I guess you could start an article in the discussion section? I don’t know the etiquette very well here either.
The empiricist claim that I would attack is one which says something like this: we have two ways of coming to know something. First, we come to know things by making inferences from other things we already know, and second we come to know things by direct experience of them. The second way, direct experience, is of something like sense-data. At root, everything else we come to know, we come to know by way of sense-data, and our access to sense-data is independent of whatever we infer from it.
That’s the view that I’d attack. I think any theory of empiricism weaker than that isn’t really distinctively empiricist, or distinguishable from, say, many versions of coherentism. But I’d be willing to debate that too.
That sounds like a good starting point to me. We could discuss this via PM, as TheOtherDave suggested; this way, if our discussion turns out to be nothing but noise, we would at least spare the other LWers the aggravation. Alternatively, I could create a discussion post containing the above paragraph, and my response, and we could go from there.
Both of these approaches sound good to me, so let me know what you want to do and I’ll get crackin’… by which I mean, I will write up a response when I have time :-/
I guess you could start an article in the discussion section? I don’t know the etiquette very well here either.
The empiricist claim that I would attack is one which says something like this: we have two ways of coming to know something. First, we come to know things by making inferences from other things we already know, and second we come to know things by direct experience of them. The second way, direct experience, is of something like sense-data. At root, everything else we come to know, we come to know by way of sense-data, and our access to sense-data is independent of whatever we infer from it.
That’s the view that I’d attack. I think any theory of empiricism weaker than that isn’t really distinctively empiricist, or distinguishable from, say, many versions of coherentism. But I’d be willing to debate that too.
That sounds like a good starting point to me. We could discuss this via PM, as TheOtherDave suggested; this way, if our discussion turns out to be nothing but noise, we would at least spare the other LWers the aggravation. Alternatively, I could create a discussion post containing the above paragraph, and my response, and we could go from there.
Both of these approaches sound good to me, so let me know what you want to do and I’ll get crackin’… by which I mean, I will write up a response when I have time :-/