Steve said:
... I'm glad that DMB has given them useful distinguishing labels: empirical 
and historical.
Matt replied:
This distinction, then, might be a profitable place to spend some time 
exploring and articulating. ... For my part, I'm not sure what DMB exactly 
meant when he distinguished between the two kinds of _claims_ (aren't empirical 
claims claims about what's happened in real time, as it were?), and I'm not 
sure what you mean by distinguishing between two kinds of _perspectives_ 
(wouldn't viewing the world as experiential commit one to viewing it as an 
historical sequence of experiences?).  The two dialectical moves are opaque to 
me and I'm not sure what else they would commit one to, nor what else they 
would enable one to do.


dmb says:
I don't think there's anything fancy about the distinction. I'm only talking 
about the difference between radical empiricism and the theory of evolution. 
They're just different disciplines, epistemology and evolution. I use terms 
like "pre-intellectual" to mean "pure experience". In that case I'm talking 
radical empiricism and referring to the cutting edge of experience in a sort of 
psychological sense. But Bo, for example, has taken it as a reference to 
pre-Socratic Greece or the MOQ's social level. That's a case of mixing 
empiricism with cultural evolution. Just add milk and you have a crazy cake, a 
dish well worth avoiding. 

In radical empiricism and in the MOQ, reality and experience are the same 
thing. But this reality is DQ or pure experience or pre-intellectual 
experience, which is undefinable. This is what's added to the theory of 
evolution, but once we start talking about that we've left the epistemological 
descriptions behind and have now shifted to an already existing theory which 
includes the idea of a pre-existing material reality unfolding over billions of 
years. This is just a whole different deal. Especially in a system that says 
all these ideas are just ideas, just analogues.

That's all I mean by saying empirical claims are different from historical 
claims. 



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