Empiricism, Radical
Empiricism, Radical
The theory of knowledge which holds that idens are reducible to sensations, as in Hume (1711-1776). The doctrine that experience is the final criterion of reality in knowledge. Syn. with sensationalistic empiricism or sensationalism (q.v.). See Avenarius.
William James, who first adopted this philosophical position, and so named it, described it in The Meaning of Truth (Preface, xii-xiii) as consisting “first of a postulate, next of a statement of fact, and finally of a generalized conclusion.
1. “The postulate is that the only things which shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience. . . .
2. “The statement of fact is that relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are as much matters of direct particular experience . . . [as] . . . the things themselves.
3. “The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure.”
James believed that ridical empiricism differed from ordinary or traditional empiricism primarily through the above “statement of fact” (No. 2). By this statement he wished explicitly and thoroughly to reject a common assumption about experience which he found both in the British empiricism and in Kantian and Hegelian idealism, namelv, that experience as given is either a collection of disparate impressions or, as Kant would have preferred to say, a manifold of completely unsynthesized representations, and that hence, in order to constitute a world, the material of experience must first be worked over and connective relations established within it either through the principles of the association of ideas (British empiricism) or through a set of trans-empirical categories imposed by the unity of consciousness (Kantian and Hegelian idealism). — F.L.W.