[MD] What is radical empiricism?

[david buchanan]

David M said:
I think the label is as good as any. But I'd like to explore what we mean by 
'radical'. I am assuming that it is radical because it is somethingdifferent 
from a more SOM based sort of empiricism.

Ian said:
I'm no fan of labels like "radical empiricism", but I have no problem with 
that working understanding of the term in relation to MoQ. ...I'm cool with 
radical empiricism.

Gav said:
...radical empiricism is taking immediate experience as the only certainty. 
...in the MOQ the same position is seen in the DQ/sq relation. DQ is 
absolute (truly radically empirical); sq is abstracted from DQ; sq is what 
we call 'the world' - every*thing*. ...everything is abstracted from 
immediate experience(DQ), including us.

dmb quotes from Lila, end of chapter 29:
"The second of James's two main systems of philosophy, which he said was 
independent of pragmatism, was his RADICAL EMPIRICISM. By this he meant that 
subjects and objects are not the starting point of experience. Subjects and 
objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more 
fundamental which he described as 'the immediate flux of life which 
furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual 
categories'. In this basic flux of experience, the distinctions of 
reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject 
and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make 
them. Pure experience cannot be called either physical or psychical: it 
logically precedes this distinction.
In his last unfinished work, SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY, James had 
condensed this descripton to a single sentence. 'There must always be a 
discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and 
discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing'. Here James had 
chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for the basic subdivision of 
the MOQ.
What the MOQ adds to James' PRAGMATISM and his RADICAL EMPIRICISIM is the 
idea that the primal reality from which subjects and objects spring is 
VALUE. By doing so it seems to unite pragmatism and radical empiricism into 
a single fabric."

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