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Thursday, 31 August 2017



Whatever experience is, it entails an implicit and complete account of itself. In so far as part of such an account may be, or become, explicit it is incomplete and subject to challenge and repudiation, but any such repudiation always means an expansion of the field that must be acknowledged to belong to this account. This is the strange principle at the heart of experience and the basis for all dialectics and practices of expansion of perspective, for the very life of the mind, but it is hard to express clearly. It is also subject to a skeptical doubt which can draw on some empirical support. Thus some would say that the principle of conservatism that constrains experience to neglect contradicting evidence that falls outside of a very narrow working region is a more fundamental characteristic of it. But even such neglect is an active position, something defended because it is known that, and where, defense is needed, and acknowledging this is enough. It ought to be, perhaps, that there is a dialogic reconciliation of all diverse points of view, but this only needs to be so in principle, in practice it may always be too soon, or that there are disproportionate forces in play to realistically bring it about. Perhaps another way of saying it is that experience is always embedded in something, and what it is embedded in is, in fractal fashion, also exactly experience, and so on, indefinitely.

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