what is empirical evidence

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Any examples?

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2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Empirical evidence is stuff a number of individuals can observe/measure and agree on using their senses.

So things that would count as empirical evidence would be things like. Speed of a train, length of a train, the number of people on a train.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The term gets used in a couple of different ways.

The short answer: Evidence is called ‘Empirical’ if it can be objectively observed and measured without personal bias. If you draw a line and have 100 people measure it with the same ruler, you should get roughly the same answer from all 100 people (assuming everyone is honest and capable of using a ruler the same way), regardless of any of their personal beliefs or opinions.

Longer answer:

In science, the term generally refers to evidence that has gone through the process of peer review and replication, and has been objectively measured and verified by several different, independent scientists.

In philosophy, when someone talks about whether or not evidence is empirical, they’re usually talking about how certain knowledge was attained. If you know that a certain thing is true because of what your senses observe (“This cantaloup is round”) it’s called empirical, as opposed to something you know because of logic and reason without needing to observe anything (“All circles are round”). Empirical evidence is sometimes called *a posteriori* evidence in philosophy.

You asked in another comment if empirical evidence was the same thing as a fact, and the only answer to that is a lame one. It depends how you define “fact”. Once you’ve had those 100 people verify the length of that line, would you call that measurement a fact? Many scientists and philosophers would say that nothing can be truly known with 100% certainty, but they usually still call certain things a fact. So sometimes people will say “fact” when they mean “empirical evidence” and vice versa.