Definitions of empirical

1.   relying on medical quackery; " empiric treatment"

2.   Pertaining to, or founded upon, experiment or experience; depending upon the observation of phenomena; versed in experiments.

3.   derived from experiment and observation rather than theory; " an empirical basis for an ethical theory"; " empirical laws"; " empirical data"; " an empirical treatment of a disease about which little is known"

4.   Empirically.

5.   1. Founded on experience. 2. Relating to an empiric.

6.   Resting on experience, or experiment and observation; versed in experiments; known only from experience; applied without science or rationale.

7.   Depending upon experience or observation alone, without due regard to science and theory; - said especially of medical practice, remedies, etc.; wanting in science and deep insight; as, empiric skill, remedies.

8.   Resting only on experience; applied without science.

Antonyms for empirical

supposed, unsupportable, a priori, metaphysical, debatable, theory-based, hypothetic, theoretic, conjectural, insupportable, notional, speculative, visionary, transcendentalist, unprovable, disputable, theoretical, refutable, unproven, Disprovable, supposititious, abstractive, unsubstantiated, unverifiable, divinatory, academic, hypothetical, Indemonstrable, suppositious, suppositional, unsustainable.

Quotes of empirical

1. When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical – Jon Carroll

2. The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions. – Paul Deman

3. Realism is not a matter of any fidelity to an empirical reality, but of the discursive conventions by which and for which a sense of reality is constructed. – John Fiske

4. Our empirical criterion for a series of theories is that it should produce new facts. The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one. – Imre Lakatos

5. Men act like brutes in so far as the sequences of their perceptions arise through the principle of memory only, like those empirical physicians who have mere practice without theory. – Gottfried Leibniz

6. I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures, to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data, but we couldn't see any. – Merton Miller

7. I think philosophers can do things akin to theoretical scientists, in that, having read about empirical data, they too can think of what hypotheses and theories might account for that data. So there's a continuity between philosophy and science in that way. – Robert Nozick

8. Empirical interest will be in the facts so far as they are relevant to the solution of these problems. – Talcott Parsons

9. In so far as such a theory is empirically correct it will also tell us what empirical facts it should be possible to observe in a given set of circumstances. – Talcott Parsons

10. It is that of increasing knowledge of empirical fact, intimately combined with changing interpretations of this body of fact- hence changing general statements about it- and, not least, a changing a structure of the theoretical system. – Talcott Parsons

11. Now obviously the propositions of the system have reference to matters of empirical fact; if they did not, they could have no claim to be called scientific. – Talcott Parsons

12. Special emphasis should be laid on this intimate interrelation of general statements about empirical fact with the logical elements and structure of theoretical systems. – Talcott Parsons

13. People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections. – Steven Pinker

Usage examples for empirical

1. “ This empirical method may perhaps be better illustrated by a specific example. ” – Edison, His Life and Inventions by Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

2. “ Of these three, the problem of logic can be solved exactly and perfectly; the problem of physics can probably be solved with as great a degree of certainty and as great an approach to exactness as can be hoped in an empirical region; the problem of theory of knowledge, however, remains very obscure and very difficult to deal with. ” – Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell

3. “ Of course a large number of apparent cures were due solely to nature; which is true under every form of treatment, orthodox or empirical ” – The Complete PG Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

4. “ The practical application of the theory of heat transfer, as developed at present, seems consequently to rest on these last two formulae, which from their nature are more or less empirical ” – Steam, Its Generation and Use by Babcock & Wilcox Co.

5. “ Logic alone can give us no information as to which of these cases actually occurred, and we are thrown back on to a discussion of empirical evidence. ” –  by

6. “ Not until the real, individual man is identical with the citizen, and has become a generic being in his empirical life, in his individual work, in his individual relationships, not until man has recognized and organized his own capacities as social capacities, and consequently the social force is no longer divided by the political power, not until then will human emancipation be achieved. ” – Selected Essays by Karl Marx

7. “ In the religious poems the Jewish standpoint is illustrated in " Saul" and " Rabbi Ben Ezra," the Christian in the portrait of John in " The Death in the Desert"; the empirical reasoner in " Paracelsus." ” –  by

8. “ But presently comes the empirical method, which refuses authority to any idea unless it can stand the test of experiment, and prove that it corresponds with reality. ” – The Book of Life: Vol. I Mind and Body; Vol. II Love and Society by Upton Sinclair

9. “ Social Science is a vast and complex science; it can not be discovered and constituted by the aid of empirical observation and reasoning: the Inductive method can not do its work here. ” – History of American Socialisms by John Humphrey Noyes

10. “ The British sea- plane, although still in an empirical stage, like everything else in this sphere of warlike operations, has reached a point of progress in advance of anything attained elsewhere. ” – The Mastery of the Air by William J. Claxton

11. “ But even at the best, such a popular or empirical psychology has no special claim to be ranked as science. ” – Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

12. “ But the empirical aspect of this teaching was pushed into the background through the teachings of Socrates and Plato. ” – An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy by W. Tudor Jones

13. “ Instead, however, of considering these kinds of exercise in this empirical way, I will devote a brief space to an examination of them in a more scientific form. ” – The Complete PG Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

14. “ The difficulty of defining the limits of intimately- connected studies has been increased, because for centuries it has been customary to designate various branches p 58 of empirical knowledge by terms which admit either of too wide or too limited a definition of the ideas which they were intended to convey, and are, besides, objectionable from having had a different signification in those classical languages of antiquity from thish chey have been borrowed. ” – COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 by Alexander von Humboldt

15. “ Dr. Moehrlein's knowledge of the occult of India was wholly empirical ” – The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton by Wardon Allan Curtis

16. “ Moreover, it is not conditioned like every other empirical fact, but as consequence and substance of a voluntary act entirely unconditioned. ” – The Red Room by August Strindberg

17. “ The nature of the Church itself as an empirical institution in the midst of human society was subjected to the same criticism with the State. ” – Edward Caldwell Moore Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant by Edward Moore

18. “ I wonder if the Portuguese of Angola observed it long ago and adopted violet glass for basins, or was it merely accidental and empirical ” – West African studies by Mary Henrietta Kingsley

19. “ To a man less thorough and empirical in method than Edison, it would have been sufficient to have made his plans clear to associates or subordinates and hold them responsible for accurate results. ” – Edison, His Life and Inventions by Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

Rhymes for empirical

• lyrical;