Go back to Digital Texts Empiricism Empiricism, philosophical doctrine holding that all knowledge is derived from experience, whether of the mind or of the senses. Thus it opposes the rationalist belief in the existence of innate ideas. A doctrine basic to the scientific method, empiricism is associated with the rise of experimental science after the 17th cent. It has been a dominant tradition in British philosophy, as in the works at John Locke, David Hume, and George Berkeley. Most empiricists acknowledge certain a priori truths (e.g., principles of mathematics and logic), but John Stuart Mill and others have treated even these as generalizations deduced from experience. From the Concise Columbia Encyclopedia. Copyright © 1991 by Columbia University Press.