Sunday, January 7, 2018

Empiricism and Objectivity

The foundations of Locke's Empiricism are the immediate objects of the five senses.  He then distinguishes in those objects Primary Qualities and Secondary Qualities, and Berkeley eliminates the former completely, as does Hume.  But, the resulting experiential data can no longer be characterized as 'sensory', since the sense organs are part of what has been eliminated.  Likewise eliminated are any grounds for a distinction between Subject and Object, e. g. Hume's Bundle of Perceptions constitutes any entity as much as the 'I'.  So, this tradition can no longer be classified as 'Empiricism', and it lacks any criterion of Objectivity.  In contrast, Bacon's Empiricism seeks objective Knowledge via impersonally repeatable operations on observed things and events.  In other words, by privatizing Empiricism, Locke et al. abstract it from its social relevance.

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