Radical empiricism

Radical empiricism is a pragmatist

Pragmatism

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice...

doctrine put forth by William James

William James

William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...

. 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

Transcendence (philosophy)

In philosophy, the adjective transcendental and the noun transcendence convey the basic ground concept from the word's literal meaning , of climbing or going beyond, albeit with varying connotations in its different historical and cultural stages...

connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure."

Postulate

The postulate is a basic statement of the empiricist

Empiricism

Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,...

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.

Fact

James' factual statement is that our experience isn't just a stream of data, it's a complex process

Stream of consciousness (psychology)

Stream of consciousness refers to the flow of thoughts in the conscious mind. The full range of thoughts that one can be aware of can form the content of this stream, not just verbal thoughts...

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

Sense data

In the philosophy of perception, the theory of sense data was a popular view held the early 20th century by philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, C. D. Broad, H. H. Price, A.J. Ayer and G.E. Moore, among others. Sense data are supposedly mind-dependent objects whose existence and properties are...

") 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 Principles of Psychology
Principles of Psychology
The Principles of Psychology is a monumental text in the history of psychology, written by William James and published in 1890.There were four methods in James' psychology: analysis , introspection , experiment The Principles of Psychology is a monumental text in the history of psychology, written...

in 1890, more than a decade before he first wrote about radical empiricism.

It differs notably from the traditional empiricist view of Locke

John Locke

John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...

and Hume

David Hume

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...

, 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.

Conclusion

James concludes that experience is full of connections and that these connections are part of what is actually experienced:

Context and importance

James put forth the doctrine because he thought ordinary empiricism

Empiricism

, inspired by the advances in physical science, has or had the tendency to emphasize 'whirling particles' at the expense of the bigger picture: connections, causality, meaning. Both elements, James claims, are equally present in experience and both need to be accounted for.

The observation that our adherence to science seems to put us in a quandary is not exclusive to James. For example Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...

notes the paradox in his Analysis of Matter (1927): we appeal to ordinary perception to arrive at our physical theories, yet those same theories seem to undermine that everyday perception, which is rich in meaning.

Radical empiricism relates to discussions about direct versus indirect realism as well as to early twentieth-century discussions against the idealism

Idealism

In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...

of influential philosophers like Josiah Royce

Josiah Royce

Josiah Royce was an American objective idealist philosopher.-Life:Royce, born in Grass Valley, California, grew up in pioneer California very soon after the California Gold Rush. He received the B.A...

. This is how Neo-realists like William Pepperell Montague

William Pepperell Montague

William Pepperell Montague was a philosopher of the New Realist school. Montague stressed the difference between his philosophical peers as adherents of either "objective" and "critical realism"....

and Ralph Barton Perry

Ralph Barton Perry

Ralph Barton Perry was an American philosopher.-Career:...

interpreted James.

The conclusion that our worldview does not need transempirical support is also important in discussions about the adequacy of naturalistic

Naturalism (philosophy)

Naturalism commonly refers to the philosophical viewpoint that the natural universe and its natural laws and forces operate in the universe, and that nothing exists beyond the natural universe or, if it does, it does not affect the natural universe that we know...

descriptions of meaning and intentionality, which James attempts to provide, in contrast to phenomenological approaches or some forms of reductionism

Reductionism

Reductionism can mean either an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can...

that claim that meaning is an illusion.