Empiricism, Interactionism, World

Descartes and Locke are competing Epistemological Foundationalists--according to the former, Cogito is that foundation, while according to the latter and his Empiricist successors, it is Sense Data of some kind.  A further distinction between the two is methodological--Descartes arrives at the Cogito via a sequence of abstractions that themselves arbitrarily begin in a chair in front of a fire, while the Empiricists forgo any such prelude and start immediately with Sense Experience.  Now, Heidegger's Being-in-the-World offers an account of what the Empiricists repress--not merely the things from which Sense Data are abstracted, but their concatenation as implicated in Practice. Still, his "the" World is problematic, since the Time that is the horizon of one's involvement in it is always one's own, in which case it is one's World in which one is engaged.  Thus, Heidegger does not adequately restore social relations to the Empiricist model.  In contrast, according to Mead's Interactionist concept of the Psyche, children from the earliest age learn to incorporate the perspectives of others into their own, so that the World of each is indeed the World, is better grounded than in Heidegger's model.  Mead thus shows, if traditional Empiricism is any example, how the Atomist concept of relations as contingent, is, when applied to human society, itself contingent, i. e. the product of abstraction from observable processes.