Watching the English

by Kate Fox

Empiricism The most fundamental of this ‘outlook’ cluster. Empiricism is another shorthand term into which I am packing a large collection of English attitudes. Strictly speaking, empiricism is a philosophical doctrine holding that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience – and its close relation ‘realism’ should technically only be used to mean the tenet that matter exists independently of our perception of it. Englishness is deeply rooted in these philosophical principles, but I am also using these terms in a much broader, more informal sense, to include both the anti-theory, anti-abstraction, anti-dogma elements of our philosophical tradition (particularly our mistrust of obscurantist, airy-fairy ‘Continental’ theorising and rhetoric) and our stolid, stubborn preference for the factual, concrete and common-sense. ‘Empiricism’ is shorthand for our down-to-earthness; our matter-of-factness; our pragmatism; our cynical, no-nonsense groundedness; our gritty realism; our distaste for artifice and pretension (yes, I realise that last bit rather contradicts what I said about our hypocrisy, polite euphemisms, etc., but I never claimed that we were consistent).