Ian and DMB (note: I am still planning on remarks for SA's contribution and DMB's remarks to me, but those take longer and I wanted to interject something here),
Ian said: I probably sounded dismissive earlier when I suggested I couldn't really see what was so "radical" about radical empricism, but I guess I'm saying what was radical when James envisaged it doesn't seem so radical in a post-Pirsig light. DMB responded: It seems you're taking "radical" to mean something like "way outside the mainstream" but radical empiricism is a feature of mainstream pragmatism. It is radical in the sense of going to the roots of experience, excluding no experience, adding nothing to experience and in equating reality with experience. In that sense, their empiricism is as radical as it gets. This differs from traditional empiricism, which says experience is how we can know the world. Radical empiricism says experience IS the world. Matt: I have two main remarks for this bit-- 1) I want to suggest to DMB to not be too hard on Ian for not finding radical empiricism very "radical," because it seems to me that the place Ian is saying it from is exactly the same place that DMB, in years past, balked at my Rortyan criticisms of things like "absolute truth." It is not just "post-Pirsigian," it is a secular common sense, the kind that looks askance at a lot of philosophy as shooting at invisible ghosts, as criticizing nonsense that we shouldn't waste our breath on. It is a strategic stance about what we should spend our time doing. 2) DMB, your formulation of the pragmatist swerve from empiricism is pitch perfect: "This differs from traditional empiricism, which says experience is how we can know the world. Radical empiricism says experience IS the world." I want people to notice how the verb "to know" appears in the first, but not the second. The difference is that in traditional empiricism, you had to do epistemology, you had to study how we know things. In the second, you don't because it is assumed that we already know things about the world because we already are always connected to the world. This is why, if empiricism is an epistemological doctrine, pragmatists find themselves in the strange position of asserting a position that denies the problem area (much like their offering of a "theory of truth" that isn't a theory at all). Matt _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live Hotmail and Microsoft Office Outlook – together at last. Get it now. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA102225181033.aspx?pid=CL100626971033 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
