empirical knowledge

1. in philosophy, knowledge gained from experience rather than from innate ideas or deductive reasoning.

2. in the sciences, knowledge gained from experiment and observation rather than from theory. See empiricism.

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Psychology term of the day

July 27th 2024

horizontal–vertical illusion

the misperception that vertical lines are longer than horizontal lines when both are actually the same length. The vertical element of an upper case letter T, for example, looks longer than the cross bar, even when the lengths are identical. See also foreshortening; Helmholtz square illusion.