I'm a maths student currently studying a philosophy of mathematics course and I'm struggling to get to grips with some terminology.
I've been told that Empiricism is the theory that knowledge is obtained a posteriori i.e. it is obtained from empirical evidence. Which from Wikipedia is said to be 'the knowledge or source of knowledge acquired by means of the senses'.
My issue is with the senses part. For example: 'scientist A says to scientist B that proposition X is true', if scientist B was an empiricist this knowledge has technically been given via a sense, would it be reasonable to allow this to be knowledge obtained empirically? Or is this relying on scientist B trusting scientist A?
This question arose in an essay I'm writing concerning the paradoxes of infinity. I.e. an empiricist would have issues with the infinite because they can't explicitly experience something infinite, a rationalist on the other hand may not have the same issues. However if a rationalist tells them the infinite is comprehensible and is well-defined, would it then be valid for empiricist to take this as truth?