On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 1:27 PM, david buchanan <[email protected]>wrote:
> > dmb said to John: > James is simply saying that philosophers have no business talking about > things that can't be known in experience. > > John replied: > Makes a pretty small discussion list, everything in my personal experience, > like my toes and my kittens, that I can verify, makes for a rather boring > philosophy. What about Quarks and leptons? What about ideas and concepts? > So much of reality is beyond my narrow experience. But I can't talk about > any of it? Why? What good is it? > > dmb says: > Radical empiricism does NOT limit itself to what can be known in MY > PERSONAL experience. I suppose such a doctrine would have to be called > something like "philosophical narcissism". If there was a scientist who > subscribed to that kind of empiricism, he'd have to personally witness every > experiment in every lab. Thank god for science journals, eh? Well therein lies the problem, eh Dave? It is in this world of "accredited facts" that Science gains it's godlike hold over all truth. Take away values objectively and put them under the control of peer-reviewed journals. All hail academia. Thank god for science journals seems a bit redundant when science is god. Let's see if you can handle some logical refutation of empiricism of a higher quality than you usually have to suffer through... My man Josiah... It is plain, then, that if we say: “That only is to constitute ‘accredited fact’ which some individual man has verified for himself through its presence in his experience,” the usual way of interpreting the thesis is as follows: “There does exist the body of accredited facts, *a, b, c*, etc., such that any fact belonging to this body of facts—as, for instance, *a*—has been verified by the experience of some man, let us say by A, while some other man, as B, may have experienced as present to himself the fact *b*, and so on,—some of the various facts having been observed indeed by the same man (as a Galileo or a Faraday observed, each for himself, various physical facts), while different facts, in many cases, have been severally presented in the experience of different men. Now only such facts as belong to this body of ‘facts of experience ’ are to be regarded as duly ‘accredited.’” Of course, it is obvious that, in this formulation, familiar though it be, the thesis simply contradicts itself. For it expressly asserts the * existence* of the various facts, *a, b, c*, etc., while referring them, in general, to the experience of various observers, A, B, etc., whose existence is also regarded as “accredited.” But since A, by hypothesis, has never had present to his experience the experience of B, nor any observer the observations of another observer, it is plain that there is no one man who has personally experienced either the existence of all the several observers, A, B, etc., or the presence of their various facts, *a, b, c*. Yet these existences and these various facts are, according to the thesis, “accredited facts,” in case the thesis itself is to be an accredited truth. And, nevertheless, according to the same thesis, no facts were to be regarded as “accredited” unless some man, A, or B, or some other, had verified them in his experience. The thesis, as stated, consequently asserts the existence of an indefinitely vast range of fact that it also declares to be not “accredited fact.” To become consistent our thesis would have to be amended thus: “No fact is ‘accredited’ unless it belongs to the system above defined, *except*, to be sure, *the fact that *this system, together with its various observers, exists. *That* fact, indeed, is present to no human observer's experience. And yet, although it thus transcends every man's observation and verification, it is an ‘accredited’ fact.” But the thesis, as thus amended, is no longer even a relatively pure empiricism. It is a synthesis of an appeal to human experience with an admission of principles that, whatever they are, or however they are grounded, transcend every man's experience. dmb] > No, James is going after those metaphysical fictions. John] By creating his own. dmb] > Hegel's Absolute, for example, John] Poor old Hegel. Everybody's favorite whipping boy. No wonder Royce got tired of the appellation and pointed out the only true Hegelian was Hegel. > > 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/ > 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/
