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Radical Empiricism is a pragmatist doctrine put forth by William James. In James' own words:

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. . . . a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced, whether term or relation, in the final philosophic arrangement.^[1]

James put forth the doctrine because he thought ordinary empiricism has or had the tendency to emphasize 'whirling particles' and particulars at the expense of the bigger picture (connections, causality, meaning). Both elements, James claims, are equally present in experience and both need to be accounted for.

Now, ordinary empiricism, in spite of the fact that conjunctive and disjunctive relations present themselves as being fully co-ordinate parts of experience, has always shown a tendency to do away with the connections of things, and to insist most on the disjunctions.^[2]

John Dewey, in his Experience and Nature, attacks the same dichotomies that bothered James: objectivity/subjectivity, mind/body and so on. His position is more or less the same as that of James, although he does not himself use the word 'Radical Empiricism' but rather 'Immediate Empiricism'.

Stephen Toulmin comes to a similar conclusion in his Reason in Ethics after an investigation into the meaning of reality and 'really' in our ordinary language. His exposition is of interest because it makes clear how the world can be at the same time messy and ordered, mere atoms and a meaningful place - which neither James or Dewey made clear.

Now the notion of 'what is really so-and-so' is one which we encounter in many types of context. . . . Further, it is a notion about which there is not always agreement or even consistency. An artist may take us into a wood and say, 'Look upwards, and compare the colour of the sky seen through the branches with its colour over the fields: you'll find that it is a deeper blue in the first case than in the second'; and when the physicist replies, 'Of course, it isn't really a deeper blue: that's only an illusion', the artist may retort, 'Isn't really a deeper blue? What do you mean? Why, if you'll only use your eyes, you'll see that it is!' The artist's retort may take us by surprise for, as his clinching piece of evidence, he picks on the way it looks in the two cases-- the very thing the physicist has to regard as irrelevant!^{[citation needed]}

The need to distinguish reality and appearance, Toulmin tells us, only arises when we try to explain a phenomenon, and what counts as real and as appearance depends on what kind of explanation is asked for in each individual case.

1. ^ William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 1912, Essay II § 1.
2. ^ William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 1912, Essay II § 2.

• Essays in Radical Empiricism
• William James