[FRIAM] Radical Empiricism
Frank Wimberly
wimberly3 at gmail.com
Sun Jun 4 21:48:49 EDT 2023
As one of the few, if not the only, person who has been a full time
employee of a philosophy department for multiple years, I am quick to
defend my former colleagues. Read "Actual Causation and Thought
Experiments" by Glymour and Wimberly in J. K. Campbell, M. O'Rourke & H. S.
Silverstein (eds.), Causation and Explanation. MIT Press
You don't have to read thousands, or even hundreds, of pages to be able to
grok that paper.
---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM
On Sun, Jun 4, 2023, 7:30 PM David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:
> So there’s a rather concrete way in which one can imagine ChatGPT’s being
> particularly useful as a time-saver.
>
> I have heard it said (and find it persuasive), that philosophy is
> different from physics because what philosophers want to do and settle for
> being is different from that for physicists.
>
> A physicist can pick up F = ma and start from there to get something done.
>
> Each philosopher is, in a sense, a new beginning of the universe, and you
> are expected to read thousands of pages of his composition to be permitted
> to engage with him. That is a good barrier to exclude pretty-much-everbody
> from most conversations.
>
> But there are specific topics on which engaging with this group is a game
> of whack-a-mole, and it would be _so_ satisfying to catch that damned mole
> far enough out of the hole to pin him down to the board for once.
>
> It is on this point:
>
> Summarizing what, as Marcus rightly says, as been repeated 10^n times
> before, CGTP quotes:
>
> At the core of radical empiricism is the concept of "pure experience."
> According to James, pure experience refers to the immediate, unmediated
> apprehension of reality, devoid of any conceptual or interpretative
> filters. It involves experiencing the world as it is, without imposing
> preconceived notions or theories onto the experience.
> What the HELL does anyone think this is supposed to refer to? I am not
> asking whether it actually does refer to anything, but rather what anyone
> believes he is saying by it.
>
> And I can ask that in a rather concrete way. Were James to engage with
> Husserl, would he claim that the access to the “immediate apprehension” is
> by way of the same portal as Husserl’s epoche?
>
> I ask because they set themselves up to make a particular style of
> assertion.
>
> By analogy, we have seen that human bodies can do things like Amanars and
> any of the 4 Bileses (which should have been 5, and would have been were it
> not for COVID). But that doesn’t mean every human body can do any of
> them. There is rather a lot of specific training that goes into becoming
> one of the bodies that can do any of this.
>
> The various “internal” experience-focused philosophers present these
> things as doable, but technical and particular and requiring training.
>
> But if you then ask what that is about, you get either a demand to follow
> several thousand pages in each person’s formulation, or the kind of cloudy
> motivational life-coach speech that almost all of the CGPT summary is
> composed of. (Reminds me of something I once heard said of chimp speech:
> if you aren’t there working with them, you cannot anticipate how
> mind-numbingly repetitive it is).
>
> So rather than asking “what it is” (the skill or whatever), I can ask “If
> they were arguing with each other, would they even assert to each other,
> each with his supposed privileged appreciation of the mysteries, assert or
> deny that they are referring to the same thing.
>
> This might allow us to not have to approach the full body of philosophical
> literature as if each corpus were Sui generis.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jun 5, 2023, at 2:43 AM, Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:
>
> ChatGPT now allows sharing conversations. I've asked it about William
> James book "Essays in Radical Empiricism"
> https://chat.openai.com/share/375aef4e-a8d6-467e-8061-bd85b341c46b
> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fchat.openai.com%2fshare%2f375aef4e-a8d6-467e-8061-bd85b341c46b&c=E,1,SrWav4ypspeJiXxANsU84IqWFKy5OPWIx-qHp0YLHpEHLinoe3Q3aAeuo_0eErOe6fnJYosh3T6fflwMl7CsxV2wKAIIwCbBlleeoZM8db1fEE4,&typo=1&ancr_add=1>
>
> -J.
>
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