Talk:Naïve empiricism

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I would appreciate seeing the names, and preferably links to, the leading proponents of both the strong and weak (the piece by Jose is insufficient) versions of the naive empiricist school of thought.

The Naïve empiricism page, unfortunately, is in complete error[edit]

Naïve empiricism is original research, POV and completely made up by the original editors of the article. Sorry to break the news. Possibly the original editor(s) were confusing empiricism with naive falsification, a concept of the empirical method. Possibly they were referring to some extremely obscure and long obsolete uses of the term from the 19th Century. The arguments "for" and "against" it were essentially conjured up without any reasonable sourcing or other research. Most of the first paragraph was internally contradictory. Therefore, I will now remove most of its content...Kenosis 22:29, 2 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Naïve empiricism is a commonly used term in philosophy of science. However, the original article was totally wrong. --SecondSight 02:52, 2 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

User:Kenosis seems to want to keep inserting the (uncited, and incorrect) claim that "naive empiricism" is a term not used in science or the philosophy of science, which simply isn't true, and can be refuted in about 10 seconds. It's true that it does have somewhat different meanings depending on which field or subfield we're talking about, and of course true that it's a term generally used by opponents of a position (nobody calls their own views "naive"), but that doesn't mean it isn't used or coherent.

In parts of philosophy, for example, "naive empiricism" is used by opponents of the view that sensory experience or sense data is essentially a "direct" view of real truth; one author defines it as the view that "immediate sense experience is by itself sufficient to provide the foundations for knowledge" (Thomas Ernst Uebel (1992). Overcoming Logical Positivism from Within: The Emergence of Neurath's Naturalism in the Vienna Circle's Protocol Sentence Debate. Rodopi. pp. p. 205. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)). It is used for a roughly similar position in sociology, describing the view that a sociologist simply observes and describes the world as it really is (Stjepan G. Mestrovic (1993). Emile Durkheim and the Reformation of Sociology. Rowman & Littlefield. pp. p. 94. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)).

It is also frequently used in cluster analysis to describe a certain kind of error, and completely separately, it's a term with a precise meaning in literary theory (see Michael McKeon (1986). The Origins of the English novel. Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. p. 105-109. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)). --Delirium 02:50, 14 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

These usages just given are reasonable, IMO. To which we could add numerous and fairly widespread conflations of naive falsification and the numerous manifestations of the very fundamental, widely misunderstood concept of empiricism that have been thrown into the marketplace of ideas throughout the years. The conflations, all told, are worse than, say scientism. As a pejorative without widespread agreement about what it means, it's difficult to present an article under this title. In light of the difficulties, I say "Very nice research, Delerium" ... Kenosis 08:58, 14 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]