Empirical evidence

“ CHAPTER I THE MEANS OF EMPIRICAL OBSERVATION OF THE VOICE
To all knowledge obtained through the observation of facts and phenomena, the term empirical is properly applied. Empirical knowledge must be the basis of every science. To be available in forming a science, empirical knowledge of a subject must be so carefully gathered that all probability of error is eliminated ”

“ Quite apart from the more physical investigations, where statistical methods yield more concrete and definite results, he has utilized direct experimentation where that has been possible, has cited the larger records of history, of literature, and of the more technical portions of psychology and biology. It must forever remain true that advance in this field of comparative psychology must make use of arguments by analogy, of parallelisms, assisted by direct reinforcement of evidence from the investigations of animal life, from the study of the abnormal, from the lessons of history. ”

“ We have reason to hope that the empirical processes which are at present employed will be replaced by scientific methods, the trustworthiness of which no one will be able to put in doubt, and the efficacy of which will endure every test. ”

“ Thus, in so far as physics is an empirical and verifiable science, it must assume or prove that the inference from appearances to matter is, in general, legitimate, and it must be able to tell us, more or less, what appearances to expect. It is through this question of verifiability and empirical applicability to experience that we are led to a theory of matter such as I advocate. ”

“ An empirical proof of this is the fact that when the question is raised whether one thing is true of another distributively, our objections take the form of asserting that it is not true of some particular instance or at some particular time. ”

“ According to these, all we know and infer, in so far as it is unmathematical, results from experience, and our conviction of it and our reasoning about it, means by which we pass the bounds of sense-perception, depend on sensation, memory and inference from causation. Our knowledge of the relation of cause and effect results also from experience, and the doctrine, applied to the work of the criminalist, may be formulated as follows: “Whatever we take as true is not an intellectual deduction, but an empirical proposition.” ”

“ While many empirical conclusions are, roughly speaking, correct; while they are exact enough to be of great help in practical life; while the presages of a weatherwise sailor or hunter may be more accurate, within a certain restricted range, than those of a scientist who relies wholly upon scientific observations and tests; while, indeed, empirical observations and records furnish the raw or crude material of scientific knowledge, yet the empirical method affords no way of discriminating between right and wrong conclusions. ”

“ In the first place, if the interpolation is to be more than empirical, we must have not only the experimental results, but the laws which they obey—we must in fact go through the complete process of scientific investigation. ”

“ Those sciences, which thus got the name of philosophy, we call empirical sciences, for the reason that they take their departure from experience. Still the essential results which they aim at and provide, are laws, general propositions, a theory—the thoughts of what is found existing. ”

“ Therefore rough empirical generalizations have a definite place in science, in spite of not being exact of universal. They are the data for more exact laws, and the grounds for believing that they are USUALLY true are stronger than the grounds for believing that the more exact laws are ALWAYS true. ”

“ The empirical laws of those phenomena which depend on known causes, and of which a general theory can therefore be constructed, have, whatever may be their value in practice, no other function in science than that of verifying the conclusions of theory. ”

“ From the knowledge thus obtained a set of verified general rules must be worked out with which all the observed facts and phenomena are shown to be in accord. Then a science has been erected. There is no possibility of conflict between empirical and scientific knowledge. The discovery of a single fact, at variance with the supposed general laws bearing on any subject, is sufficient to overthrow the entire structure which had been accepted as a science. ”

“ Let us make this ability to deal with novel data the technical differentia of reasoning. This will sufficiently mark it out from common associative thinking, and will immediately enable us to say just what peculiarity it contains.
It contains analysis and abstraction. Whereas the merely empirical thinker stares at a fact in its entirety, and remains helpless, or gets 'stuck,' if it suggests no concomitant or similar, the reasoner breaks it up and notices some one of its separate attributes. This attribute he takes to be the essential part of the whole fact before him. ”

“ It may be a thing entirely unknown to our previous experience, something which no simple association of concretes could ever have evoked. The great difference, in fact, between that simpler kind of rational thinking which consists in the concrete objects of past experience merely suggesting each other, and reasoning distinctively so called, is this, that [Pg 330] whilst the empirical thinking is only reproductive, reasoning is productive. An empirical, or 'rule-of-thumb,' thinker can deduce nothing from data with whose behavior and associates in the concrete he is unfamiliar. ”

“ But the science of the Investigation of Truth by means of Evidence, is happily independent of many of the controversies which perplex the science of the ultimate constitution of the human mind, and is under no necessity of pushing the analysis of mental phenomenon to that extreme limit which alone ought to satisfy a metaphysician. ”

“ The most comprehensive inferences respecting the actions of men, which are admitted by all parties as incontestable truths, are derived from this or from analogous sources; they rest on statistical evidence, and are expressed in mathematical language. ”

“ If, therefore, even one or two of these few instances be insufficiently known, or imperfectly analyzed into their elements, and therefore not adequately compared with other instances, nothing is more probable than that a wrong empirical law will emerge instead of the right one. ”

“ It needs scarcely be observed, that,—if direct observation and collation of instances have furnished us with any empirical laws of the effect, whether true in all observed cases or only true for the most part,—the most effectual verification of which the theory could be susceptible would be, that it led deductively to those empirical laws; that the uniformities, whether complete or incomplete, which were observed to exist among the phenomena, were accounted for by the laws of the causes—were such as could not but exist if those be really the causes by which the phenomena are produced. ”

“ We all start by being empiricists. But our empiricism is confined within our immediate interests. The more clearly we grasp the intellectual analysis of a way regulating procedure for the sake of those interests, the more decidedly we reject the inclusion of evidence which refuses to be immediately harmonized with the method before us. ”

“ It is the absence of direct evidence that, not only in the science of Folklore, but also in the physical sciences, causes resort to the evidence afforded by comparison of other structures and processes. ”

“ The alterations in the minds of men, which the tendency of modern thought has effected in respect of evidence, may be summed up under two heads: First, the nature of the evidence required is altogether altered, and a great many arguments, that would in former days have gone to the jury, are now summarily suppressed. Fact can only be proved by facts, that is, by events, instances, things, which are submitted to experience and observation, and are confirmed by experiment and reason. ”

“ When we come now to consider how we establish facts, whether single or complex, we find that, both to aid our own judgment and to convince other people, we rely on evidence. We have seen that evidence falls roughly into two classes: either it comes from persons who testify out of their own observation and experience, or it comes indirectly through reasoning from facts and principles already established or granted. ”

“ When we consider that each of these two theories, which, as theories of causation, stand at the opposite extremes of possible divergence from one another, invokes not only as its evidence, but as its sole evidence, the absolute inconceivability of any theory but itself, we are enabled to measure the worth of this kind of evidence ”

“ In other words, an empirical law is a generalization, of which, not content with finding it true, we are obliged to ask, why is it true? knowing that its truth is not absolute, but dependent on some more general conditions, and that it can only be relied on in so far as there is ground of assurance that those conditions are realized. ”

“ On the subject of Induction, the task to be performed was that of generalizing the modes of investigating truth and estimating evidence, by which so many important and recondite laws of nature have, in the various sciences, been aggregated to the stock of human knowledge. ”

“ The causes being given, we may know what will be their effect, without an actual trial of every possible combination; since the causes are human feelings, and outward circumstances fitted to excite them: and, as these for the most part are, or at least might be, familiar to us, we can more surely judge of their combined effect from that familiarity, than from any evidence which can be elicited from the complicated and entangled circumstances of an actual experiment. ”

“ The empirical method inevitably magnifies the influences of the past; the experimental method throws into relief the possibilities of the future. The empirical method says, "Wait till there is a sufficient number of cases;" ”

“ Not that they begin later to be studied; on the contrary, they are the earliest cultivated, since in our abstract investigations we necessarily set out from spontaneous facts. But though we may make empirical generalizations, we can form no scientific theory of concrete phaenomena until the laws which govern and explain them are first known ”

“ The question is, at last, simply one of evidence: what is fact, and what is not fact? Imperfect observations vitiate reasoning, and lead to erroneous conclusions in the workshop, on the farm, in the counting-room, the church, and the legislative ball, just as much as in the laboratory or the observatory. ”

“ But we must be able to combine empirical tests with subjective analysis, before the intellectual process can be completed which authorizes us to determine whether any given production reaches that highest grade of excellence implied in its being "true to nature." ”

“ It is more insistent in the first place on including the whole range of relevant data, of bringing to light all the facts that bear on a Page 383 given problem. In common-sense thinking we make, as we say, snap judgments; we jump at conclusions. Anything plausible is accepted as evidence; anything heard or seen is accepted as a fact. The scientific examiner insists on examining and subjecting to scrutiny the facts at hand, on searching for further facts, and on distinguishing the facts genuinely significant in a given situation from these that happen to be glaring or conspicuous. ”

“ To be most conclusive they must have no intentional connection with the experience of the scientist. In other words, those individuals who corroborate the facts are made, in spite of themselves, experiencers of the same facts. The perfection of this evidence is attained when the fact can happen to others and the observer simply details the conditions under which he made the observation,208 which can be then so perfectly reproduced that others may repeat the exceptional experience. ”

“ The empirical law derives whatever truth it has from the causal laws of which it is a consequence. If we know those laws, we know what are the limits to the derivative law; while, if we have not yet accounted for the empirical law--if it rests only on observation--there is no safety in applying it far beyond the limits of time, place, and circumstance in which the observations were made. ”

“ The whole, taken together, forms a chain of evidence; and, according to the rational rules of evidence, each distinct fact ought to be proved to have existed at some time before our belief in the main hypothesis can be challenged. I know of no reason why the probable truth of a scientific hypothesis should be judged by any other rules of determination than those which are applied to any other subject of inquiry ”

“ Hence, I believe that until our means of empirical research are greatly improved, all such investigations, notwithstanding their immense value in other respects, will tend to lead mere inductive minds into error, by making them rely too much on what they call the facts of the case, to the prejudice of the reason. ”

“ The same defect occurs in the reasoning of an empirical psychologist when he analyses an action into the various aspects which it presents, and then sticks to these aspects in their separation. The object which is subjected to analysis is treated as a sort of onion from which one coat is peeled off after another. ”

“ The empirical rule is, therefore, no final law, but is capable of explaining, especially when true, e.g., the succession of a certain condition of weather from certain meteorological signs, the improvement of species through crossing, the fact that some alloys are harder than their components, and so on. ”

“ In each of these subjects, we first, either with or without the aid of experiment, make observations, record facts, compare them, and draw conclusions from our comparisons; we also group the facts, and the conclusions, in every possible way, and then draw other conclusions; we also analyse, combine, and permutate the various truths arrived at, and cross examine the evidence in every possible manner in order to extract from it the greatest amount of new knowledge. ”