From
wiki
quote:
In philosophy, empiricism is a theory of knowledge which asserts that knowledge arises from experience. Empiricism is one of several competing views about how we know "things," part of the branch of philosophy called epistemology, or "theory of knowledge". Empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, while discounting the notion of innate ideas...
In the philosophy of science, empiricism emphasizes those aspects of scientific knowledge that are closely related to evidence, especially as discovered in experiments. It is a fundamental part of the scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the natural world, rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation. Hence, science is considered to be methodologically empirical in nature.
Although Revelation might be considered experiential and thus empirical, in the context of the philosophy of science revelation doesn't cut the mustard. It is quite a long article discussing the various modes of empiricism and the different senses (heh) that it is used in.
Rationalism, in simple terms is (again wiki), "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification". Science is a subtle blend of empiricism and rationalism.
For example, it is a known fact that our perceptions can be erroneous. Optical illusions confirm this for anybody wanting empirical evidence for it. If we sense something we are first faced with the problem - how do I know if that is a sensation that has come from the external to the internal or if it is a sensation purely occurring as a result of internal factors.
Take
This famous illusion, if we just relied on simple, or naive empiricism we would conclude that since we had experienced the 'snakes' moving, they were in fact moving. Indeed - if we explored things a little more deeply we might even conclude that the 'snakes' 'knew' when we were looking at them because when we stare directly at one it stops moving.
Other evidence we could accrue would suggest that this is simply a 'bug' in our visual perception ability.
Which empirical observation do we accept as true? This is where rationalism might come into play. We might decide to apply parsimony for example: the explanation that requires the fewest extra entities is the visual 'bug' explanation. We don't need to posit self aware and perceptive pixels on a monitor screen which would just add more layers of complication as we tried to explain how they could do that.
We could test the hypothesis by constructing our own illusions that work on a similar 'bug', to see if we still perceive motion. Or maybe we can cover up most of the picture we do have and see if the motion perception is still present. This would be a sort of verification. How would we verify the conscious snake/pixel hypothesis? Until we've answered all those complicated questions I'm not sure we can - it might even be entirely unfalsifiable if it is constructed in a certain way.
Its not about retrofitting anything - the philosophy of science has been discussing these concepts for over a hundred years. Feel free to browse wiki which gives a nice overview of the history of empiricism/rationalism/British empiricism/naive realism/logical positivism/analytical philosophy and of course the philosophy of science to verify what I am telling you.
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