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Empiricism is a philosophical concept that considers experience to be the only source of new knowledge about the world. “Experience” in empiricism can be interpreted quite broadly. For example, John Locke, one of the classics of Modern empiricism, divided experience into “external” and “internal”. By “internal experience” here was meant the ability of a person to reflect, i.e., to observe their internal states. However, the primary thing for Locke was still sensory experience.
Empiricism as a philosophical concept has faced a number of serious problems, which still remain largely unresolved. Thus, David Hume has already pointed out that there is no necessary logical connection between our individual observations and general laws (for example, physical laws). Coarsening, although we assume that if an apple has fallen from the apple tree to the ground a thousand times, it will do so for the 1001st time, it is impossible to justify the logical necessity of this within the limits of empiricism.
It is worth adding that relying on past observations to predict the future is, in general, practically justified; Hume only emphasized the lack of a strict logical connection. This problem becomes noticeable in practice when we try to make predictions for complex systems, for example, in economics. The crisis of reproducibility of experiments in psychology and medicine, which has been going on since the 2010s, also illustrates this problem, so it cannot be said that it is purely speculative.
Empiricism is an epistemological doctrine in philosophy, the central thesis of which is that all reliable knowledge is ultimately reduced to sensory experience (empiricism), begins with it and builds on it.
Intuitively, many people are inclined to agree with this, but, on the other hand, if we accept this, we will be forced to conclude, for example, that mathematics is nonsense, since there is practically no experience in it, everything is built on abstract logical conclusions.