Marsha said:A thought can be inspired by a sound, a sight, a smell, a taste, a touch, a previous thought. The first five of these are what an empiricist considers experience. Is this correct? And are the first five also what a pragmatist considers direct experience?
dmb says:As I understand it, pragmatism is aimed at questions about what counts as truth and knowledge. It says that beliefs are true when they lead us to actual results in experience. Or not. Richard Mullin, author of "The Soul of Classical American Philosophy" provides a very clear example of this. Suppose you're lost in the woods and it's starting to get scary. You find what you recognize as a cow path and figure that if you follow it you'll eventually get to the rancher's house. So you do and it saves you from a very cold night in the woods. In that case, your belief about the cow path was proven to be true. I'd add that you better not confuse a cow path with a deer trail, which could very well lead you deeper into the woods where you freeze to death. In that case, your belief that the path leads to safety would be proven false. The "physical" path serves as a metaphor for all sorts of ways to be led by beliefs. Maybe the task involves a concept that you use as a guide through a set of readings or a painting technique that you want to use to create a certain aesthetic effect. In all these cases the proof is in the pudding. Or suppose you believe that accepting the church's dogmas will get you into heaven after you die. This kind of belief can't be proven in lived experience. It's not verifiable. Such a belief might even prove to detrimental insofar as leads you to make poor choices in life like flying a commercial jet into a building, for example. Then there are meaningless beliefs, as in the example of the man trying to get around the squirrel. It makes no actual difference if you think he did or not and so the dispute is merely verbal because it makes no practical difference. This is the beauty of pragmatism. It helps us sort out real problems from fake problems. Steve Peterson's excellent advice to Ham, I think, reflects this attitude. In effect, he asked Ham to come up with some practical reasons for rejecting this or that assertion. I think your question actually gets at the difference between Radical Empiricism and the more commonly known versions, which can be called SENSORY empiricism. When the latter talks about experience it is pretty much limited to the senses and then thoughts and beliefs about what the senses provide. Radical Empiricism doesn't deny this but adds to it. It says that so-called subjective experiences must count also. You might say that radical empiricism is radical because it says ALL experience is real in the sense that it really is experienced. It is also very, very empirical in the sense that it precludes us from making claims about anything that is not experienced. This latter principle has the effect of excluding Kant's things in themselves, the common conceptions of God, and just about every metaphysical entity that's ever been asserted. And even though you didn't really ask, I'd also point out that James says (in his essays on Radical Empiricism) that all sorts of fake problems and unknowable metaphysical entities have crept into philosophy because traditional empiricism (sensory empiricism) because of the failure to see experience as continuous and flowing. He says that the relations between things are part of experience too and therefore should be counted. The Platonic notion that individual horses share in as essential horseness is not explained in terms of the ideal form of the horse that exists somewhere outside of experience but is simply the relation between horse-like things that we experience. Same with the blueness of the sky, blue cars and blueberries. I don't know if this is related to what Matt was getting at with his "panrelationalism" but it seems important to realize that the relations are experienced too and so they are very much a part of Radical Empiricism. This might not help dummies, but I hope it helps you. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™: Keep your life in sync. http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t1_allup_explore_012009 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/
