1,062 observations · 5th century BC to 2019 · each one dated, sourced and graded

Empiricalism

A ledger of what has been noticed about people, and what the noticing is worth.

Empiricism is a philosophy. It holds that knowledge comes from experience rather than from pure reason, and it has been arguing the case — against rationalism, against idealism — for four centuries. Empiricalism, a word coined for this site, argues with nobody. It is not a theory of knowledge but an inventory of the residue: the accumulated stock of things people have observed about how human beings and their institutions actually behave, written down and given names.

Those observations arrive under no single label. Some are eponymous laws — Goodhart’s, Parkinson’s, Brooks’s. Some are effects and biases: anchoring, the halo effect, the bystander effect. The rest are scattered across razors, maxims, canons, paradoxes, models, thought experiments, folk adages and rules of thumb, with a few genuine theorems among them. Many are proverbs that long predate the discipline that later confirmed them, and a few are jokes that turned out to be true. Because they are spread across that vocabulary, no single search finds them, and they are almost never set beside one another. This is the attempt to do that.

The point of gathering them is comparison, and comparison makes grading possible. Every entry here is marked for what kind of claim it is, because a measured regularity and a witticism are not the same thing and both circulate as “laws”. Roughly a quarter of what follows cannot be true or false at all. Where a claim is contested, has failed replication, or is misattributed to the wrong person, the entry says so plainly rather than leaving it out — the errors are often the most instructive part.

Colour The stripe on each entry is its register: evidence, model, precept or figure.
Open Tap any entry for the claim and a worked case — the study, the incident or the number it rests on.
Find Search covers definitions, worked cases, thinkers and alternative names. Filters fold away when you want to read.
Keep Star anything worth returning to. Favourites are stored in your own browser.

By half-century — bar height by count, colour by dominant register

500 BCAD 100017001900today

Reading the ledger

Register — the colour on each entry

Register is the one thing this ledger insists on. Roughly a third of what circulates as a “law of human behaviour” is an adage, an analogy or a paradox, and cannot be true or false in the way an empirical regularity can. The colour says which you are looking at before you read a word of it.

Type — the finer distinction

Editorial notes

Contested Marked where the entry’s note records a dispute, a failed replication, a misattribution, or a position outside the mainstream. Nothing is excluded for being contested; it is labelled instead.

Politics Claims from across the political spectrum are included on the same terms, each with its standing stated. Where two traditions make mirror-image claims, the notes point from one to the other.

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Language Profanity is masked so the ledger reads cleanly in any setting. Buridan’s Ass keeps its donkey.

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