Krimel said: ...No, I have not been saying that James is the same as Hume and Locke. He is adding the experience of conjunction and disjunction to overcome the limits of simple sensory empiricism. In terms of radical empiricism his aim to still to overcome rationalism. It certainly is not his aim to do some kind of reverse zwabydah and turn empiricism into rationalism. Dave would paint James as a rationalist in empirical clothing. But I am saying that he is just adding to the British empiricists not throwing them out.
dmb says: Well, no don't see James as a rationalist. Not at all. And I think it would be a huge mistake to think that James is merely adding to British empiricism. Let me remind you that this last set of exchanges was prompted by your assertion that SOM was just a vague label, a straw man that no philosophers took seriously. In reply, I posted quotes wherein James identifies subject-object philosophies as a philosophical problem. [Krimel] You are confusing is use of specific terms with the thrust of his argument. SOM is a label you blindly apply to any incarnation of the problem. James was talking about rationalism (knowledge derived from the head/subjective) with empiricism (knowledge derived from interaction with the world/objective). These are different approaches to the same kind of problem and the arguments in each framing of the question are different. You are using a strawman because your labeling ignores this and paints all the arguments and framing of the problem as the same. This is either dishonest or genuinely stupid. I will give you credit for being dishonest but that's about the only option you have left. [dmb] By going after that problem, James's radical empiricism undermines the most basic metaphysical assumptions of the British empiricists. It is simply wrong to call that an addition or extension. He's upsetting and overturning the very foundations upon which those empiricists stood. [Krimel] Actually no that is not what he is doing. He is not rejecting empiricism he is expanding to include the kinds of relations Kant called a priori. He is saying we experience those relations of time, space and causality. He is pretty specific about this only reading him with your eyes closed could produce the kind of fog you seem to live in. [dmb] In ZAMM, you'll recall, this overturning of SOM is compared to a Copernican revolution. [Krimel] Yeah, that was a bit of megalomania that was premature at best. [dmb] I think that's much closer to a proper characterization of the scope and scale of the difference between radical empiricism and sensory empiricism. It's true that in both cases, the empiricist says that experience is the starting point of reality but "experience" means two totally different things, depending on which type of empiricism you're discussing. In the old school, it meant the experience of the objective reality by a subjective experiencer so that subjects and objects are the pre-requisites of experience, are the concrete realities that give rise to experience. But in radical empiricism it is the other way around. Experience comes first and subjects and objects are derived from that. They are secondary and conceptual, not primary and existential. [Krimel] Experience only comes first from the point of view of extreme phenomenology. I do think this can be a useful point of view but you push it to the point of solipsism. Pirsig's analogy of conceptual systems as picture in a gallery is a good one. It should promote clarity on these issues. Instead it confuses you. How one sees a picture in a gallery depends on where one is standing. Is the picture right in front of you or across the gallery. It depends on point of view. We can take multiple points of views. Sometime we look from the inside out and sometimes from the outside in. Some times we seek arousal of the emotions sometimes we are just looking for the exit. This capacity to take multiple points of view is unique to humans. You are so confused on this point that you don't even see that claiming to have no point of view is a point of view, just as claiming to kill all your concepts is a concept. 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/
