[MD] The Trouble With Wilber

[david buchanan]

Krimel said to dmb:
The process of science minimizes the impact of the individual scientist's 
personal experience, through replication and peer review. What Wilber 
proposes makes the individual experience everything. ...

dmb says:
I understand the point but it is based on the same narrow conception of what 
counts as valid kinds of experience. Scientific materialism and sensory 
empiricism go hand in hand and the goal is objective knowledge or knowledge 
of objective realities. And so the scientist's  "personal experience" isn't 
supposed to play a role or, as you say, it is minimized. Because its just 
subjective, right? See, this sort of limited empiricism is exactly the 
problem to be overcome. Replication and peer review aren't abandoned just 
because we adopt a more expansive notion of what counts as valid empirical 
evidence. And actually the its not that hard to think of the traditional 
scientific methods as a detailed prescription for generating certain kinds 
of personal experience. Its not that hard to think of a physics experiment 
as a carefully defined sensory experience. And then the papers and articles 
allow other physicists to repeat that experience for themselves. And of 
course they are usually observing "physical" things. But there is no 
scientific reason for this narrow empiricism. It's based on metaphysical 
assumptions. Radical Empiricism says we ought not exclude any kind 
experience for metaphysical reasons. (And there is also a epistemological 
pluralism that goes along with this wherein different categories of 
experience are judged in their own terms rather than weighing everything as 
if it were physical.) So anyway, it seems to me that you are (once again) 
offering the problem as an objection to the solution.

dmb

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