Examines an excerpt titled "A World of Pure Experience"
Focus on the relationship between knower and known in experience
James challenges the traditional distinction between perceiver and perceived.
He argues that experience incorporates both the nature of the experience and the things encountered through it.
Empiricism constrains knowledge to the contents of sensed experience.
Empiricists assert knowledge comes only from what can be experienced.
Examining a simple perception: looking at a wall
Everyone sees the wall and may agree on its properties (e.g., color).
Belief example: "The wall is white".
Inquiry into the content of the belief:
Temptation to think it is about the wall.
James suggests it is really about our experience of the wall.
Truth of the claim depends on personal perceptual experience.
James uses the Thanksgiving dinner as an illustrative example:
A family member disputes the reality of tables.
One might touch the table (knock on it) to prove its existence.
The knocking serves as experiential evidence, not evidence of an independent object.
When saying a wall is white,
The proposition concerns personal perception, not the wall itself.
Proposition demonstrates subjective experience about the belief rooted in experience, not external reality.
James critiques traditional empiricism for focusing only on the individual parts and abstract relations.
Radical empiricism combines experience and relations into one framework:
It holds that both the individual elements and their relations should derive from direct experiences.
Experience includes all relational features as constituents.
The lecture concludes by emphasizing the relational aspects of experience in James' philosophy.
It will continue with an exploration of conjunctive versus disjunctive relations in the next session.
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