The other thread was getting bogged down in other things, so I'm starting a new one to try to answer Russ's question about some of the terms Nick and I are using, in particular "experience" and whether I deny "subjectivity".
The latter is easier. Re subjectivity:
I do not deny that the knowledge relationship has two elements (knower and known) and the relationship between them that we refer to as "knowing." But that leaves open the question of what type of relationship that is. If you are merely pointing out that there are "subjects" who look out into the world, then I have no objection. If you are pointing out that those subjects see the world from a particular point of view (in a literal and metaphorical sense), I still have no objection. What I don't accept, however, is the that the notion that all experience is some how "inescapably subjective" in the sense that A) we can never really know what someone else is experiencing, or B) that we are never really experiencing anything but "our own subjective worlds." The latter, if taken seriously, has lead emminent philosophers to feel like intellectual giants if they channel their inner The Big Lebowski and reply to any claim about the world with, "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, uh, your opinion, man."
I'm not sure what would satisfy you re experience. I will try quoting some Dewey to see if that helps:
Immediate empiricism postulates that things- anything, everything, in the ordinary or nontechnical
use of the term " thing "- are what they are experienced as. Hence, if one wishes to describe
anything truly, his task is to tell what it is experienced as being. If it is a horse that is to be
described, or the equus that is to be defined, then must the horse-trader, or the jockey, or the
timid family man who wants a " safe driver," or the zoologist or the paleontologist tell us what the
horse is which is experienced. If these accounts turn out different in some respects, as well as
congruous in others, this is no reason for assuming the content of one to be exclusively " real," and
that of others to be " phenomenal"; for each account of what is experienced will manifest that it is
the account o f the horse-dealer, or of the zoologist, and hence will give the conditions requisite
for understanding the differences as well as the agreements of the various accounts. And the
principle varies not a whit if we bring in the psychologist's horse, the logician's horse, or the
metaphysician's horse.
In each case, the nub of the question is, what sort of experience is denoted or indicated: a
concrete and determinate experience, varying, when it varies, in specific real elements, and
agreeing, when it agrees, in specific real elements, so that we have a contrast, not between a
Reality, and various approximations to, or phenomenal representations of Reality, but between
different reals of experience. And the reader is begged to bear in mind that from this standpoint,
when " an experience " or " some sort of experience " is referred to, " some thing " or " some sort
of thing " is always meant....