Too-blue: Colour-patch for an expanded empiricism

This essay is in part a response to the rhetoric of the 'two cultures' revi ved by the 'science wars' conducted in recent years through the mass media against humanities disciplines, especially 'post-modern' art, cultural stud ies, and non-analytic philosophy. The essay focuses in greatest detail on t he relation between science and philosophy, arguing that they are in fact c omplementary activities effectively partaking of the same reality. Although knowledge practices in the humanities draw from their partaking radically different orders of result from those of science (and from each other), the y have claim to an effective connection to a shared reality. Humanities dis ciplines, and even 'informal' or 'traditional' knowledge practices, can be argued to be realist, empirical enterprises generating modes of validity sp ecific to their manner of result - provided that the definition of empirica l reality is generously broadened. An 'expanded' empiricism is a 'radical' empiricism in William James's sense of taking relations to be as real and a s fundamentally given to experience as discrete objects or sense-data. Reco gnizing the reality of relation nudges empiricism in the direction of proce ss philosophy. The essay reviews concepts of cause and discovery, nature an d culture, affect and virtuality, truth and constructedness, taking the exp erience of colour as a prime example. It combines elements of James's radic al empiricism with Whitehead's process philosophy with the poststructuralis m of Deleuze and Guattari with chaos and complexity theory. The resulting p erspective converges with Isabelle Stengers' vision of a non-judgemental po litical ecology of knowledge. An expansive ethics of relationality, of mutu al differential belonging, is the natural correlate of an expanded culture of empiricism.