§114. Theorematic and Problematic
A pattern runs through history's empiricisms, a rhythm in time rather than a static schema for historical content. Empiricisms tend either to the theore- matic or the problematic in what they expect from experience.
Theorematic empiricisms use experience apodictically, as primary data, ultimate evidence, or the foundation of sense, whereas problematic empiricisms use experience pragmatically, constructively, artfully, seeking solutions to problems of knowledge. In antiquity, the empiricism of Hippocrates, Democritus, and Epicurus was problematic in this way, expected to produce something, for instance, health or tranquility, while Aristotle found a place for experience in science but subordinated it to a theorematic demonstration of truth. The ex- perimentalism of the seventeenth century was also problematic in its empiricism, while epistemology's empiricisms tend to the theorematic, expecting experience to justify beliefs and endow ultimate evidence. The radical empiricisms of the twentieth century reclaim experience from epistemology for their new problems of ontology and cosmology.Ever since Democritus, empiricism has been associated with the idea that the senses are passive, hence veridical. Everything we have learned about the physiology and psychology of perception demolishes that argument. However, if what we expect from experience is not theorematic evidence but rather an applicable invention, then our unconscious contribution to perception detracts nothing from the value of the action it coordinates. Perception is a teleological response to stimuli, and the epitome of being alive. Distinctions between cognition and perception or perception and action regain continuity and become the blur in theory they always were in practice. What we perceive, what we remember, what we know, and what we do are interpenetrating phases of one temporal Dasein.
Another long-standing thesis of empirical philosophy is to organize experience for inquiry, to make it an organon, a kriterion, a kanon in the service of science. This too begins in medical theory, with Alcmaeon in the Empiricisms. Barry Allen, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197508930.001.0001. sixth century bce (§3). “The gods have certainty concerning non-evident matters, but it is given to men to conjecture from signs.” A Hippocratic apothegm reiterates the new principle, “Appearances give insight into the invisible.” Perception becomes an instrument for knowing the unperceived, and with it empirical knowledge colonizes the unseen world beyond perception. Democritus brought medical signs into natural philosophy. Empirical methods, especially abductive inferences to the best explanation, extract conceptual determination from experience, which becomes an instrument to penetrate nature's non-apparent causes. We attain empirical knowledge of what is profoundly hidden (atoms and void) by inference to the best explanation of the phenomena.1
Plato did not like this idea, though Aristotle thought there was something to it. Epicurus liked it best, and philosophers of the scientific revolution favored the Epicurean ideas they read in Lucretius. The modern renewal of empiricism was at the same time a renovation in its concept of experience, which is no longer desultory, perfunctory, ordinary, unorganized, or merely read in books. The experience that matters to natural philosophy must be experimental experience, energized by hypotheses and fructified by fallible evidence. This is a difference between the theorematic empiricism of Paduan Aristotelians like Nifo and Zabarella and the problematic empiricism of their colleague Galileo, who inherited from their tradition an idea of experience that was at once haphazard yet ambitiously theorematic, an errant experience from which epagogic alchemy was expected to extract a theorematic principle. This view of experience is unavailing for the experiments Galileo wants to do, and he replaces it with an experimental concept of problematic experience.