Abstract

A critique of modern empiricism, pressed ploddingly but capably from a renovated pragmatist standpoint. In Part I the author argues that a rigid distinction between the analytic and synthetic is presupposed by empiricism and yet leads to a conventionalism out of touch with experience. Part II attacks various attempts to base knowledge on of perceptual experience. The constructive position developed in Part III stresses the concept of experience as a plurality of contextual happenings, always involving formal and nonformal elements; the formal structure is held to rest on conventions which should remain flexible, varying according to purposes. Though often clumsy, cluttered, and over-abstract, the discussion is informed and perceptive.--L. K. B.