The Empirical and the New Empiricisms

The premise of this article is that social science researchers often rush to application, to empirical method and methodology, before studying the history, philosophy, and politics of various empiricisms. Because there are incompatibilities between the empiricisms of different systems of thought, it is dangerous to attempt new empirical work without having studied the old empiricisms, lest those incompatibilities produce weak, fundamentally flawed scholarship. To help prevent such confusions, this article briefly describes two empiricisms commonly used in social science research—logical empiricism and the empiricism of phenomenology—as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s transcendental empiricism, which is being used in much new empirical inquiry.