Jim Devine wrote: > the limits of > empiricism. Empiricists are great at finding information, but that's > different from understanding it. I don't know whether this is a question that can be fruitfully explored on a maillist or not, but I want to raise it in isolation from the origins question in case someone can contribute to a clearer understanding of the nature, scope, and limits of not just empiricism but of empirical evidence within in any framework. One of the reasons I withdrew from the debate on origins (and should have withdrawn one or two posts earlier) was that it seemed to me that Jim B & Lou as well as their opponents were operating as though purely empiricist arguments could decide the issue. This was also the reason I did not respond to Jim B's insistence that I learn more: there is no way even to know what is and is not a fact or what kind of facts are relevant without a prior theoretical framework within which facts and relevance are defined. (I think the features of the thread which led to Michael's suggestion that it was exhausted were precisely those which constituted its empiricist nature. Within the limits of a purely empiricist approach the disputants can only hurl uninterpreted and uninterpretable "facts" at each other endlessly without coming any nearer to a decision on the issues or even on what the issues are. It seems to me that various forms of empiricism constitute a far more serious repudiation of marxism than do the various fads called "post structuralism," "post modernism," "deconstruction," etc. Carrol
