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12. The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism (1909)
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12 The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism (1909) john dewey the criticisms made upon that vital but still unformed movement variously termed radical empiricism,pragmatism,humanism,functionalism ,1 according as one or another aspect of it is uppermost,have left me with a conviction that the fundamental difference is not so much in matters overtly discussed as in a presupposition that remains tacit:a presupposition as to what experience is and means. To do my little part in clearing up the confusion, I shall try to make my own presupposition explicit. The object of this paper is, then, to set forth what I understand to be the postulate and the criterion of immediate empiricism. Immediate empiricism postulates that things—anything, everything, in the ordinary or non-technical use of the term “thing”—are what they are experienced as. Hence, if one wishes to describe anything truly, his task is to tell what it is experienced as being. If it is a horse that is to be described, or the equus that is to be defined, then must the horse-trader, or the jockey, or the timid family man who wants a “safe driver,” or the zoologist, or the paleontologist tell us what the horse is which is experienced. If these accounts turn out different in some respects, as well as congruous in others, this is no reason for assuming the content of one to be exclusively “real,” and that of others to be “phenomenal”; for each account of what is experienced will manifest that it is the account of the horse-dealer, or of the zoologist, and hence will give the conditions requisite for understanding the differences as well as the agreements of the various accounts. And the principle varies not a whit if we bring in the psychologist’s horse, the logician’s horse, or the metaphysician’s horse. 12.Ch12.189-195/Capps 10/29/04, 10:34 AM 189 190 . john dewey In each case, the nub of the question is, what sort of experience is denoted or indicated: a concrete and determinate experience, varying, when it varies , in specific real elements, and agreeing, when it agrees, in specific real elements ,so that we have a contrast,not between a Reality and various approximations to,or phenomenal representations of Reality,but between different reals of experience. And the reader is begged to bear in mind that from this standpoint, when “an experience” or “some sort of experience” is referred to, “some thing” or “some sort of thing” is always meant. Now,this statement that things are what they are experienced to be is usually translated into the statement that things (or, ultimately, Reality, Being) are only and just what they are known to be or that things are, or Reality is, what it is for a conscious knower—whether the knower be conceived primarily as a perceiver or as a thinker being a further and secondary question.This is the root-paralogism of all idealisms, whether subjective or objective, psychological or epistemological. By our postulate, things are what they are experienced to be: and unless knowing is the sole and only genuine mode of experiencing, it is fallacious to say that Reality is just and exclusively what it is or would be to an all-competent all-knower; or even that it is, relatively and piecemeal, what it is to a finite and partial knower. Or, put more positively , knowing is one mode of experiencing, and the primary philosophic demand (from the standpoint of immediatism) is to find out what sort of an experience knowing is—or, concretely how things are experienced when they are experienced as known things. By concretely is meant, obviously enough (among other things), such an account of the experience of things as known that will bring out the characteristic traits and distinctions they possess as things of a knowing experience, as compared with things experienced aesthetically,or morally,or economically,or technologically.To assume that, because from the standpoint of the knowledge experience things are what they are known to be, therefore, metaphysically, absolutely, without qualification ,everything in its reality (as distinct from its “appearance,” or phenomenal occurrence) is what a knower would find it to be, is, from the immediatist ’s standpoint,if not the root of all philosophic evil,at least one of its main roots. For this leaves out of account what the knowledge standpoint is itself experienced as. I start and am flustered by a...