Two types of empiricism, and the indispensability of doing science from an armchair

Recently I've been thinking¹ about a philosophical movement called logical empiricism² and its relationship to the philosophy of mind. This has reminded me that the "empiricism" part of "logical empiricism" is ambiguous in an interesting way.

When I was a Computer Science & Philosophy undergrad, at the start of any lecture or discussion on Empiricism with Peter Millican, he would note a clear and useful distinction between two kinds of "Empiricism":

• Knowledge Empiricism: The view that all knowledge comes from experience.
• Concept Empiricism: The view that all our ideas come from experience.

This distinction has stuck with me and been very helpful whenever I'm trying to make sense of some discussion about how our thoughts either do relate or should relate to experience.

To pick a non-random and (I think) very cool example: let's say that you notice that we can't have any direct experience of the minds of other people. You might think we can only reason from experience about their minds by doing things like talking to them, watching them act, or doing science on their brains.

Say you want to use this as the basis for an empiricist approach to studying other minds. The distinction above is the difference between saying:

• We can't know anything about the minds of others, except what we can derive from observations of their speech, their actions, or their brains. Any attempt to learn anything about other minds any other way is doomed to fail.
• We can't even have any idea of what another person's so-called "mind" is even supposed to be... except what we can derive from observations of their speech, their actions, or their brains. Any attempt to even think about other minds any other way is bound to be confused, or possibly even meaningless.

I happen to think both of these statements are false. They leave out a very important source of empirical data about the minds of others, which is our experience of the stuff that goes on in our own minds.

At risk of confirming your worst stereotypes of philosophers, I really do think that there are important observations to be made about the nature of minds by sitting and introspecting from an armchair. I mean - this should be fairly uncontroversial as the basis for things like empathy³.

And unlike with other kinds of activities commonly associated with armchairs; I think that some observations we can make by introspecting on our experience of our minds should count as empirical data too: such as the feelings associated with our emotions, or the images that appear in our visual imagination when we try and picture things⁴.

We can distinguish between knowledge-empiricism and concept-empiricism one last time, to see what this means for the empirical study of other minds based on observations of our own minds:

• The direct experience we have of our own minds can help us know what is likely to be going on in the minds of others, especially others in similar situations to ones we have been in ourselves.
• The direct experience we have of our own minds can give us concepts which can help us form hypotheses about what might be going on in the minds of others, or even elsewhere in the external world.

I can't imagine being genuinely curious about the world without at least occasionally stopping to meditatively observe the properties of our own thoughts, emotions and experiences. Pace Wittgenstein and Dennentt, I'm even tempted call this kind of armchair⁵ introspection an indispensable way of doing science.