Matt said: You brought up your problems with Rorty and how he supposedly rejects radical empiricism (which, under certain specifications, I deny) and the notion of "pure experience," so I thought I might return briefly to the subject. The reason I've gotten in the habit of regarding Rorty as much of a radical empiricist as James or Dewey is because I take the thesis to be the collapse of the metaphysical/epistemological divide between subject/object, knower/known. The question then becomes, "What of pure experience? What role does it play?" ...Pure experience aside, I think most of our haggling still consists over this notion of the "linguistic turn." .. Your stance looks to me like a pro-experience-talk position, and you then paint me as being pro-language/anti-experience. With regards to radical empiricism, this isn't quite right. As I see it, once we become radical empiricists, it _doesn't matter_ whether we talk about what we experience or we talk about what we talk about. It simply doesn't matter.
dmb says: It doesn't matter? Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I thought the whole debate was about experience and language. As I understand it, you and Rorty and just about everyone else believe that there is nothing outside the text, there is no such thing as experience outside of language. You know, all my awareness is a linguistic affair, its turtles all the way down, etc.. From this textualist point of view there can be no such thing as pure experience or at best it would be considered meaningless as far as philosophers are concerned. Isn't that your position, that pure experience is either impossible or (gasp) trivial? As for radical empiricism, Rorty does well with the half that says we can't add extra-experiential elements to our accounts. But when it come to the other half, where we aren't allowed to ignore any kind of experience in our accounts, he falls short and does so speciifically with respect to pure experience. Isn't that what we're talking about here? I'd say the only way associate pure experience with the myth of the given is to construe it as something like raw sense data or the pre-cognitive biological response. I don't know if you're seeing it that way, but its easy to see how one could. Also, of course we don't want to be like babies. The experience of infants is simply meant to illustrate a feature of adult experience that goes un-noticed. Its not that we outgrow this undifferentiated state so much as it falls into the background as our conceptual habits accumulate. Its that cutting edge of experience as in the train analogy or the immediate response in hot stove example. Thanks dmb _________________________________________________________________ Boo! Scare away worms, viruses and so much more! Try Windows Live OneCare! http://onecare.live.com/standard/en-us/purchase/trial.aspx?s_cid=wl_hotmailnews 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/
