Matt said: A radical revolutionary isn't an official part of the political system--they are in the business of overturning the political system. And just so with James's radical empiricism. DMB said: If I follow what Matt has said, Rorty just wants the whole thing to go away so that "radical empiricism" comes to mean "not empirical at all".
Matt: No, that's not what I mean. I meant that, because empiricism as philosophical empiricists had been promulgating it wasn't as empirical as they thought, because they wanted some sort of reality-theory, that being radical about it means _actually_ being empirical about it all, which does in its Rortyan way mean giving up epistemology as the search for Absolute Knowledge, a correspondence theory. (If one redefines epistemology in a non-theoretical way, then Rorty isn't an anti-epistemologist, which is usually the kind of mistake pragmatists who have a down-to-earth view of epistemology make when they accuse Rorty of--I don't know--insanely trying to get rid of knowledge or something.) My point was simply that a radical empiricism isn't an empiricism by empiricist standards (the kind of post-Kantian standards in which it is opposed to rationalism) because it rejects the whole problematic that made empiricism a _philosophical_ position as opposed to just the way life is. Or, "radical empiricism" comes to mean "everything is empirical, silly, so stop trying to demarcate something off that isn't." _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail® goes where you go. On a PC, on the Web, on your phone. http://www.windowslive-hotmail.com/learnmore/versatility.aspx#mobile?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_WL_HM_versatility_121208 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/
