Definition of Empirical

Empirical

Pertaining to, or founded upon, experiment or experience; depending upon the observation of phenomena; versed in experiments.

Depending upon experience or observation alone, without due regard to science and theory; -- said especially of medical practice, remedies, etc.; wanting in science and deep insight; as, empiric skill, remedies.

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Empirical Quotations

The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.
Albert Einstein

No one has the right to destroy another person's belief by demanding empirical evidence.
Ann Landers

Men act like brutes in so far as the sequences of their perceptions arise through the principle of memory only, like those empirical physicians who have mere practice without theory.
Gottfried Leibniz

Our empirical criterion for a series of theories is that it should produce new facts. The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one.
Imre Lakatos

I think philosophers can do things akin to theoretical scientists, in that, having read about empirical data, they too can think of what hypotheses and theories might account for that data. So there's a continuity between philosophy and science in that way.
Robert Nozick

Empirical interest will be in the facts so far as they are relevant to the solution of these problems.
Talcott Parsons

In so far as such a theory is empirically correct it will also tell us what empirical facts it should be possible to observe in a given set of circumstances.
Talcott Parsons

Now obviously the propositions of the system have reference to matters of empirical fact; if they did not, they could have no claim to be called scientific.
Talcott Parsons

It is that of increasing knowledge of empirical fact, intimately combined with changing interpretations of this body of fact - hence changing general statements about it - and, not least, a changing a structure of the theoretical system.
Talcott Parsons

That is, a system starts with a group of interrelated propositions which involve reference to empirical observations within the logical framework of the propositions in question.
Talcott Parsons

Special emphasis should be laid on this intimate interrelation of general statements about empirical fact with the logical elements and structure of theoretical systems.
Talcott Parsons

Thus, in general, in the first instance, the direction of interest in empirical fact will be canalised by the logical structure of the theoretical system.
Talcott Parsons

So I think one can say on empirical grounds - not because of some philosophical principle - that you can't have democracy unless you have a market economy.
Peter L. Berger

People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections.
Steven Pinker

I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures, to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data, but we couldn't see any.
Merton Miller

As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.
Steven Pinker

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?
Steven Pinker

Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances.
George C. Williams

Realism is not a matter of any fidelity to an empirical reality, but of the discursive conventions by which and for which a sense of reality is constructed.
John Fiske

We would be in a nasty position indeed if empirical science were the only kind of science possible.
Edmund Husserl

When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical.
Jon Carroll

More Empirical Quotations

Empirical Translations

empirical in French is empirique
empirical in Hungarian is empirikus, tapasztalati
empirical in Italian is empirico
empirical in Swedish is empirisk

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