John Dewey was a part of a movement in American philosophy that included Charles Peirce, the inventor of semiotics, and William James, who is often credited with the invention of modern psychology and modern philosophy of mind. James launched more of what those fields are today, than Freud, about whom it could be said that launched what those fields became in the 1940s and 50s. (So, it used to be said Freud was “the father of psychology”, but then psychology became, in the 1970s and 1980s, something that James, rather than Freud, seems to have initiated.) All three were often referred to as “pragmatists”, after an aspiration on the part of Pierce to form a new kind of philosophy that could bypass unwieldy abstraction and withstand the complexity and ambiguity everyday life. (Emerson was also an influential figure.) Dewey, James, and Pierce, each in different ways, cultivated radical departures from the norms of Western philosophy, that had little to know influence outside the United States. But Jacques Derrida would (much) later argue that pragmatism (borne of Pierce’s semiotics, James’ Radical Empiricism, and Dewey’s anti-authoritarian approach to pedagogy), was ahead of its time, anticipating what would later become poststructuralism decades later in France.
Empiricism is, roughly, a belief that experience and observation are the most reliable sources of knowledge. (Normally this is contrasted with “rationalism”…) It might also be described as the tendency in Western philosophy to recognize the limits of a priori beliefs, theories, or assumptions, in understanding our present experience—a kind of humility about how we already think about things: it is a resistence to (but not a rejection of!) established categorical ways of thinking or comprehending. When we say we are doing an “empirical” study of x, it means that we resist theory as a basis for understanding x … and instead, we embark on observation. The observation/theory distinction actually plays a more complex role in empirical philosophy, but it can be simplified by saying that for empiricists, the production of knowledge is a process, maybe even a kind of dance, between these two types of mental activity.
Observations consist of limited perspectives, but in empirical philosophy they are never “flawed” per se, because it’s in the very nature of an observation to be temporary, and contingent.^1 As long as we recognize that a perspective is bounded, an observation has stability as such: you can dispute what it means, and what actually happened, but it doesn’t make much sense to dispute whether or not an observation occurred. This is important because as limited as an observation might be, it can be construed as a part of a series of observations that form a pattern that might be a useful source of knowledge about other things. A ‘pattern’ of observations is just as bounded as an observation, always referring not to what is, but to “what we experience when ___, and if ____.” These patterns don’t have to lead to a profound truth in order to lead to a broad basis for prediction. More importantly, when a series of observations includes some sense of stability across a range of perspectives—even stability means understanding the role that those perspectives play—the broadening range becomes a broadening basis for theory. Scientific methods are systematic ways of expanding the utility of observation, through the controlled comparison of observations repeating across time and space; theories that arise from those observations not only contribute to our world view, but they help us both to stay humble about our limited perceptions as individuals—for example, we learn that the sun doesn’t revolve around us—and to challenge authority where it might force a kind of knowledge—for example, sexism, or internalized self-oppression—that limits us as a culture or as a species.
Theories are attempts to explain such a series of observations, in a way that lets them all relate to some common explanation or premise. By establishing a way of connecting a large number of experiences to a small number of ideas, our thoughts about those experiences are economized. Theory in that sense, functions in Lacan’s symbolic domain: theory individuates a complex reality with a simpler series of statements; it replaces something chaotic with something invocative and orderly; sharper or bolder lines in the world that, while artificial and sometimes simplistic, sometimes give us half a chance at seeing more of it. (And sometimes need to be broken when clarity requires a new view.) Theory doesn’t just have that definition in science; it applies colloquially as well. When Robert Mapplethorpe says “my theory about creativity is that the more money one has, the more creative one can be,” he is representing creativity, by establishing a common idea (money facilitating freedom) as a stand-in (a standing-for) for a more elusive one (creativity).
The question left wide open by the empirical dance of theory and observation—even in some presumably “empirical” scientific discourse—is the degree to which the status and organization of the knowledge left behind, so to speak, in the wake of the method, is itself empirical. (Again, we know that the facts were gained empirically, but what of their status? Their organization?) Say a public intellectual is trying to determine some differences between female-assigned brains and male-assigned brains, and we observe that female-assigned thinkers tend to have denser, more abundant dendrite-networks connecting the brain hemispheres. We also observe that patients with severed dentrites have difficulty recognizing emotions in the faces of others. Then someone theorizes that female-assigned embodiments are more sensitive to the emotional determinants of facial expressions. If someone can confirm the theory in a series of observations, and that someone is reportedly careful in recording the circustances of those observations, then the theory becomes a kind of knowledge.
But if instead, the study shows something like the above observation, but with a range of ambiguities: i.e. that women (I will use gender terms now because the data will acknowledge more complexity, and ‘break’ the category') tend to fall not on one end, but on either end of the spectrum of sensitivity, while men cluster in a moderate level of sensitivity, and if we also find that the ends of the spectrum are populated by men in rare cases… cases where in fact men are even more extreme. Then we return to observation, a little dissatisfied with what seems like a messy relationship between gender and sensitivity. Say we notice that the location of women on the spectrum is sometimes radically affected by whether the face is a stranger’s or a relative’s, and sometimes not…but men never produce that effect. And then in one group of women, there is a much higher standard deviation, except where the faces are elderly men or androgynous, in which case the standard deviation is the same as that of men, on average. And then, as it turns out, the results of the Boston experiment can’t be duplicated in Denmark.
Is this knowledge? Certainly—at the very least, we can say that we have knowledge that the situation is complex or ambiguous. However, this isn’t the kind of knowledge (yet) that qualifies colloquially as “scientific knowledge” in the public imagination. And in the institutional imagination, it is often said that the paper isn’t ready for publication, or if it is published, the journalist does not feel that the scientist is ready to be interviewed, or if the journalist finds it newsworthy, the managing editors do not find room for it this week, or if they do, perhaps the news-consuming public tunes out the story.
“Knowledge” is very different from “experience” or “reality.” Like “theory,” knowledge is a semiotic entity (Gordon Wells (2007) “Semiotic mediation, dialogue, and the construction of knowledge” Human Development 50:244–274) consisting of memes that stand in for a chaotic abundance experience and reality. What determines the signifier? When does a scientist declare the emergence of knowledge? No matter how empirical her process, the declaration of success in the process is an aesthetic declaration, is it not? It reflects a decision that experience has become something both more than experience and less than it, something worth holding, something worth situating next to the next chaotic bit of experience you’ll have, in hopes of improving your experience of it. The “aesthetics” to which I’m referring here isn’t merely a problem at the level of journalists and magazines and the public who read them; it begins with a scientists’ sense of time, and becoming, in the construction of questions and their meanings.
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William James thought-through these issues in the early 1900s, and recognized that sound science requires not only what I am calling a dance between observation and theory, but a willingness to reject the aesthetics, or the narrativity, of “clarity” in knowledge, as it is spiritually and culturally defined. And to replace that aesethetics with an embrace of ambiguity and the inherent fluctuation of its subjectivity, its becoming. In order to embrace that—a key element of his most famous thesis on knowledge—“Essays in Radical Empiricism“—(New York: Longman Green and Co., 1912^2) requires us to give the same status of “reality” to the relations between things, as to things themselves. If physical objects are real, and shapes and letters are real, then the ways that shapes and signs refer to other things are also real, and so are the processes and developments of our narratives about those references.
Implicitly or not, the best scientists today have embraced James’ outlook, not presuming that clarity = grand truth, & ambiguity = ask again, something must be wrong. When I speak casually with a neurobiologist studying sex differences in the cerebral cortex, and ask her about her research, she normally does not say “I am learning about the mental essence of man and woman”. Instead, she’ll say something like “I am testing whether female cats with elevated levels of potassium enjoy hunting more than their male counterparts.” And if you ask her what she has learned, she will always say “well the cats I have studied exhibit…”, always being certain to profess the limitedness of observation, never saying that what she has learned is the truth in any broad sense.
However, this project, what turns out to be quite humble at its core, doesn’t begin or end that way. A sense of knowledge in the inquiry, and a sense of choice about the nature of question and answer, unfolds simultaneously on different planes, and in relation to different criteria. The lab she is working in discovers something useful, the utility is put forward in a grant application, the institution produces a name for itself and projects it to a journalist. The empirical ideal doesn’t disappear, but at some point it has to make a transition from the base/systemic labor of methodology, to the superstructural domain of utility or meaning…the dance of observation has to be cut, into a shape, something that looks like knowledge (or doesn’t look like it), before we can interrupt one barrage of tests and begin another, searching once again for that aesthetic. Flash forward six months, and the scientist finds herself “humanized”, she is inspiring us about the wonders of knowledge, musing the implications of what she has found, she is laughing approvingly at a joke about why women like to shop. This mediating process does not float freely, or independently, apart from scientific inquiry; it is an integrated part of scientific method.
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The legacy of empiricism, defined radically, also extends from Bergson’s Matter and Memory (partially read in DANM 201), which in turn informs familiar Deleuzian/Guattarian concepts of the “Nomadic”, and “Rhizome,” developed in Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Rhizomes.net’s resource on rhizomes and becoming is excellent, and is more practical for our purposes than direct engagement of the whole Deleuzian project.
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NOTES
^1. For example, “I saw the bird fly west” is, for an empiricist, only incorrect if it is a lie. I may have seen something that didn’t happen, I may have misidentified a bug as a bird, I can mistake jumping for flying, and I can mistake west for east. But regardless of what ‘actually’ happened when those mistakes were made, the observation itself (if not a lie) is irrefutable; that is what I saw. (One can debate the semantic point here: “did you see it, or only think that you saw it?” But for our purposes here, seeing is always tantamount to “thinking that you see.” For empiricists, there is no perfect certainty about the senses, except one: we can be certain that we sensed.)
^2. That link’s to a pdf of my own design, the full text (James, William Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Longman Green and Co., 1912) is fun too.