Experiment and experience

If we try to explain how the world constrains what we can believe, and what we can say, we must describe enough of this constraining world to render the method of constraint intelligibly unequivocal.

A sensory empiricist epistemology cannot be hand-waving, or metaphorical. We can't just point to a few appealing parables and say 'all the rest is like this, even if we cannot give a proper account of it'. It needs to be a theory, not a 'foundation myth'.

Can a 'good enough' account of this kind be given, without encountering open question problems?

Can we give an account of the relationship between language and the world without begging the question whether the foundations of such an account can be independent of its reliability? It doesn't sound likely, for the very general reason that we have to give an account of the 'way the world is' (with respect to the way it modifies our knowledge) which is independent of our account of how we find out the way the world is, since that is the account we're trying to construct ...

We do, of course, give reliable accounts of the world. We also find out about the world by doing experiments. But before an experiment becomes an experiment we must, already, have agreed about what its outcomes might be and what their relevance is.