Sentence Examples:
This kind of practice offers one of the finest fields for deception of any species of empirical delusion held out to the public at the present day.
Every author thus silently amasses a store of empirical rules, furnished by his own practice, and confirmed by the practice of others.
Our inquiry is scientific, not empirical; it therefore seeks the psychological basis for every law, endeavoring to ascertain what condition of a reader's receptivity determines the law.
There is the immediate, direct empirical repression, which does not investigate the cause of criminality, but waits until the crime is about to be committed.
That in the course of the inquiry he introduces a new principle, which causes him to diverge from the true empirical path, will appear in the sequel.
The former recognized that the principle of causality is neither empirical nor analytic, and therefore concluded that it is an invention of reason, which confuses subjective with objective necessity.
The political poster is placed side by side with the trade or theatrical poster on the hoardings, it is drawn by the same artist and follows the same empirical rules of art.
His examination of the alleged impossibility of miracles may be described as a very subtle turning the tables on Hume and the empirical philosophy.
She had a strong taste for empirical medicine and for alchemy, and was always compounding elixirs, tinctures and balms, some of which she regarded as valuable secrets.
Emerson was a member of the Saturday Club from the first; in reality before it existed as an empirical fact, and when it was only a Platonic idea.
All one had were one's concoctions of plausible scenarios about the person's history and how he or she might behave from empirical personal experiences or what was witnessed when with others.
Since normal solutions of various reagents are all referred to a common standard, they have an advantage not possessed by empirical solutions, namely, that they are exactly equivalent to each other.
The Empirical principles are altogether to be rejected, because they can give no universal law for all rational beings; of the Rational principles, the first, though setting up an empty and indefinite conception, has the merit of at least making an appeal from sense to pure reason.
We will call those laws purely empirical which, in the study of nature, yield regularities that are demonstrated by observation and experiment, but upon which little or no reliance is placed with regard to cases which differ considerably from the observed.
Each degree on the film has a number, and, after a given exposure, the last number photographed on the plate represents the sensitiveness on an empirical scale.
In conformity with the character of my former writings, as well as with the labors in which I have been engaged during my scientific career, in measurements, experiments, and the investigation of facts, I limit myself to the domain of empirical ideas.
Her father, the physician of the surrounding country, a man of engaging energy with an empirical education and a speculative habit of mind, had been the companion of her girlhood.
These empirical laws, however, themselves bring about by induction the promulgation of more general laws, which are termed principles.
I think we may phrase the situation fairly on an empirical basis when we say that seeking arises in instinct but receives its impulse to continuity by some agreeable affective state of satisfaction.
This problem concerns mathematics, so that the discussion is less taxed by semantics and empirical matters - though there is of course the theory about empirical space.
As with the Pythagoras example, but now empirically, there is a switch from just empirical knowledge to a set of definitions, when the loss function allows it.
Paradigm switches may be the most intriguing or flashy examples of the introduction of new definitions, but the change from empirical knowledge to definition does also occur in ?normal science?.
Those who govern a nation cannot at the same time enlighten the people, for the executive power is not empirical; and the governed cannot think, for they have no continuity of leisure.
Meantime psychology is of inestimable value in giving us a point of view, in clarifying our ideas, and in rationalizing the truths that empirical practice discovers.
The law of multiple proportions found general acceptance as an empirical fact; but many of the leading lights of chemistry still looked askance at Dalton's explanation of this law.
Of the more empirical arts, music is given as an example; this, although affirmed to be necessary to human life, is depreciated.
For the empirical practitioner, if he chance to meet the educated physician talking to his patient, and entering into the philosophy of his disease, would burst out laughing and say, as doctors delight in doing, 'Foolish fellow, instead of curing the patient you are educating him!'
Without great men and without clear convictions this age is nevertheless very active intellectually; it is studious, empirical, inventive, sympathetic.
For if, as we have already observed, more rational empirical notions, and a certain rude form of scientific faculty made its appearance amid those mythical ideas which were still persistent, its various forms were not animated, sustained, and preserved by myth.
I do not wish to foreclose the philosophic question whether anything more than this empirical content is involved in the conception.
In collecting empirical laws from history, therefore, only very rough inductions can be hoped for, and we may have to be content with simple enumeration.
Derivative Laws make up the body of the exact sciences, having been assimilated and organized; whilst Empirical Laws are the undigested materials of science.
We do not, indeed, know why heavy bodies are always inert, nor why the chemical elements are what they are; but it is known that "the properties of the elements are functions of their atomic weight," which (though, at present, only an empirical law) may be a clue to some deeper explanation.
Poor Hawthorne, beginning to write subtle short tales at Salem, was empirical enough; he was one of, at most, some dozen Americans who had taken up literature as a profession.
Mention of the traditional precepts leads at once to the consideration of another aspect of the empirical knowledge of the voice.
There is nothing new in this statement; considered as empirical knowledge, the modern vocal teacher understands the meaning of the old masters' precepts perfectly well.
Empirical knowledge, consisting merely of a succession of auditory and muscular sensations, lurks in the background of consciousness.
The conscious thought of the teacher is always turned to the mechanical idea supposedly conveyed by scientific doctrine and empirical precept.
Further, the empirical doctrines are always stated so loosely that no real unanimity of view can be found on any one of them.
These teachers generally profess to employ only the purely mechanical doctrines of Vocal Science, and to ignore all empirical interpretations of these doctrines.
When, at the same time, we observe an inner harmony in our organization, this observation gives us the right and the duty of controlling the truth of our empirical perception by the truth of the results of our ideal and our ethical activity, and the latter again by the former.
The doctor, who has forgotten his scientific principles but has picked up some empirical knowledge, has the advantage of experience and authority as against the layman for whom he prescribes.
The characteristic feature of common sense or empirical thinking is its excess traditionalism, its wholesale acceptance of authority, its reliance upon precedent.
The argumentative method of Theology is that of a strict science, such as Geometry, or deductive; the method of Physics, at least on starting, is that of an empirical pursuit, or inductive.
Both owe their philosophical appeal to their apparent success in unifying the world upon a direct empirical basis, and to their provision for the practical sense of reality.
It is used commonly as a methodological principle to signify that no causal relationship between mind and body, but one of correspondence, is to be looked for in empirical psychology.
His refutation of material substance is intended as a full acceptance of the implications of the new empirical epistemology.
He applies this psychological test because of his adherence to the general empirical postulate that knowledge is limited to the individual content of its own individual states.
No two people, there is good empirical reason to think, ever have exactly similar sensations related to the same physical object at the same moment; on the other hand, even the most private sensation has correlations which would theoretically enable another observer to infer it.
There is no cogent empirical reason for supposing that the laws determining the motions of living bodies are exactly the same as those that apply to dead matter.
It is obvious that physics is an empirical science, giving us a certain amount of knowledge and based upon evidence obtained through the senses.
It may be necessary to adopt this way to some extent, but in so far as it is adopted physics ceases to be empirical or based upon experiment and observation alone.
Empirical investigation begins by single perceptions, which are afterwards classed according to their analogy or dissimilarity.
It seems to me, therefore, that all idea of reference to definite businesses should be abandoned in such schools as that just established: we can have neither the materials, the conveniences, nor the empirical skill in the master, necessary to make such teaching useful.
That is hardly an empirical observation, nor can the expressiveness of rhythms be made definite enough to bear specific association with complex feelings.
Empirical evidence along just these lines is so abundant in the annals of every people, and in all ages, that it is unnecessary to quote it here.
We have done all this almost entirely in the absence of empirical evidence, and without empirical reconsideration to see if our policies were working.
As ordinarily carried on, the process is an empirical one, and if the red coat does not develop as expected, the maker resorts to all kinds of devices to bring out the desired ferment.
As the geologic factors are many of them comparatively simple, much of the expert work on soils requires only elementary and empirical knowledge of geology.
Many practical explorers are shrewd observers of empirical facts, even though their explanations may show a lack of comprehension of the processes involved.
Carrington devised a mathematical formula by which the rate or "law" of this lengthening was conveniently expressed; but it was a purely empirical one.
They were there to be seized and used, invaded and evacuated at a price, to be bought and sold for some empirical or commercial consideration.
Great progress, it is true, has been made in the past in breeding grapes in America, but the work has been wholly empirical and extremely wasteful.
From the reference made to my further views, he would infer my acceptance of that empirical utilitarianism which I have expressly repudiated.
This empirical attitude, not at all infrequent in the latter eighteenth-century medicine, was quite unusual in the seventeenth-century medicine.
And while much keen observation was duly recorded and a considerable mass of fact underlay the theoretical superstructure, the idea of empirical proof was not current.
This stipulation contains a further physical hypothesis, the validity of which will hardly be doubted without empirical evidence to the contrary.
To this was added an empirical knowledge of men by means of ethical maxims, so that they might discover the weak side of every man, and so be able to outwit him.
Till the Empirical laws of Mind, i.e. the truths of common experience, are explained by being resolved into the causal laws (the subject of the last chapter), they are mere approximate generalizations which cannot be safely applied beyond the limits in which they were collected by observation.
Medicine is merely empirical as long as its practice rests upon such generalizations as that Quinine cures ague, without knowing why.
The principle is sound, but is it our only postulate in inference to the unobserved, and does the continuance of empirical laws represent all that Science assumes in its inferences?
A certain historical continuity, in the empirical and circumstantial sense of the transmission and the successive increase of the means of civilization, is then an incontestable fact.
He is only able to draw a distinction between them, because, without being aware that he is doing so, he takes account of the relation of the object to the subject in the case of an a priori judgement, while in the case of an empirical judgement he ignores it.
Any actual conformity of the manifold to the categories would upon this view be at best but an empirical fact, and, although, if the conformity ceased, we should cease to be aware of a world and of ourselves, no reason has been or can be given why the conformity should not cease.
In the former example of a house, my perceptions in apprehension could begin at the roof and end at the foundation, or begin below and end above; in the same way they could apprehend the manifold of the empirical perception from left to right, or from right to left.
Pure knowledge is introduced as a species of a priori knowledge: "A priori knowledge, if nothing empirical is mixed with it, is called pure".
For instance, we must establish the actuality of an object corresponding to the conception of a volcanic eruption by showing it to be involved, in accordance with the analogies (and with particular empirical laws), in the state of a place which we are now perceiving.
The descending movement of thought is not what Spinoza himself said it should be, an evolution, but simply an external and empirical process by which the elements dropped in the ascending movement of abstraction are taken up again with a merely nominal change.
Such an assumption goes with that epistemological universe of discourse which has to be abandoned in an empirical universe of discourse.
Three types of curve may be distinguished, which were first discovered in purely empirical fashion, and later reproduced voluntarily for purposes of experimentation by diagramming before each test the intricate curve of the varying degrees which the intensity of concentration was to assume.
As is the case with all empirical theories of mental development, the higher categories or notions, which are apparently shown to result from the simple elements, are really presupposed at every step.
Neither I, nor the physicians who amiably expend their limited and somewhat empirical skill upon me, can determine the date at which this disease will prove fatal.
This mere presence of experience, this ghostly apparition to the inner man, was all that empirical philosophy could now profess to discover.
Upon the latter point they would have been correct if dependence had been placed upon guesswork or any empirical method of determining the amount needed.
For a shorter or longer time the facts and ideas may remain in accord, but the uninterrupted increase of empirical knowledge involves sooner or later new fundamental alterations of the general idea, and in this way there is a never-ceasing process of adaptation of the ideas to the facts.
On this second ground, therefore, as well as on the first, the observed uniformity of coexistence can only hold good as an empirical law, within the limits not only of actual observation, but of an observation as accurate as the nature of the case required.
And even then such generalizations must be held in readiness to be given up on the occurrence of some new anomaly, which, when the uniformity is not derived from causation, can never, even in the case of the most general of these empirical laws, be considered very improbable.
In some cases, the frequency of the effect is the more accessible to that extensive and varied observation which is indispensable to the establishment of an empirical law; at other times, the frequency of the causes, or of some collateral indications.
These, indeed, do not possess even the degree of evidence which pertains to a well-ascertained empirical law; but admit of refutation on the empirical ground itself, without ascending to causal laws.
It remains to consider how we are to assure ourselves of its truth even within those limits; after what quantity of experience a generalization which rests solely on the Method of Agreement, can be considered sufficiently established, even as an empirical law.
The reason is, that in all these classes of facts, the causes are either not amenable to direct observation at all, or not with the requisite precision, and we have no means of judging of their frequency except from the empirical law afforded by the frequency of the effects.
Let us now consider how the matter would have stood if the uniformity had been known only as an empirical law; if we had not been aware that the sun's light, and the earth's rotation (or the sun's motion), were the causes on which the periodical occurrence of daylight depends.
If, then, it is only to cases which in point of time are adjacent (or nearly adjacent) to those which we have actually observed, that any derivative law, not of causation, can be extended with an assurance equivalent to certainty, much more is this true of a merely empirical law.
In fact, if we concentrate our attention on the progress of French professional criticism, we see it becoming steadily more philosophical and less empirical.
The six other books, if extant, ought nevertheless to be looked up, as they can hardly be without some personal interest or empirical value, even if no better in workmanship than this first book.
Character too is an empirical concept, and like all such concepts, it has a truthfulness which is not clearly discernible, but dimly visible.
It may be admitted, on the other hand, that nothing in their empirical character specially necessitates the view that they are composed of mutually external units.
If this is true, as it seems to be, it follows that there can never be any empirical evidence to demonstrate that the sensible world is continuous, and not a collection of a very large finite number of elements of which each differs from its neighbor in a finite though very small degree.
In view of our earlier discussion of physics, it would seem that no conclusive empirical evidence exists in favor of infinity or continuity in objects of sense or in matter.
What we have said so far is that there have been hitherto certain observed causal laws, and that all the empirical evidence we possess is compatible with the view that everything, both mental and physical, so far as our observation has extended, has happened in accordance with causal laws.