Norwood Russel Hanson (1922 – 1967) was a philosopher who created the book Patterns of Discovery (1958) who successfully argued that what we see and perceive is not what our senses receive, but instead filtered sensory information, where the filter is our existing preconceptions. He cited illusions such as the famous old Parisienne woman (Patterns of Discovery p. 11), which can be seen in different ways.

Thomas Samuel Kuhn picked up on his work and created the revolutionary The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) which challenged the existing emperical methods of scientific theory development.

Both the work of Kuhn and Hanson were in criticism of empiricism.