[MD] Radical Empiricism and Psychological Nominalism

[Matt Kundert]

Here is part of the rapprochement I offered between radical 
empiricism and psychological nominalism in "Quine, Sellars, 
Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn":

I think it an open question as to whether retro-pragmatists like David 
Hildebrand are right about there being an important line to be drawn 
between classical pragmatists like James and Dewey and 
neopragmatists like Rorty and Putnam, one roughly centering around 
the "radical empiricism" of the former set, and supposed lack there-of 
in the latter. I still tend to think that there's simply an unimportant line 
between the classical tendency to talk about experience and the neo 
tendency to talk about language, with no further major philosophical 
implications.

The main thesis for this line of thought is that the role radical 
empiricism plays for James (with Dewey having an analogous section 
of his philosophy that could be so-named) is the same role 
"psychological nominalism" plays for Sellars (with a likewise 
analogous section in Rorty). We might call the slogan of radical 
empiricism "everything is experience," and the intuitive appeal of this 
slogan makes it easy to see why James and Dewey might wield it 
opposition to those who take, for instance, meanings to be analytic, 
and therefore non-experiential (for if they were, they'd be synthetic 
in the requisite sense). Psychological nominalism's slogan, however, 
is "all awareness is a linguistic affair," which on the surface seems 
counter-intuitive--am I really aware of that sunset I'm appreciating 
silently linguistically? I don't think psychological nominalism, however, 
quite means this kind of thing. It has to be understood in the context 
of various kinds of atomism, particularly the kinds that surfaced in 
early analytic philosophy.

My suggestion about the parallel qualities of radical empiricism and 
psychological nominalism is that both are kinds of holism, and that 
the only difference between the two is a difference in jargon, in the 
state of the philosophical dialogue that each arose out of and 
responded to. We might encapsulate the differences by saying that 
modern philosophy was birthed out of Greek when talk moved from 
being about "reality" to being about "experience." Rorty, Whitehead, 
and Dewey all advanced historical arguments about the lack of an 
internal "place" called the mind where reality played itself out for us 
(Whitehead called it the birth of the "subjectivist principle"). This 
created a divorce between reality and our experience-of-reality such 
that now we had to deal with problems about just when we were in 
touch with reality.

The atomistic response are various correspondentisms, philosophical 
theories about how this bit of experience rubs up against this bit 
reality, which it does in a one-to-one relation. Dewey and James 
advanced their ideas about experience in this milieu of experience-talk, 
and their basic suggestion was to _collapse_ experience back into 
reality--experience _is_ reality (witness James' "a world of pure 
experience" and Dewey's appreciation of Aristotle's pre-modern, 
anti-Platonism). Their's was a kind of holism, for it consisted in the 
idea that our experiences all relate to each other in a hanging web, 
and trying to pinpoint connections between this web and something 
else is pure folly. For the web, our experience of life, _works_ in 
getting us through life, and it is only a kind of retrograde metaphysical 
dogmatism that keeps us trying for something more--we need to stop 
thinking there is something more.

Psychological nominalism, on the other hand, consists in the same 
move, except now the linguistic turn has made philosophers think 
that there is a divorce between language and experience. Early 
atomists like Russell and Carnap spent their time trying to elaborate 
theories that specified when this linguistic-bit here connected to that 
experience-chunk over there. Sellars attack on the Myth of the Given 
was on the idea that our linguistic concepts overlaid bald experiences. 
"All awareness is a linguistic affair" is simply the analogous collapse 
of language into experience that James and Dewey did for experience 
into reality.

What we basically have is a line that looks like this: 
language-about-experience-of-reality. The Greeks, having just 
become leisured, reflective individuals, talked about "reality," though 
they occasionally would stumble down a path where it sounds as if 
they recognize the modern fact that we each experience reality 
differently. They _did_ understand this _commonsensically_, but they 
didn't charge it with any special philosophical significance. It was only 
after the march of thousands of more philosophers, trampling down 
the philosophical terrain, trying to get various theories to work, that 
Descartes, Locke, and the rest suddenly get the idea that, maybe we 
should charge the fact that different eyeballs see different ways with 
philosophically-charged metaphorical significance. And so they began 
promoting an expansion of what knowing is of from the object 
"reality" to tacking on "_experience-of_-reality."

This new philosophical situation took hold in part because of an 
equivocation in terminology--Descartes and Locke used the word 
"idea" to denote both (what we might now distinguish as) 
_per_ceptions and _con_ceptions. As modern philosophy moved 
passed Kant, who isolated explicitly the two (in intuitions and concepts 
respectively), and thousands of more philosophers (aided by 
expansions in population, education, and professionalization) trampled 
down this new terrain, philosophers began sniffing more and more 
around the idea that, hey, what really is the difference between a 
concept and word? Isn't it just a silly Platonism, with a universal Realm 
of Forms, that would make us think otherwise? (This is what makes 
sense out of the "nominalism" bit in Sellars' platform name--nominalism 
was the medieval counter to Plato's Realm of Forms idea.)

The linguistic turn was roughly the realization that when we talk about 
reality, we are _talking_ about experience or reality, we are using 
words, language, and that when this or that philosopher, be they 
Platonist, Thomist, Cartesian, Kantian or Russellian, suggests taking up 
this or that philosophical position, they aren't changing the world like a 
bridge-builder does, they are suggesting a change in thought, which is 
to say, in our conceptions, which is to say, _in the words we use to 
describe the world_. And so analytic philosophers began promoting a 
further expansion of what knowing is of from the object 
"_experience-of_-reality" to tacking on 
"_*language-about*-experience-of_-reality."

One way to conceive of what the holists are up to is to see them as 
trying to get us back to a kind of pre-Platonic common sense position, 
before the whole obsession over knowing what knowing was even 
started. The only point in collapsing language-into-experience or 
experience-into-reality is if you'd also be just as willing to finish the 
collapse into the remainder, unconsidered term.