ABSTRACT
In the preface to The Meaning of Truth James outlines the three central tenets of radical empiricism. These are, first, the postulate ‘that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience’: second, the statement of fact ‘that the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience…as…the things themselves’: third, a generalised conclusion, ‘that therefore the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves part of experience’. James adds to this conclusion that ‘the directly apprehended universe needs no extraneous, trans-empirical, support’.1
