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Radical Empiricism: On the Road to Recovery
Abstract: Physicalism and ontological reductionism have dominated philosophy and science for a very long time. In cognitive science, neuroscience, and the science of consciousness this leads to a variety of problems such as the hard problem of consciousness, the seeming explanatory and ontic separation of cognitive abilities from experience, and the question of how to interpret or treat realistically a variety of everyday experiences such as the passage of time, as well as less common transformative “mystical” experiences such as those sometimes produced by psychedelics, meditation, etc. Indeed, this state of affairs has led to a variety of seemingly intractable epistemic, ontic, and existential conundrums in philosophy, science, and everyday life. While there are philosophical and scientific counter-movements afoot such as enactivist-based 4E cognitive science and multiscale contextual emergence, these evolving scientific approaches need to be grounded in a different metaphysical and epistemological foundation. It will be argued that the radical empiricism (neutral monism) of William James and others is the cure-all. Radical empiricism allows for a new non-reductionist scientific worldview and multiscale explanatory pluralism, all without the pitfalls of cognitivism or neo-mechanism.
Bio: Michael Silberstein is Professor of Philosophy at Elizabethtown College, Director of the Cognitive Science Program, and a Core Neuroscience Faculty member. His primary research interests are foundations of physics, foundations of cognitive science, and the science of consciousness. He is also interested in how these branches of philosophy and science bear on more general questions of reduction, emergence, and explanation. His three most recent books with OUP are Beyond the Dynamical Universe (2018), Emergence in Context (2022), and Einstein's Entanglement: Bell Inequalities, Relativity, and the Qbit (2024)
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