[MD] MacIntyre, Pirsig, Crawford & Damasio

[X Acto]

Ian,
Dmb, Krimel and myself had a recent discussion on Pirsigs use of "empirical" as it relates
to william James which applies to the questions in your blog post....


Ron quoted William James:
The conclusion is that our worldview does not need "extraneous trans-empirical connective support, 
but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure." ...James is in fact refining 
empiricism to exclude "trans-empirical connective support" which is a kind of rationalism, the charge 
against positivism as well. Pragmatic Value and meaning therefore has a "truer" grip on the 
interpretation of experience.
dmb says:I think "extraneous trans-empirical connective support" is another way of saying "metaphysical fiction" 
or "invented entities not known in experience". Or, as John Stuhr put it in relation to Dewey, James is talking 
about the error of conferring existential status upon the products of reflection". This error is also known simply 
as "reification". Reification is when you treat abstract concepts as if they were concrete realities. I think 
James is charging both the rationalists and the traditional empiricists with this error. In the case of the 
Hegelians, their main metaphysical fiction is Absolute Mind and in the case of the Humians their main metaphysical 
fictions are subjects and objects. The positivists would certainly count as traditional empiricists so this 
charge applies to positive science as well. It's really quite sweeping. Since radical empiricism is an attempt 
to get rid of these trans-empirical fictions, meaning metaphysical entities that are beyond experience, it is 
more empirical than traditional empiricism. Radical empiricism also insists that we cannot exclude from our 
philosophical constructions "any element that is directly experienced". That also makes it more empirical 
than traditional empiricism. The particular element that the traditional empiricists tended to exclude despite 
the fact that it is directly experience, was the experience of conjunctive relations. Thus his emphasis on the 
continuity of experience. These are the relations that connect into a seamless whole the elements that had been 
made discrete by traditional sensory empiricism. Radical empiricism excludes un-empirical things and includes a 
wider range of things that are experienced and so I think it's more than fair to say it expands upon traditional 
empiricism. It's not just an extension however. The relation between the two forms of empiricism is something 
like the relation between Newtonian physics and Einstein's physics. In both cases you'll find them working with 
"gravity" but that word means one thing to Newton and quite another thing to Einstein. You see the same sort of 
thing in these rival forms of empiricism. Both schools of thought are going to use the word "experience" and that 
term will be central to both schools but the traditional meaning of the word is very different from the meaning it 
is given within radical empiricism.
"To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, 
not exclude form them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, THE RELATIONS THAT CONNECT 
EXPERIENCES MUST THEMSELVES BE EXPERIENCED RELATIONS, AND ANY KIND OF RELATION EXPERIENCED MUST BE ACCOUNTED AS 
'REAL' AS ANYTHING ELSE IN THE SYSTEM. Elements may indeed be redistributed, the original placing of things getting 
corrected, but a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced, whether term or relation, in the final 
philosophic arrangement." (From "A World of Pure Experience", the emphasis is James's)
Ron said:
I think what he points to is the idea that sensory empiricism IS in fact a kind of rationalism, this is the 
rationalism he builds his argument against in his essays on radical empiricism. So you are correct, he does 
rail against rationalism, but its the rationalism of sensory empiricism. ... Ironically, Dave is actually 
charging YOU with being a rationalist by calling you a reductionist.
dmb says:No, I don't think of it like that. Rationalism and empiricism are nearly opposite approaches and I 
don't think it's very helpful to confuse or conflate them. James is accusing them both of creating fictional 
metaphysical entities to work as a kind of philosophical glue to overcome fake philosophical problems, however. 
He's accusing them both of reification. I'd say my accusation of reductionism against Krimel is aimed at what I 
see as his adherence to SOM and traditional empiricism and contemporary scientific materialism. As we saw in 
the wiki article on radical empiricism, James was also concerned with the reductionistic tendencies of that 
outlook. In fact, I think the discussion of the differences between the two kinds of empiricism is quite 
appropriate and relevant to reductionism, the topic of this thread.
Krimel said:
...No, I have not been saying that James is the same as Hume and Locke. He is adding the experience of 
conjunction and disjunction to overcome the limits of simple sensory empiricism. In terms of radical 
empiricism his aim to still to overcome rationalism. It certainly is not his aim to do some kind of 
reverse zwabydah and turn empiricism into rationalism. Dave would paint James as a rationalist in 
empirical clothing. But I am saying that he is just adding to the British empiricists not throwing them out.
dmb says:
Well, no don't see James as a rationalist. Not at all. And I think it would be a huge mistake to think that 
James is merely adding to British empiricism. Let me remind you that this last set of exchanges was prompted 
by your assertion that SOM was just a vague label, a straw man that no philosophers took seriously. In reply, 
I posted quotes wherein James identifies subject-object philosophies as a philosophical problem. By going 
after that problem, James's radical empiricism undermines the most basic metaphysical assumptions of the British 
empiricists. It is simply wrong to call that an addition or extension. He's upsetting and overturning the very 
foundations upon which those empiricists stood. In ZAMM, you'll recall, this overturning of SOM is compared to 
a Copernican revolution. I think that's much closer to a proper characterization of the scope and scale of the 
difference between radical empiricism and sensory empiricism. It's true that in both cases, the empiricist says 
that experience is the starting point of reality but "experience" means two totally different things, depending 
on which type of empiricism you're discussing. In the old school, it meant the experience of the objective reality 
by a subjective experiencer so that subjects and objects are the pre-requisites of experience, are the concrete 
realities that give rise to experience. But in radical empiricism it is the other way around. Experience comes 
first and subjects and objects are derived from that. They are secondary and conceptual, not primary and existential.