Radical empiricism

Radical empiricism is a philosophical doctrine put forth by William James. It asserts that experience includes both particulars and relations between those particulars, and that therefore both deserve a place in our explanations. In concrete terms: any philosophical worldview is flawed if it stops at the physical level and fails to explain how meaning, values and intentionality can arise from that.

Radical empiricism is a postulate, a statement of fact and a conclusion, says James in The Meaning of Truth. The postulate is that "the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience". The fact is that our experience contains disconnected entities as well as various types of connections, it is full of meaning and values. 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."

The postulate is a basic statement of the empiricist method: our theories shouldn't incorporate supernatural or transempirical entities. Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that emphasizes the role of experience, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, while discounting a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation. James allows that transempirical entities may exist, but that it's not fruitful to talk about them.

James' factual statement is that our experience isn't just a stream of data, but a complex process that's full of meaning. We see objects in terms of what they mean to us and we see causal connections between phenomena. Experience is "double-barreled": it has both a content ("sense data") and a reference, and empiricists unjustly try to reduce experience to bare sensations, according to James. Such a "thick" description of conscious experience was already part of William James' monumental work The Principles of Psychology in 1890, more than a decade before he first wrote about radical empiricism.

It differs notably from the traditional empiricist view of Locke and Hume, who see experience in terms of atoms like patches of color and soundwaves, which are in themselves meaningless and need to be interpreted by ratiocination before we can act upon them.

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