CONCEPT
Radical Empiricism
James's methodological commitment to admit as fact everything directly experienced and nothing else—including the subjective, uncomfortable, and contradictory—now the discipline required for honest AI assessment.
Radical empiricism was William James's most demanding intellectual discipline: nothing shall be admitted as a fact except what is directly experienced, and everything that is directly experienced shall be admitted as a fact. The first edge excluded abstractions—philosophical theories about consciousness were not facts about consciousness, only interpretations. The second edge included the uncomfortable—if a mystic reported divine presence, the experience was a psychological fact regardless of whether God exists. To dismiss data because it embarrassed a theory was dogma, not empiricism. This method required taking all varieties of experience seriously: the exhilarating, the terrifying, the contradictory, and the ambiguous. James applied it to religious experience; the AI moment demands it be applied to productive experience.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The AI discourse systematically violates radical empiricism by selecting data that confirms prior positions. Triumphalists admit exhilarating experiences (capability expansion, unification, flow) and exclude corrosive ones (compulsion, depth erosion, reserve depletion). Elegists admit losses and exclude gains. Policy analysts admit the measurable and exclude the