[MD] Positivist empiricism and radical empiricism and imaginative exploration

[David Morey]

Hi MOQers

Now we all know that positivist empiricists like to stick to perceptions
and radical empiricists like to broaden out the sort of experiences that
are happy to describe and include values, feelings and moods, etc.
Agree/disagree?

But how do radical empiricists feel about the imagination and fantasies?
Are these just good old elements of experience like any other that we
need to study and describe?

Seems to me that what is important is what we share with other people
and we don't seem to have discussed this enough with respect to the MOQ.

Perceptions are simple we can all point at the same sources of our
experiences and agree on at least their location, or we can move on
to sharing quantities and measurements in a good old scientific way.
Agree/disagree?

Feelings and moods can at least sometimes be shared and rationally
discussed. We can feel the same way about certain things, whether
they make us feel happy, sad or whatever. Maybe we feel differently
about eating fish and how it makes us feel, but at least we know we
all have a reaction to eating or smelling fish that is something real
even if it varies.
Agree/disagree?

But what about all that stuff we experience that we do not share with 
others,
we can't point at it or measure it, we can't even agree what it is that we
are referring to, because it is not shared, it is driven by imagined 
experiences?
We can of course describe such experiences, they may even prove rather
fruitful like Einstein's imagining what it is like to travel at the speed of 
light.
What has the MOQ got to say about the imagination, does it recognise
that all experiences are real? Is MOQ therefore not a realist metaphysics?
I can't think why the MOQ would start to suggest that some experiences are
less real than others or are illusions? I'd suggest the only real difference 
between
these different sorts of experiences is really how easy or hard it is to 
share them.
Would it not be fair to say that what we mean by perceptual experiences is 
that
these are connected by having an easily shared source (SOM calls them 
objects).
Moods are less easily shared (although our shared human nature helps) and 
may differ (SOM calls these
subjective) and the imagination is a realm of freedom where we can travel to 
unfamiliar corners
where we may often find ourselves alone and find it difficult to share our 
discoveries
with others. I'd suggest all these experiences are quite real, unless you 
are a positivist,
but how does the MOQ make sense of this difference in how we are able to 
share these
experiences with different levels of difficulty? Great artists, of course, 
are those who
enable us to share in their great imaginative discoveries and explorations.
Agree/disagree?

David M