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The natural and social sciences are usually considered a posteriori disciplines. Mathematics and logic are usually considered a priori disciplines.

For example, "all things fall down" would be an empirical proposition about gravity that many of us believe we know; therefore we would regard it as an example of empirical knowledge. It is " empirical" because we have generally observed that things fall down, so there is no reason to believe this will change. This example also shows the difficulty of formulating knowledge claims. Outside of the Earth's gravitational field, for example, things do not "fall down", as there is no "down".

The vast bulk of the empirical knowledge that ordinary people possess is gained via a mixture of direct experience and the testimony of others about what they have experienced--iterated in an interesting way that is studied in the field of social epistemology as well as other fields. More complicated and organized methods of gaining empirical knowledge are the methods of scienceFor the scientific journal named Science see Science (journal). Science is both a process of gaining knowledge, and the organized body of knowledge gained by this process. The scientific process is the systematic acquisition of new knowledge about a syste--see scientific methodThe scientific method is a sequence or collection of processes that are considered characteristic of scientific investigation and the acquisition of new scientific knowledge based upon physical evidence. Science deals with assertions about the way the wor --which results in perhaps the best examples of rigorously codified, scientific empirical knowledge, namely, physicsPhysics (from the Greek, physikos , "natural", and physis , "Nature") is the science of Nature in the broadest sense. Physicists study the behavior and properties of matter in a wide variety of contexts, ranging from the sub-microscopic particles from whi.

See also a priori and a posteriori knowledgeWestern philosophers have distinguished between two kinds of knowledge: a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge . A priori knowledge is knowledge gained or justified by reason alone, without the direct or indirect influence of experience (here, expe and EmpiricismEmpiricism is the school of Epistemology (in philosophy or psychology) that virtually all knowledge is the result of our experiences. See John Locke's Tabula rasa or "blank slate" theory. Radical Empiricism holds that our knowledge is essentially nothing.