Empiricism
Etymology
From Greek "empeiria," "experience." As a philosophical school it is associated with the British empiricists — John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume — in the 1600s and 1700s. Locke’s image is the key one: the mind begins as a blank slate, and experience writes on it everything we come to know.
noun · /em-PIR-ih-siz-um/
The theory that knowledge comes primarily from sensory experience and observation, not from reasoning alone.
What it names
A handle for the “show me the evidence” stance — the demand that claims about the world be grounded in what we can actually observe and test.
Example
His empiricism was unshakable — no matter how elegant the theory, he wanted data before he would believe it.
Related idea
Rationalism is its classic opposite, holding that reason alone can deliver real knowledge of the world. Empiricism insists that without experience, reason has nothing solid to work on.