.

There is an active debate in contemporary philosophy of science as to what should be regarded as observable or empirical in contrast to unobservable or merely theoretical objects. There is general consensus that everyday objects like books or houses are observable since they are accessible via unaided perception, but disagreement starts for objects that are only accessible through aided perception. This includes using telescopes to discussing distant galaxies, microscopes to explore bacteria or using cloud chambers to study positrons. So the question is whether distant galaxies, bacteria or positrons should be regarded as observable or merely theoretical objects. Some even hold that any measurement process of an entity should be considered an observation of this entity. So in this sense, the interior of the sun is observable since neutrinos originating there can be detected. The difficulty with this debate is that there is a continuity of cases going from looking at something with the naked eye, through a window, through a pair of glasses, through a microscope, etc. Because of this continuity, drawing the set between any two adjacent cases seems to be arbitrary. One way to avoid these difficulties is to hold that it is a mistake to identify the empirical with what is observable or sensible. Instead, it has been suggested that empirical evidence can include unobservable entities as long as they are detectable through suitable measurements. A problem with this approach is that it is rather far from the original meaning of "empirical", which contains the piece of section of reference to experience.