Oi...

For sense perception gives us knowledge of very little of significant human interest, least of all knowledge of knowledge itself.

Empiricism (later often called "Positivism") is simply a failed ideological gambit in Western culture that prevailed from, roughly, the 18th Century on, and should be regarded as nothing more than an instructive historical episode. It arbitrarily specifies the senses or 'feeling' as boundary marker for knowledge and reality. But it cannot guide us in the interpretation of knowledge and reality, for it fundamentally misconstrues them. Its primary function was to replace religious orthodoxy with a secular, epistemological orthodoxy, as cultural authority was passing from religious to merely intellectual institutions in modern Western society. As an orthodoxy, it is of course repressive and, among other things, makes impossible knowledge of the human self. One can judge for oneself the cost of this by candidly observing the intellectual and moral chaos that rules modern society--not least, intellectual society itself. Of course Empiricism is not itself an empirical theory, and in the nature of the case could never be.