The Poverty of Empiricism

Abstract

Many researchers -and their advisors on research method -adopt a doctrine called empiricism, which claims that researchers may only use empirical methods. This restrictive doctrine impoverishes any academic discipline where it is dominant. The main reason is that a discipline only qualifies for the status of a science after it has progressed beyond empirical generalisations to explanatory theories; but although empirical methods are useful for discovering the former, they are inherently useless for creating the latter. So the empiricist doctrine retards scientific progress. Researchers should be aware of this danger, and research methodologists should attempt to counter it.

The Method of Problems versus the Method of Topics

“…Such an understanding of empiricism also severely dampens the creative, imaginative aspect of science that is always bound up with formulation and solution of problems (Cf. Cartwright 1995, 276; Mende 2005). “[T]he natural sciences,” notes Popper (Popper 1995, 90), “do not begin with measurements, but with great ideas.”…”