Empiricism: More Glaring Issues

In the previous post, I mentioned a couple of glaring problems with Empiricism, and I would like to offer two more.

1) The Empirical Claim cannot be proven by the claim itself

Empiricists say that we can only know things by sense perception. However, what sense did they use to construct the proposition: we can only know things by sense perception? They are then impaled on the horns of an epistemological dilemma. If they hold to their proposition, they become irrational because they cannot justify their beliefs. If they try to prove empiricism by some other sort of philosophical system, they self-refute their own argument: we can only know things by sense perception because they are now use some higher presuppositional standard to prove Empiricism.

2) Infinite regression of “evidence”

Since Empiricism relies on material evidence, we see a second problem. If one says that in order to believe P we must provide evidence A for it, the person would then need new evidence A’ to justify evidence A. Then in order to justify A’, they would need evidence A”, ad nauseam.