Chapter 2: Philosophical empiricism

In this chapter, some ideas are introduced from enlightenment and contemporary philosophers about epistemology, ‘the branch of philosophy which investigates origins, structure, methods, and validity of knowledge’ (Runes, 1983). This discussion is intended to demonstrate that it is philosophically defensible to rely on empirical evidence alone. An engineer persuaded by empirical evidence of the validity of a given structure may not need to be further persuaded by taking a rational or analytical approach to investigating the structure. Clearly, a structure can often be accepted on the basis of both rational and empirical evidence. Those cases in which there may be contradictions between the two methods are discussed in Chapter 6, where the ethical aspects of the use of empirical design are investigated.