Thursday, August 20, 2015

Empirical Limitations

The academic ill that plagues us today, is man's unhealthy regard for empiricism.  To regard empiricism to the exclusion and abuse of other epistemological forms, leads man to certain clear absurdities. 

A clear weakness of empiricism is that while it offers transparent, provable data, it is incapable of making judgements and giving an interpretation to data. Empirically, we know that, for example, quantitative easing has always failed to secure an economy; however, that evidence can be broadly interpreted. We might have a vast pool of proof that Q.E. doesn't work, but thats not to say that it will never work, provided that conditions are right. If instead of using empiricism to prove the Q.E. is a bad idea, rationalism goes to the logical roots of Q.E. and shows by theory that Q.E. is inept.

Likewise, empiricism becomes a broken microscope when studying Praxeology (the study of human action) because individual motives cannot be tested nor provable by the five senses. furthermore, man is not a consistent being, so when tested upon twice, the results will be different. The difficulties of knowing praxeology with empiricism goes anon.

empiricism, is by far the strongest of all the epistemologies, but relying on it alone, does not reflect reality and the conditions of man, which ironically contradicts the reasons for using empiricism.



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