Abstract

Whitehead used extensive abstraction to demonstrate that "ideal" entities like "point," "instant," etc. display themselves in our experience of nature without the need for mental constructions. It supports his attempt to eliminate the "bifurcation of nature" within the context of a philosophy of nature that is genuinely empiricist. ;Whitehead's own application of extensive abstraction assumes an analysis of experience that differs fundamentally from the Humean analysis presupposed by his contemporary logical empiricists like Russell, Broad, and Nicod. These latter seized upon extensive abstraction and applied it in the service of the same epistemology that Whitehead sought to displace. Much of the criticism directed at extensive abstraction per se has been directed at its application by the logical empiricists and has been based on the fact that the convergence condition in the definition of an abstractive class is incompatible with the sense data analysis of experience to which they are committed. ;As a result of such "misplaced appreciation" of extensive abstraction by logical empiricists and their subsequent abandonment of the method in the face of misdirected criticism, Whitehead's own conception of extensive abstraction has seldom been considered on its own merits and in the context of the theory of perception he thought to be essential to its successful application. Consequently, the real defect in Whitehead's radically empiricist philosophy of nature has been obscured and generally overlooked. ;This dissertation: describes extensive abstraction as conceived and applied by Whitehead and contrasts this to its conception and application by Russell, Broad, and Nicod. shows that published criticisms that are effective against extensive abstraction as applied by the logical empiricists either miss the mark entirely when directed at Whitehead or are not nearly as cogent as they are against Russell et al. because most criticism of the method has been based on the fact that the convergence condition for an abstractive class is incompatible with the sense data theory of perception while Whitehead's application assumes a theory of perception that is fully compatible with this condition. expounds Whitehead's theory of perception and shows how it is compatible with the convergence condition, accommodates the use of extensive abstraction to display the empirical character of ideal entities, and runs counter to a widely-accepted interpretation of the general theory of relativity. shows that the major difficulty with Whitehead's empiricism as founded on extensive abstraction is its failure to accommodate the needs of the real number continuum. Such as accommodation seems inevitably to entail mental constructions of elements in nature that serve to give structure to our experience of nature. draws the conclusions that even an empiricist epistemology unconstrained by Hume's strictures against internal relations and against the perception of unlimited divisibility, an empiricism that is in fact designed to incorporate into what is actually perceived and genuinely "given" in experience that which most of us would take to be logical inferences and not to be given at all, is, even so, fundamentally inadequate to the conceptual needs of the scientific description of nature