18 Facts About Empirical evidence

Empirical evidence is of central importance to the sciences and plays a role in various other fields, like epistemology and law.

In epistemology, evidence is what justifies beliefs or what determines whether holding a certain belief is rational.

In philosophy of science, on the other hand, Empirical evidence is understood as that which confirms or disconfirms scientific hypotheses and arbitrates between competing theories.

Empirical evidence is essential to a posteriori knowledge or empirical knowledge, knowledge whose justification or falsification depends on experience or experiment.

Sources of empirical evidence are sometimes divided into observation and experimentation, the difference being that only experimentation involves manipulation or intervention: phenomena are actively created instead of being passively observed.

An important distinction among theories of Empirical evidence is whether they identify Empirical evidence with private mental states or with public physical objects.

Concept of Empirical evidence is of central importance in epistemology and in philosophy of science but plays different roles in these two fields.

In epistemology, Empirical evidence is what justifies beliefs or what determines whether holding a certain doxastic attitude is rational.

The most straightforward way to account for this type of Empirical evidence possession is to hold that Empirical evidence consists of the private mental states possessed by the believer.

In philosophy of science, Empirical evidence is understood as that which confirms or disconfirms scientific hypotheses and arbitrates between competing theories.

Measurements of Mercury's "anomalous" orbit, for example, constitute Empirical evidence that plays the role of neutral arbiter between Newton's and Einstein's theory of gravitation by confirming Einstein's theory.

For scientific consensus, it is central that Empirical evidence is public and uncontroversial, like observable physical objects or events and unlike private mental states.

The problem of underdetermination concerns the fact that the available Empirical evidence often provides equal support to either theory and therefore cannot arbitrate between them.

Traditional view proposes that evidence is empirical if it is constituted by or accessible to sensory experience.

One reason for this is that the standards or criteria that scientists apply to Empirical evidence exclude certain Empirical evidence that is legitimate in other contexts.

Central to scientific Empirical evidence is that it was arrived at by following scientific method in the context of some scientific theory.

One problem with non-scientific Empirical evidence is that it is less reliable, for example, due to cognitive biases like the anchoring effect, in which information obtained earlier is given more weight, although science done poorly is subject to such biases, as in the example of p-hacking.

Empirical evidence is required for a hypothesis to gain acceptance in the scientific community.