Aristotle was the philosopher to start empiricism.  Empiricism means that everything you experience in life causes you to create conclusions and gain knowledge about different parts of life.  When you’re looking out the window of your house or apartment ready for your walk to school or work, you see a large group of people walking down the street shivering and wearing many layers of clothing.  Through reasonable and logical thought, you can conclude that they are experiencing cold weather and you should follow their lead in wearing your winter coat.

Empiricism can be lost for certain people though.  When you were a kid, some parents would talk about how if you put a tooth under the pillow and fell asleep the tooth fairy would replace the tooth with change.  As children, we believed in the story because it was a reward for a natural part of life.  After learning the truth, you realize the foolish notions that were believed even though there was no evidence of a real tooth fairy.  Our experience was positive for blindly believing in the tooth fairy, so the evidence was not disputed in any way.

In this day and age, the internet has a ridiculous amount of information that can be processed in the shortest amount of time.  Through some artistic talent, any information on the internet can be polished to look real and legitimate.  Many people look at this information as true evidence without the citations or references to establish fact.  These people look at strings of information and draw their own conclusions on false information.  These conspiracy theorists are extremely passionate with their thought process and beliefs due to the supposed facts from the internet and the obvious related experiences.  This relates to illusory correlation in which people draw their own conclusion on random events even though there is no relation to it.  The people truly believe in the correlation between so many of the events because they don’t dispute the evidence before them and they believe in what they want to believe.  Empiricism is completely confused by the people with rationalism.  Rationalism is the thought process that puts reason as the primary source of information needed to attain knowledge.  Rationalizations are mainly used to justify a certain thought process without the use of empirical evidence.