Empiricism has a long and venerable history. Aristotle, the Epicureans, Sextus Empiricus, Bacon, Locke, Hume, Mill, Mach and the Logical Empiricists, among others, represent a long line of historically influential empiricists who, one way or another, placed an emphasis on knowledge gained through the senses. In recent times the most highly articulated and influential edition of empiricism is undoubtedly Bas van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism. Science, according to this view, aims at empirically adequate theories, i.e. theories that save all and only the observable phenomena. Roughly put, something is observable in van Fraassen’s view if members of the human epistemic community can detect it with their unaided senses. Critics have contested this notion, citing, among other reasons, that much of what counts as knowledge for scientists, especially in the natural sciences, concerns things that are detectable only with instruments, i.e. things that are unobservable and hence unknowable by van Fraassen’s lights. The current paper seeks to overcome this objection by putting forth and defending a liberalised conception of observability and an associated, and accordingly liberalised, conception of empiricism. ‘Grounded observability’ and ‘grounded empiricism’, as we call them, unchain themselves from the burdens of traditional conceptions of experience, while at the same time tethering themselves to the source of epistemic credibility in the senses, and, hence to the true spirit of empiricism.

经验主义有着悠久而可敬的历史。亚里士多德、伊壁鸠鲁学派、塞克斯图斯·恩实论者、培根、洛克、休谟、穆勒、马赫和逻辑实证主义者等，代表了一长串历史上有影响力的经验主义者，他们以某种方式强调通过感官获得的知识。在近代，最清晰和最有影响力的经验主义版本无疑是巴斯·范·弗拉森（Bas van Fraassen）的建设性经验主义。根据这种观点，科学的目标是经验上充分的理论，即拯救所有且只拯救可观察现象的理论。粗略地说，在范·弗拉森看来，如果人类认识论社区的成员能够用他们的独立感官来探测到它，那么它就是可以观察到的。批评者对这一概念提出了质疑，理由之一是，对于科学家来说，尤其是自然科学领域的知识中，大部分都涉及只能用仪器探测到的事物，即无法观测的事物，因此无法被范弗拉森的灯光所知。本文试图通过提出和捍卫自由化的可观察性概念和相关的、相应地自由化的经验主义概念来克服这一反对意见。我们称之为“扎根的可观察性”和“扎根的经验主义”，将自己从传统经验概念的负担中解脱出来，同时将自己与感官中认识可信度的来源联系在一起，从而与经验主义的真正精神联系在一起。