Abstract
In this chapter, Marie Collins Swabey critiques naturalism and defends a rationalistic conception of knowledge.
Marie Collins Swabey: First published in 1930 in Marie Collins Swabey, Logic and Nature (New York: New York University Press), 33–64.
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Notes
- 1.
Of course, this does not deny that rational activity may include and make use of memory and imagination, but only stresses that it can never be identical with them.
- 2.
Thus, the propositions “All water is H2O” or “Ammonia is NH3” make assertions that go far beyond the empirical evidence of the cases examined, since only a very limited number of samples have actually been analyzed. Clearly mere experience is not entitled to authorize a pronouncement here as to the nature of the non-experienced cases.
To this, the empiricist may reply that the proposition means only that “So far as experience has gone, such has been the case; and, therefore, man has an empirically justified tendency to expect that future experiences will resemble past ones.”
But that mere experience entitles us to make this kind of generalization involving past and future is precisely what the rationalist questions. Both past and future for the radical empiricist, he maintains, must be constructions from the immediately present “given” of the organism; and, as such, they never fall within the limits of actual experience at any given time. What we call the past, for instance, is really the work of memory, which constantly selects and arranges sensory material in reverse order, daubing it with the light and shade of imaginative emphasis and, in general, creating an extraordinary fiction of experience as it was never experienced. Even more obviously, the futures which figure in our predictions are fictions respecting non-existent experiences, since, strictly speaking, we cannot by any twist of interpretation claim actually to have lived through future futures.
- 3.
Cf. [Swabey, Logic and Nature], pp. 271–272; also 269–270.
- 4.
Cf. [Swabey, Logic and Nature, pp. 285–287], Ch. VII, Sect. IV, for further discussion.
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Swabey, M.C., Edited by., Katzav, J., Rogers, D. (2023). The General Nature of Reason. In: Katzav, J., Vaesen, K., Rogers, D. (eds) Knowledge, Mind and Reality: An Introduction by Early Twentieth-Century American Women Philosophers. Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24437-7_11
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