Hi Yaro,
Our five senses generally give us information about the outside world. By "outside" I mean the world outside our own consciousness. Our senses allow us to listen to our own heartbeats, to measure levels of hormones in our blood, to watch regions of the brain light up under an NMR scan, etc, etc, but do not give us direct access to the content of conscious activity.
Nice examples of knowledge which is not easily availble to empiricism are the emotions. We know what it feels like to hate, love, or feel jealous. Some of the physical correlates of these emotions can be assessed by our senses - for example the increased heart rate during anger or the prickling of hairs during fear - but the feeling itself, the conscious content of experiencing an emotion, isn't to my knowledge accessible to empiricism.
If we want to get knowledge of the content of emotional feeling we necessarily rely on phenomenology. For example, the feelings that drove
Abdullah Yones to murder his own daughter for being "too westernized" can only be understood phenomenologically - there is simply no empirical access point into understanding what he must have been thinking and feeling.
Much of historical writing and literature is testament to the importance of phenomenological knowledge. That's why we continue to read novels about romantic love - because knowledge of changes to brain activity and hormone levels only tells a small part of the story.
Another example: if we want to understand what life was like for a first world war soldier, empiricism will only get us so far. We can examine the belongings of dead soldiers that exist in museums, we can visit the same places as them and see what the countryside looks like, we can look at records of the kind of diet that soldiers had and the kind of ailments that they endured. We can examine the equipment used in field hospitals and we can examine the old war fields for evidence of bomb craters and the like. But empiricism doesn't tell us the whole story. We also need to read the diaries of soldiers, read the war poets, etc. if we want to get a full understanding.
quote:
Lost in the swamp and welter of the pit,
He flounders off the duck-boards; only he knows
Each flash and spouting crash,--each instant lit
When gloom reveals the streaming rain. He goes
Heavily, blindly on. And, while he blunders,
"Could anything be worse than this?"--he wonders,
Remembering how he saw those Germans run,
Screaming for mercy among the stumps of trees:
Green-faced, they dodged and darted: there was one
Livid with terror, clutching at his knees. . .
Our chaps were sticking 'em like pigs . . . "O hell!"
He thought--"there's things in war one dare not tell
Poor father sitting safe at home, who reads
Of dying heroes and their deathless deeds.
Siegfried Sassoon
Mick
[Edited to add the name of the poet]
This message has been edited by mick, 09-24-2005 03:38 PM
This message has been edited by mick, 09-24-2005 03:44 PM
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