> Any other takers on what constitutes empirical evidence?
"We have empirical evidence"
"He has an eyewitness account"
"I have an experience"
"You have a delusion"
I think that covers the territory.
I mean "empirical evidence" is just what corporate bodies of men get
together to call "empirical evidence", after, that is, a suitable period of
wondering aloud between themselves as to whether or not it might be better
classed as a freak result, an experimental flaw, the result of exceptional
stupidity, or of a fraud, or all of the above.
(eventually, after a few hundred years of the "evidence" providing exemplary
service to humanity, the "stupidity" verdict wins out)
Only the corporate "we" talks in terms of "evidence": the scientific
community consider "evidence", the court hears his "evidence", we only have
"experiences".
And finally when you are singled out as just one individual with experiences
in contradiction with the "evidence", why then you have a "delusion".
------------------------------------------------------
One of the criteria that we want empirical evidence is that it must cohere,
fit, with all the other evidence.
If we were simply passively receiving data from the world, it would be hard
to see why this might be a requirement. After all, wouldn't it then be up
to the world to tell us whether it was coherent or not?
The fact that we we value this coherence so highly suggests that the
evidence is only evidence to us because of the value that the evidence has.
To begin with, coherent evidence is easier to use as a guide to action than
incoherent "evidence".
So it's because of this requirement that evidence be of some practical use
that we would rather accept coherent evidence that not merely coheres
internally but also fits somehow with the overall world picture that we base
our lives around.
To my way of thinking this kind of Pragmatism about "evidence" takes us a
long way from "empiricism" as most people understand the term. Indeed it
looks like a kind of idealism: idealism about evidence, the notion that
evidence consists in ideas and the relations between them.
The way in which this kind of "idealism" differs from that widely understood
by the term is that of course pragmatists remind us of the relation that has
to exist between ideas and action. An idea has to have some practical
content, or it is not an idea.
Somewhere between what most people understand by "idealism" and by
"empiricism" and outside and above both: that's where you will find Pirsig
and the American Pragmatists. And Plato.
Elephant
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