Instead of empiricism? Probably some variant of pragmatism in the direction of Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom. Try this on for size: section two of Brandom'

Instead of empiricism? Probably some variant of pragmatism in the direction of Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom. Try this on for size: section two of Brandom's article "Pragmatism, Inferentialism, and Modality in Sellars' Arguments against Empiricism."[1] Brandom's argument (which he has given different versions of elsewhere) is that having a belief is necessarily a social endeavor, because the content of that belief can never be fully specified by observations. Philosophers[2] have tried and failed to formalize observations in order to specify the content of beliefs in a formal language, but it never works. Brandom suggests an alternate route: the content of a belief is inseparable from the role it plays in the social "game" of asking for and giving reasons. Here's a key passage: "Observational vocabulary is not a vocabulary one could use though one used no other. Non-inferential reports of the results of observation do not form an autonomous stratum of language. In particular, when we look at what one must do to count as making a non-inferential report, we see that that is not a practice one could engage in except in the context of inferential practices of using those observations as premises from which to draw inferential conclusions, as reasons for making judgments and undertaking commitments that are not themselves observations. The contribution to this argument of Sellars’s inferential functionalism about semantics lies in underwriting the claim that for any judgment, claim, or belief to be cognitively, conceptually, or epistemically significant, for it to be a potential bit of knowledge or evidence, to be a sapient state or status, it must be able to play a distinctive role in reasoning: it must be able to serve as a reason for further judgments, claims, or beliefs, hence as a premise from which they can be inferred. That role in reasoning, in particular, what those judgments, claims, or beliefs can serve as reasons or evidence for, is an essential, and not just an accidental component of their having the semantic content that they do." EDIT2: This might be a more helpful explanation. Elsewhere, Brandom elaborates on this view by redefining beliefs as commitments. A commitment entails some other commitments, and is mutually incompatible with others. For example, if I believe that I'm eating an apple, this entails the belief that I'm eating a fruit. It's mutually incompatible with the belief that I'm eating a squid. It also entails that I believe things I might not even know about the apple, such as the chemical formulas for the various sugars I'm eating. The point is, if I play the game of reasoning correctly--mostly by dispensing with mutually incompatible commitments when they arise--others (e.g. botanists, chemists) can hold me accountable for all the correct beliefs about the apple. The "content" of the apple, for me, is nothing other than the series of moves I make in this game. EDIT1: You should also read rpedroso's comment, which does a great job exploring the many alternatives that arose after empiricism reached its impasse. 1: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-444/paper01.pdf http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-444/paper01.pdf 2: Not only empiricists, but possibly Kant on a very straightforward reading--although Brandom has a very different reading of Kant.