Essentially, the term empiricism originates from the Greek word ‘empereiria’, meaning experience. It can be defined as the general name given to the doctrine in philosophy which holds that knowledge of the material world must be based on straightforward observation and sense perception. It was Aristotle who is historically believed to be the founder of empiricism by his attempt to integrate experience into a theory of knowledge. In contrast to idealism, therefore, the fundamental tenet of empiricism is the belief that knowledge is the product of a straightforward perceptual encounter with the natural world. Eventually, empiricism attained its place in Western thought because of its relation to modern science and its emphasis on substantiating knowledge statements by recourse to observation and the accumulation of facts.95 As successes in the natural sciences began to mount in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was universal accep¬ tance of empirical methods in the social sciences and these became standardized in disciplines such as history, social science, psychology and anthropology. 

One of the principle qualities of empiricism is its reliance on sense perception. This is expressed in a number of key assumptions which characterize the empirical stand¬ point. The first of these assumes that things in the material world remain the same over time and are subject to observation and description. Second, empiricism asserts that, while a division exists between the ‘outer world’ of things and the ‘inner world’ of the mind, knowledge is the straightforward grasping or apprehension of the object in the material world. Third, empirical methods assume that accounts concerning the validity of observation must be given about the operations and procedures used to obtain knowl¬ edge of things in the outer world. Where no account can be given, claims may not be validated. Fourth, empirical methodologies assume that certainty lies in the methods of measurement used to obtain reliable knowledge from the physical world and believes that these methods are an indispensable means of representing the factual consistency of the natural world itself. Fifth, empiricism assumes that the tendency to commit error in the formation of knowledge can only be reduced when we increase our reliance on observation and measurement. Historically, it was this reliance on measurement, and the belief that the outer world could be measured, that eventually gave birth to the scientific outlook and the scientific method and its utilization in the social sciences. But, as we shall see later, there were problems in the social sciences when it became time to derive knowledge from the material world based on an uncritical reliance on empirical and scientific techniques.

(Excerpt from Ken Morrison: Marx, Weber and Durkheim pages 31 – 32)