[MD] John Carl's Critique of Pure Experience. Inst02

[John Carl]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 1:27 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>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.








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