Abstract

The naïve empiricist is a stock figure in the humanities. According to legend, the naïve empiricist believes that knowledge is a direct result of experience, unmediated by theories, interests, instruments, or human labour. That this is indeed a legend – that it bears little resemblance to what the historical empiricists actually wrote – is known to scholars of Francis Bacon, Auguste Comte, Ernst Mach, Rudolf Carnap, and the like. There has been much revisionist literature on these and other empiricists in recent decades. But there has been no attempt to weave together the revisionist studies into a single story about European empiricism over the last four centuries. I argue that we can tell such a story by turning the legend on its head. The history of empiricism is the history of efforts to show just how indirect is the relationship between experience and knowledge. This has implications for a range of projects in the humanities that have taken the myth of the naïve empiricist for granted.