An Empiricism Worthy of the Name

The chapter explains Bergson’s theories of body as image, perception as virtual action, and memory as virtual experience. Perception is virtual action—not yet action though tending to it; and memory is virtual experience—not yet present but tending to add itself to present perception, enhancing its acuity and prudence. Experience is more than sense perception, which is experience with bodies in space. Intuition is Bergson’s word for experience with the phenomena of duration, such as movement, becoming, development, and continuity. Bergson’s empiricism goes beyond usual empiricisms because experience goes beyond the utilitarianism in which epistemological empiricism confined it. What Bergson calls the error of empiricism is to be satisfied with experience mutilated by anthropomorphism and riddled with cliches. A more consistent empiricism eliminates the defects of nominalism, as James did, but also brackets the pragmatism that limits experience to the virtual rehearsal of action.

The Beginning of Radical Empiricism

William James introduced the expression “radical empiricism.” The chapter explains what was supposed to make empiricism radical, and why James thought that was worth trying to do. That requires explaining the connection between radical empiricism and other themes in James’s work, including pluralism and the idea of pure experience. His work belongs to an effort from the latter nineteenth century to make empiricism more consistently empirical by overcoming the legacy of Ockham and nominalism, and it is this anti-nominalist animus that radicalizes James’s empiricism.

Empiricisms of Antiquity

Empirical philosophy begins in Greek medicine, which formulates the first imperative to use experience as an instrument of knowledge, and initiates European thinking about methods of empirical inquiry. Antiquity’s greatest thinker on empirical methods was Galen, its greatest doctor. Many leading empirical philosophers had medical training or studied medical writings and collaborated with physicians. This began when Democritus and Epicurus drew medical empiricism into natural philosophy, but their efforts were swamped by the prestigious rationalism of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. The chapter also considers the empiricism of the Babylonians, and the career of empiricism under Islam.

Empiricism with Chinese Characteristics

The chapter offers an account of Chinese thought on the value of experience, including ideas about the senses and their evidence, practices of measurement, observation, and experiment, and the contributions of alchemy, medicine, and selected Mohist, Daoist, and Confucian classics. The question is whether there is any philosophy in these experimental traditions, or any empiricism in the philosophical traditions. A difference comes to light between European and Chinese evaluations of knowledge. European philosophy tends to assume that serious problems reduce to problems of knowledge, and its empiricisms tend to value experience for a contribution to such problems. Chinese traditions evade fixation on problems of knowledge. Knowledge is good, but not a panacea, and turns vicious without virtue. Experience contributes more to the development of virtue than it does to knowledge, and knowledge is valued only for its continuity with virtue.

The Dogmas of Empiricism and the Linguistic Turn

The chapter considers three lines of anti-empiricism in analytic philosophy: Quine and Davidson against the “dogmas of empiricism”; Sellars against the “myth of the given”; and Rorty’s new pragmatism, with its “higher nominalism” and disdain for radical empiricism. These anti-empiricism arguments were chiefly developed with Carnap in mind, and that is their weakness. The empiricism they criticize is theorematic rather than problematic, the empiricism of Russell and Carnap, not Epicurus or Newton. “Problematic” empiricisms like theirs, and including the work of the radical empiricists, are untouched by this entire line of criticism.

Introduction

The work begins with a look at the tabletop experiment Richard Feynman performed before a presidential commission investigating the space shuttle Challenger disaster. The case introduces the work’s leading questions—what do good experiments accomplish? What is the relation between experiments and experience, or between experience and knowledge? A distinction between two versions of empiricism plays a thematic role in the work. One version is “problematic,” another “theorematic,” using terms from Euclid for a difference in what these empiricisms expect from experience. For theorematic empiricism experience is ultimate evidence, its value probative (proof, demonstration, verification). Problematic empiricism eschews the idea of ultimate evidence, and from experience expects superior performance and a successful solution to a problem of knowledge. It is this problematic empiricism that is associated with scientific experimentation (the argument of Part I), as well as with the so-called radical empiricists (the argument of Part II).

Conclusion

Empiricism values the experience from which we learn. Some philosophers equate experience with present perception. Against that it is argued that experience requires memory, living through trials, and being changed by the experience. Some philosophers also consider experience an obvious example of knowing. Describing experience as knowledge is like describing a knife as a cut. Experience is an instrument that can be used more or less artfully. Empiricism is the art of using experience to advance problems of knowledge. The tenable values of empiricism remain those of experimentalism, even radical experimentalism, experiments in experimentation. Experimental values are many, and not limited to scientific routines. However, “truth” is not one of these experimental values, which tend instead toward aesthetic qualities like interesting, beautiful, surprising, or fecund.

The Art of Experience

Dewey objects to the same thing Hegel, Dilthey, T. H. Green, and James do in the empiricism of Locke and Hume. They neglect relations and turn mental life into a series of psychological atoms and imaginary continuity. Dewey might have followed the behaviorists of his day and disavowed the concept of experience. Instead, he chose to reconstruct it. The concept needs reconstruction because experience is not what it used to be, and not as philosophy is used to thinking. When Aristotle wrote, knowledge by experience was a hodgepodge of habits and rules of thumb. That is not experience today, and philosophy needs to catch up. Modern experience is experimental and includes the process of its own improvement. Experiments are instruments, and instruments serve ends that are ultimately aesthetic in their satisfaction and value.

Conclusion to Part I

The value of experiments as instruments of inquiry presupposes that experience is a source of knowledge distinct from reasoning, which was the medical idea Democritus and Epicurus drew into natural philosophy. The genius of empiricism is to use perception as an instrument with which to colonize the imperceptible for cognition. The European experiment with empiricism unfolds in two phases, the first spanning the centuries between Alcmaeon and Galen; the second, modernizing phase running from the sixteenth to eighteenth century, when experiments finally consolidated their role as the leading method in natural philosophy. Profiles of empiricism from antiquity to the twentieth century divide along the lines of theorematic and problematic accounts of the relation between experience and knowledge. Part I demonstrated the prominence of a problematic concept of experience in seventeenth century experimentalism. Part II reaches the same conclusion about the radical empiricists of the twentieth century.

Epistemological Empiricisms

The chapter considers the rise of modern epistemological empiricism, from Gassendi and Locke to Spencer and the positivists. The chapter studies empirical philosophy in France (Condillac, Diderot, La Mettrie, Maine de Biran); Claude Bernard’s experimental medicine; the concept of experience in British idealism; the idea of “experimental life” in J. S. Mill and Nietzsche; Dilthey’s concept of experience (Erlebnis); Russell’s concept of sense data; and the value of experience in scientific philosophy (Mach) and logical empiricism (Carnap). Additionally the chapter discusses the emergence of observation as a scientific practice, the contributions of the social studies of science to our understanding of experimental practice, and surveys modern thought concerning visual perception.