Empiricism and the Bounds of Sense

In this book' Professor Strawson seeks to renew the Kantian enterprise, stripping off the speculative aberrations of Transcendental Idealism to reveal that hard core of argument which constitutes its analytic essence. Part of what remains is held to amount to a refutation of that radical empiricism which holds that it is possible that all there is, is experience, and that the existence of an independent world populated by material objects is open to doubt. Though fifteen years old and widely discussed, The Bounds of Sense remains a locus classicus for the modern Kantian movement against empiricist scepticism. It is important therefore to identify and examine any central presuppositions which have so far escaped sustained attention, and in considering Srrawson's account of Kant's Transcendental Deduction, I wish to show that he does not oppose, but rather presupposes the basis of radical empiricism, and hence is incapable of escaping its limits or its attendant scepticism. For Strawson, the Transcendental Deduction results in us favourably entertaining the conclusion that, as a necessary condition of the possibility of experience, experience itself 'must have such internal, conceptcarried connectedness as to constitute it (at least in part) a course of experience of an objective world' (p. 117). This is 'the thesis of objectivity' (p. 24). Let us first notice an ambiguity in the phrase 'experience of an objective world,' since Strawson never explicitly concerns himself with it. The 'of' here could be merely intentional, in the Scholastic and Husserlian sense, indicating that it must, at least, seem in experience that there are independent objects in an objective world, whether or not such objects, or such a world, exist. Thus even if we suspend judgement as to their actual existence, experience is still of objects in an objective world in this intentional sense. Alternatively, the 'of' could indicate a

Empiricism · Epistemology · Sense (electronics · Chemistry · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science