![]() ![]() This is why it is more common to hold that all kinds of mental states, including stored but currently unconscious beliefs, can act as evidence. Restricting evidence to conscious mental states has the implausible consequence that many simple everyday beliefs would be unjustified. Some philosophers restrict evidence even further, for example, to only conscious, propositional or factive mental states. The most straightforward way to account for this type of evidence possession is to hold that evidence consists of the private mental states possessed by the believer. It is usually held that for justification to work, the evidence has to be possessed by the believer. For example, the olfactory experience of smelling smoke justifies or makes it rational to hold the belief that something is burning. In epistemology, evidence is what justifies beliefs or what determines whether holding a certain doxastic attitude is rational. ![]() The concept of evidence is of central importance in epistemology and in philosophy of science but plays different roles in these two fields. Sources of empirical evidence are sometimes divided into observation and experimentation, the difference being that only experimentation involves manipulation or intervention: phenomena are actively created instead of being passively observed. Scientific evidence is closely related to empirical evidence but not all forms of empirical evidence meet the standards dictated by scientific methods. 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 concepts but not as pertaining to the external world. 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. It is generally accepted that unaided perception constitutes observation, but it is 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.Įmpirical evidence is essential to a posteriori knowledge or empirical knowledge, knowledge whose justification or falsification depends on experience or experiment. In this context, it is usually understood as what is observable, in contrast to unobservable or theoretical objects. The term empirical comes from Greek ἐμπειρία empeiría, i.e. For this role, it is 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. In philosophy of science, on the other hand, evidence is understood as that which confirms or disconfirms scientific hypotheses and arbitrates between competing theories. This is only possible if the evidence is possessed by the person, which has prompted various epistemologists to conceive evidence as private mental states like experiences or other beliefs. In epistemology, evidence is what justifies beliefs or what determines whether holding a certain belief is rational. Often different fields work with quite different conceptions. There is no general agreement on how the terms evidence and empirical are to be defined. ![]() Empirical evidence is of central importance to the sciences and plays a role in various other fields, like epistemology and law. what supports or counters this proposition, that is constituted by or accessible to sense experience or experimental procedure. For other uses, see Empirical (disambiguation).Įmpirical evidence for a proposition is evidence, i.e. ![]()
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