[Encyclios]

Radical Empiricism

Referring to the 19th-century philosophical debate, John Stuart Mill saw it essentially animated by the clash between two schools: the “a priori school”, or intuitive school, which supported the presence in every act of thought of original and non-derived mental elements, such as the notions of time, space, extension, solidity, and the “a posteriori school”, or school of experience, whose representatives did not deny the importance of those notions at all, but contested their character of truth which cannot be further analyzed. Reconstructing the processes through which the alleged a priori truths are formed is the task that Mill set himself in the “System of Logic” (1843), resorting to the analytical tools of associational psychology.

The outcome of the British economist’s research goes in the direction of a radical form of empiricism, in which not only the fundamental logical relationships arise from generalizations of data ultimately coming from empirical inductions, but the same mathematical axioms, the strength of each intuitionistic position, have a similar origin, in that they arise from our interactions with the world.