Empiricism Puns

[At the invitation of u/SnowballTheSage, I'm posting some things I've written about key terms in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. I've tried to make things as ELI5 as possible, and no prior knowledge should be required for reading. I'll be posting one every few days until I run out. Feedback and questions are welcome!]

What does Deleuze mean by 'Transcendental Empiricism'?

Part I: Basics

Transcendental empiricism is a philosophical project that attempts to delineate the conditions of real experience, rather than (just) possible experience. This is in response to Kant, whose project of transcendental idealism was just an attempt to outline the conditions of 'possible experience'. The problem Deleuze has with the idea of 'possible' experience is that it is prejudicial: it takes for granted certain things about experience and then proceeds to ask after the conditions which give rise to it (specifically it takes for granted that what we experience are 'representations'). This artificial constraint on transcendental philosophy is what Deleuze wants to remove, and in so doing, enable philosophy to think real, rather than just possible experience.

Doing this, however, requires the very notion of 'experience' to undergo a rather dramatic change. For Kant, experience is what might be called possessive: a subject 'has' experiences, and the point of the transcendental procedure is to figure out the conditions of possibility of those experiences in general. Deleuze has (at least) two issues with this. The first is that for him, experience is what undoes the coherence of a subject. Here, the terms are reversed: it's less that subjects have experiences so much as experiences possess subjects (in the sense that one is 'possessed' by beauty, or fear, or surprise; or else in the sense that one 'undergoes' an experience and comes out different on the other side). All 'genuine' experience in Deleuze is the product of 'encounters' which force a reorganization of the self. Experience is always 'excessive' with respect to the subject: it is trans or supra-subjective.

Now, it is true that this 'makes no sense' from the Kantian perspective, for which experience always takes place within the bounds of the coherent subject. Kantian experience is never excessive. Instead, the project of delineating the conditions of possible experience requires keeping stable both the identity of the subject and the correlativ

I’ve watched so many videos and read so many explanations, but I still don’t fully understand empiricism and rationalism. Maybe I’m a complete moron.

I took an online test (genius, I know) and one of the questions was “do you believe that we have innate knowledge or that we derive knowledge from experiences?”

Which is perhaps the most stupid question in any quiz I’ve ever taken. It’s basically “are you an empiricist or a rationalist?”

If I knew the answer to the quiz question, I wouldn’t need the f*cking quiz.

But that question doesn’t explore what either of those two things are, and they both seem like extreme positions to me.

Can anyone help?

Additional question: which do you think I am (from the description below)?

I believe we have some innate knowledge, or ‘impulses’, derived from our evolution. The desire to f*ck, for a start. Evolutionary biology is a big thing for me. I believe it drives almost everything we do.

I believe that some people are born with genes that make them more predisposed to be intelligent, or creative.

But I also believe that all of this is channelled through the prism of our experiences and interactions in society and life.

Yes, some people are born with the potential to be genii. But any number of things based on your upbringing/circumstances/background could mean that you either flourish with this disposition or go nowhere with it. And I also believe that a person of ‘normal’ genes can reach great heights, given the right circumstances.

That’s why I think that both theories are so extreme. I feel like both combine to make a human being. Nature and nurture, surely?

So, am I one? Or both? Or neither? 😂

Thanks you for getting through all that. Reward for best answer. Least I can do.

I recently had a good-natured discussion with a socialist who claimed to have "empirically falsified" the claim that wages will tend to approach a workers marginal rate of productivity over time under conditions of ceteris paribus.

What he, and plenty of other socialists (and even many pro-market and pro-liberty people) I've had discussions with refused to acknowledge is that there are certain claims of truth that we can make about reality which do not need empirical verification.

Take Euclidean geometry. You can write a proof which shows that the internal angles of a triangle will always add up to 180 degrees, without going out and "testing" your hypothesis in the real world. It's simple logic, if (a) implies (b), and (a) is true, (b) must also be true.

If someone went up to a mathematician claiming to have "empirically falsified" the statement that the sum of the internal angles of a triangle will always add up to 180 degrees, or indeed any other mathematical proof such as Pythagoras' theorem, the mathematician would simply say that the persons "evidence" was insufficient to overturn a a mathematical proof.

Does the mathematician holding that his logical proof is true regardless of whatever empirical evidence someone may present to him constitute a "religious attachment" to his methodology/prior beliefs?

It should also be noted that a truth being derived a priori without reference to empirical observation does not make it unfalsifiable. All you need to do is demonstrate where in a persons chain of reasoning they have made an error, or alternatively, propose a logical proof which better explains reality than the one you disagree with.

If you want to go one step further, you could also show that deductive reason is not properly the realm of economic analysis, and it is in fact appropriate to use empirical evidence rather than logical proofs, which would render the Austrian methodology untenable.

TL;DR Empirical evidence cannot falsify a claim made based purely on logical deduction, and by attempting to do so one is committing an epistemological category error.

I'm probably incorrectly interpreting the argument between rationalism and empiricism, but empiricists deny that we're born with innate knowledge right? But doesn't genetic coding disprove this? For example, an infant will reflexively hold their breath despite never having been submerged in water, wouldn't this be knowledge without experience? Or am I just failing to grasp the definition of empiricism and rationalism entirely? Thanks for your help! ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ

You can't trust your human senses to help you understand the nature of existence because the human senses are way too limited and what this means is that the senses limits the amount of information we can perceive, this universe that we assume exist does not exist, matter is not matter, quantum mechanics proves this to be true, in the quantum level, everything behaves like waves and frequencies, in short, this universe is a shared dream in which we all exist within, but if your focus is on only past lives well I suggest you try to understand the nature of existence and how it's possible, Hyperianism explains this very well, you should check out videos about it that gives great details.

I’m reading Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature right now and I think he makes some really convincing arguments for the empiricist POV. I’ll be reading Spinoza next to understand the rationalist arguments and then (hopefully) Kant+ to see how these ideas meet.

Before I do, though, I want to know if modern philosophers have generally agreed upon one interpretation or the other. Is there a split between modern empiricists and rationalists, or have these views been abandoned and replaced by something else? I’ve heard that Kant’s CPR intends to synthesize the two views; did he succeed?

Thanks!

Empiricism is a philosophical position that knowledge comes entirely or primarily through sensory experience. Naturalism is a philosophical position that supernatural agents/causes can be excluded/discounted. Scientism is excessive belief in the power of science and, as it tends to get employed as an accusation here, connotes something akin to dogmatic faith.

Essentially, the charge of scientism implies an a priori stance that dismisses the need to reflect on epistemology and justify itself. This makes it pretty simple to distinguish empiricism or naturalism from it:

Naturalism: We hear over and over here that naturalism is circular or dogmatic: That it starts by claiming the supernatural is impossible and concludes by claiming the supernatural hasn't happened. This is a caricature of naturalism, which is more commonly about noticing common elements of supernatural explanations that render them non-credible (hence "discountable"). It could have been that supernatural explanations beat natural explanations to the punch or better described the physical world. There could have been a God who revealed an accurate cosmology or set of physical laws which either predated their empirical discovery or were so exactly correct our experiments of limited accuracy had to eternally approach but never finally confirm them. Similarly, natural explanations could have gained no purchase on the world: E.g., objects could be accelerated at rates that couldn't be predicted by impersonal, natural forces. When people find natural explanations more credible than supernatural explanations, it's because the supernatural claims we've heard have often demonstrably failed and never shown particular success. Naturalism doesn't claim a priori that the supernatural is impossible; it justifies finding supernatural explanations non-credible because that's how they've turned out so far.

Empiricism: Likewise, there were competitors for sensory/physical evidence for a primary or most effective means of finding knowledge. We could have been born knowing the molecular structure of molecules; people could have faith about the molecular structure of molecules in ways that are later vindicated; God could reveal molecular structures to us. People don't employ empiricism because they have faith in evidence; they employ it because truth claims made by its competitors tend to be at best impossible to confirm and at worst obviously false.

Anticipated objections:

• "You're proving our point by talk

I recently read Two Dogmas of Empiricism and I think I understand the general concept: he attacks the analytic-synthetic distinction with respect to second-degree analytic statements such as "all bachelors are unmarried men." This makes sense: the analyticity of the the above statement cannot be determined by use of synonyms, definitions, or interchangeability salva veritate without a circular argument.

I have 2 questions:

1. Why is it seen that analyticity was dealt such a large blow when Quine does not seem to attack the analyticity of logical truths (an unmarried man is an unmarried man)?
2. Where do notions of analyticity and synonymy come from? If there is a claim like "All wizards are magicians and all magicians are wizards," it would convey no meaning to say "You are a magician because you are a wizard" & "You are a wizard because you are a magician" because it is circular. Wizard and magician, in this context, are meaningless terms. If analyticity is circular with synonymy and necessity then it should stand that they are also meaningless: so how am I able to comprehend the idea of analyticity? My guess is that the concept of identicality/synonymy is an observation of the world, rooting into some empirical foundation, but I am pretty confused on this part.

Thanks!

So the purpose of this post is to just see that I understand something correctly in relation to a priori knowledge and empiricism. Very roughly speaking, one way of understanding empiricism is the view that the only reliable knowledge I can have of the world comes through my senses of sight, hearing, smell etc. However, there are those who disagree that this can be right that the only reliable data I can rely on is through my senses. One reply (I am quoting Wikipedia here) might be that empirical evidence is a posteriori knowledge. But not all knowledge is experiential - which is where a priori knowledge comes in.

The above stated, what I am getting at is that would it be valid to state that a challenge to an empirical worldview would be that we know about certain things in the world a priori (for example how we understand time) and that not all forms of knowledge about the world come to us a posteriori?

I'm not looking for a discussion about rationalism versus empiricism as epistemological schools but, if you have a particular axe to grind either way, feel free to grind away. Also, for those not familiar with the distinction, here is a good summary.

What I'm interested in is whether a person might have an inherently rationalist or an inherently empiricist psychological orientation. I've often wondered whether there was a connection between rationalism and empiricism and the Jungian concepts of intuition and sensation--with intuition corresponding to rationalism and sensation corresponding to empiricism. Those of you who are INTPs (or other NT types), which feels more "right" to you, rationalism or empiricism? Do ST types feel more drawn to empiricism?

I know that I was instinctively drawn to rationalism as soon as I learned about the two schools of thought. I'm not a purist, I think the epistemological truth includes both (or perhaps lies outside of both). But I know that I'm a rationalist by nature. When a rational explanation "clicks" for me I have little doubt that empirical evidence to support it will be found, where it is a question for which empirical evidence is possible. I'm 90 percent of the way ready to accept it. Whereas, even when there is clear empirical evidence for something I'm uncomfortable with it until there is also a rational explanation.

I believe I've observed that some other people are empiricist, by nature. That is, they're 90 percent (or more) convinced about something by the empirical evidence even in the absence of a rational explanation, and they're uncomfortable with all but the most self-evident of rational explanations in the absence of empirical evidence.

Knowledge is based on experience What would be a weak point of this theory? As I see it, it’s pretty much subjective But what else is a flaw of this theory?

That's my first impression after reading the description of the subreddit explaining what "awakened" means.

>It is clear once again, then, how the concept of his object distinguishes Marx radically from his predecessors and why criticisms of him have run wide of the mark. To think the concept of production is to think the concept of the unity of its conditions: the mode of production. To think the mode of production is to think not only the material conditions but also the social conditions of production. In each case, it is to produce the concept which governs the definition of the economically ‘operational’ concepts (I use the word ‘operational’ deliberately, since it is often used by economists) out of the concept of their object. We know which concept in the capitalist mode of production expressed the fact of capitalist relations of production in economic reality itself: the concept of surplus-value. The unity of the material and social conditions of capitalist production is expressed by the direct relationship between variable capital and the production of surplus-value**. The fact that surplus-value is not a measurable reality arises from the fact that it is not a thing, but the concept of a relationship, the concept of an existing social structure of production, of an existence visible and measurable** only in its ‘effects ‘, in the sense we shall soon define. The fact that it only exists in its effects does not mean that it can be grasped completely in any one of its determinate effects: for that it would have to be completely present in that effect, whereas it is only present there, as a structure, in its determinate absence. It is only present in the totality, in the total movement of its effects, in what Marx calls the ‘developed totality of its form of existence’, for reasons bound up with its very nature. It is a relation of production between the agents of the production process and the means of production, i.e., the very structure that dominates the process in the totality of its development and of its existence. The object of production, the land, min- erals, coal, cotton, the instruments of production, tools, machines, etc., are ‘things’ or visible, assignable, measurable realities: they are not structures. The relations of production are structures – and the ordinary economist may scrutinize economic ‘facts’: prices, exchanges, wages, profits, rents, etc., all those ‘measurable’ facts, as much as he likes; he will no more ‘see’ any structure **at that level than the pre-Newtonian ‘physici

(I believe science is both rational and empirical)

I am teaching high schoolers Locke’s empiricism on Monday morning. I started off strong with some Cartesian skepticism but their interest waned toward the end.

I want to make Locke interesting so I don’t lose my students early in the year. Once I get to Hume and Kant, I’m golden. But Locke’s empiricism has me stuck.

I am looking for videos, secondary source readings, or anything else (other than Treatise. My students will have a mutiny after I had them read Descartes Meditations I & II.

>The problems with 'ecstatic' experiences as a basis of Truth are that they provide no progress towards any sort of universal understanding they are completely inconsistent The whole point of philosophy is that we can write things down, talk about them, reason about them, come to some sort of shared understanding of the questions and potential answers. Ecstatic experiences provide nothing like that. Hundreds of years later Aquinas' written work is the source of a lot of discussion; his ecstatic experience is irrelevant except for the result that it prevented further writing.

>Second, what's the difference between Aquinas' experience from that of a Sufi, a Buddhist, or a Pentecostal? Nothing, they are all equally valid (or not) and carry the same weight. An ecstatic experience can be gained by micro-dosing and mescaline, a vision quest, meditation / praying, tantra, a stroke and while they are relevant to the person experiencing it, they are all completely individual and inconsistent. Maybe you'll think the secrets of the universe have been revealed to you, but the secrets are different from everyone else's secrets.

>(this is not to say that hallucinogenics are not useful for depression and/or opening people up to the world; they can be. But they are not a path to universal truth)

>>You say they are inconsistent, but with DMT specifically you can find a lot of people who have the same experience.

> I went to a Catholic university. I had a logic class that concentrated on fallacy and then a St. Thomas AQ class right after. Man, talk about crossover. The AQ prof hated me.

🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲🥲

> Greatest philosopher of the medieval era? William of Ockham never gets any respect.

🤡

>The greatest philosopher? According to who?

>There is no evidence of God and no evidence of divine revelations. This is a sub about philosophy, not theology. Philosophy involves critical thinking, not blind belief in the bible.

🐵🐵🐵

> He's still a theologian with blind beliefs, not a philosopher. Philosophers don't take divine revelations as proof for anything.

> If you believe in unproven nonsense like God or divine revelations, you have blind beliefs.

>God can't be perfect person, perfection can't be changed so God would stay eternally alone without starting any "motion" - perfection is absolute stillness.

> Starting anything is a change. If God at one point was at "nothing is in motion" and then "decides"

What is Transcendental Empiricism?

Part I: Basics

Transcendental empiricism is a philosophical project that attempts to delineate the conditions of real experience, rather than (just) possible experience. This is in response to Kant, whose project of transcendental idealism was just an attempt to outline the conditions of 'possible experience'. The problem Deleuze has with the idea of 'possible' experience is that it is prejudicial: it takes for granted certain things about experience and then proceeds to ask after the conditions which give rise to it (specifically it takes for granted that what we experience are 'representations'). This artificial constraint on transcendental philosophy is what Deleuze wants to remove, and in so doing, enable philosophy to think real, rather than just possible experience.

Doing this, however, requires the very notion of 'experience' to undergo a rather dramatic change. For Kant, experience is what might be called possessive: a subject 'has' experiences, and the point of the transcendental procedure is to figure out the conditions of possibility of those experiences in general. Deleuze has (at least) two issues with this. The first is that for him, experience is what undoes the coherence of a subject. Here, the terms are reversed: it's less that subjects have experiences so much as experiences possess subjects (in the sense that one is 'possessed' by beauty, or fear, or surprise; or else in the sense that one 'undergoes' an experience and comes out different on the other side). All 'genuine' experience in Deleuze is the product of 'encounters' which force a reorganization of the self. Experience is always 'excessive' with respect to the subject: it is trans or supra-subjective.

Now, it is true that this 'makes no sense' from the Kantian perspective, for which experience always takes place within the bounds of the coherent subject. Kantian experience is never excessive. Instead, the project of delineating the conditions of possible experience requires keeping stable both the identity of the subject and the correlative identity of the object: it is the self-same object that is experienced by the self-same subject that constitutes experience. For Deleuze on the other hand, both these constraints need to be shorn off in order to get down to the real conditions of experience, which, when approached without prejudice, put into question both the self-identity of the subject and the self-identity of the obj

You can't trust your human senses to help you understand the nature of existence because the human senses are way too limited and what this means is that the senses limits the amount of information we can perceive, this universe that we assume exist does not exist, matter is not matter, quantum mechanics proves this to be true, in the quantum level, everything behaves like waves and frequencies, in short, this universe is a shared dream in which we all exist within, but if your focus is on only past lives well I suggest you try to understand the nature of existence and how it's possible, Hyperianism explains this very well, you should check out videos about it that gives great details.