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. [Krimel] You seem to be saying here that truth is judged on the basis of how well one's beliefs correspond to one's experience. Isn't that just another version of a correspondence theory of truth that you not so long ago gave me a huge ration of shit about? [dmb] 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. [Krimel] "So called subjective"? Isn't that a strawman knocking at your back door? Aren't vision, hearing, taste, touch and smell "so called subjective" experiences? Don't the relations between "so call sense objects" present themselves through the "so called senses"? Aren't whatever qualities that are missing from the sense data supplied by the thoughts and beliefs we use to process them? What specifically do you think radical empiricism add that can't be derived from plain ol' empiricism? I believe what James was objecting to was the introspective method. Introspectionism developed starting with Wundt and was put into hyperdrive by Titchner. The hope of the introspectionists was to engage in self examination and refine the process in an effort to identify "so called atoms" of thought. They believed that this would somehow put a science of inner life on a par with the science of the external world. James' view was that there are no such atoms in the same way that he thought consciousness was a process not a thing. I think James was a Heraclitian through and through. >From our past discussion I find it ironic that you want to use James to resurrect introspectionist methodology. 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/
