Abstract

Traditionally, the proponents of empiricism sought for the starting point of knowledge in sensations that happen to us when we open our sense organs to the world. They analyzed the functioning of human faculties of sensation and cognition and the way these faculties are activated so as to discover the origin of ideas. Thus, they insisted on the priority of particulars to universals in the body of synthetic knowledge, and granted empirical facts the authority of truth. For that reason, they are opposed to the rationalists, who maintained that the most important part of synthetic knowledge is derived solely from first principles or ideas, and that these principles or ideas are “innate”—that reason can ascertain their truth intuitively without the use of the senses.Logical positivism belongs to the empiricist tradition. However, it distinguishes itself from its empiricist predecessors in a very important way, so that its proponents thought they could overcome the difficulties raised against the older empiricists.