Frances to Cheerskep and others.
Cheerskep partly wrote in effect the following antirealist notions. Many theorists have attempted to address the assumption by thinkers that there is an absolute metaphysical status for existent objective classes like "art" or "science" and perhaps all other types. This assumption is emphatically a delusion and definitely wrong, even if a panel of learned experts might deem it to be so, and then by merely calling it or naming it so. Even the discovery of new facts as artistic or scientific laws is an act of mental subjectivity and psychologism. The reason for a thinker believing a class to exist, or that a member token is part of a typical class, and both aside from mind, is the assumption that there are independent metaphysical standards somewhere which an object or work must satisfy to be of a class. The kind of class that must definitely be deemed objective by such a thinker would hence include art and science, but membership for an object in such an objective class would of course likely be dependent on the good motive and sound intent of the creator and inventor or thinker and researcher. In regard to art, it is thus often wrongly assumed that any work to be found of art is only good art, and cannot be bad art to be a member of art. To alternatively claim that there is a global notion or concept of art in the collective mind of all thinkers alike is also wrong, although it may seem to be subjective, but the common agreed globalization makes it objective and thus in error. To agree together is to mistakenly assume that minds can think alike, and therefore that a class can be determined to exist objectively merely by virtue of this identical agreement. The stipulative decision of groups, even as to individual objects having common characters and properties that makes them be a member of their group, has no categoric being or metaphysic truth or ontic power. For any normal expert group to merely agree that an object is a member of a global class does not necessarily make it so, because people can agree on things that are bad or ugly and wrong and false, yet claim these things to be otherwise. It may be that things like art and science as classes are solely a notion in each mind, but with no "corresponding" external entity. The idea of learned persons thinking that classes like art and science or their essences and properties exist objectively independent of mind is wrong, because these things are only made as mental notions in each mind that can at best be defined or explained publicly, thereby being conveyed to another mind that might hold a similar but not identical notion in common. Frances replies with the following list of realist and pragmatist notions. This all goes to the attempted building of a phenomenal system with a categorical structure by Peircean philosophers. (1) The agreed expert opinion of any collective communal group is necessary, but it must remain tentative, because the determinism will always be fallible due to the growing process of evolution, in that the human mind can only interpret what it determines to be so, whether the object of interest might be objective or subjective. To merely hold or deem a thing as so by custom or coercion or control does make it so. It must be found as a fact of law, inductively and empirically. In this way the feeling for the thing is made known. It may be of course that many persons like groups and families or even whole peoples like societies and nations may arbitrarily rule by enforced authority that an opinion is deemed expert and hold to a rigid dogma that may even be bad or ugly and wrong and false. It then falls to other collections of humans to attempt an offer of connections and corrections. The real truth indeed may never absolutely be known for sure with exact certitude, but humans are driven to try and guess at it the best way possible. This approach at least leaves thinkers with an optimistic outcome of forecasts. Humans will never get it right all the time, but they are too resilient and insistent and persistent to resist the goal of goodness. This clearly implies that goalness and goodness exist objectively as facts of nature. (2) It may be that in the evolution of humanity its sentience and experience must come before such acts as life or tech, and may also have to come before its intelligence and inference, but in so evolving its intelligence and inference must have come before the human mind could engage in such acts as art and religion and language and philosophy and science, because nature cannot fill a dumb brute animal brain with icons and symbols, but only with indexic signals. By all current empirical conclusions, primal animals that are seemingly even subhuman simply cannot get or take or make or use a sign as other than a raw signal. It is a mistake to think that a nonhuman animal can even take or make an object and then sense it as an icon and then as a drawing, and further use it as a drawing of some other object, although they may fall to deception by way of iconic similarity. Nonhumans cannot stipulate anything, let alone determine kinds of classes like art or science. Only normal humans have this ability, and seemingly have had it from the beginning as a part of their evolving dispositions. (3) The writing of any history about early humanity and its primal world remains mainly a speculative theory, which exists as a kind of nonfictional fact and literary art. (4) The laws of mathematics and logics, along with the laws of nature and the laws of science, are objective phenomenal constructs that mind accidently discovers and then determines to be evolutionary dispositions, albeit such laws in mind are of a degenerative form, because the mind must degrade them in that mind must infer their meaning and truth by way of signs that merely stand for them. The mind does not arbitrarily invent these existential laws. If it is agreed there are some things that are objective, such as some typical classes of objects like laws, then theories of subjective notionalism and nominalism fail as global accounts of what it is that the world has. (5) To hold that two or more phenomenal objects that exist external to mind, and which seem sensed to be alike in some way, cannot be members of an objective class is to deny they have any properties similar to one another. This defies common sense, and the existential presence of formal similarity, and the logic of iconicity, and the very theory of groups and the science of signs. If objects have forms that are similar to each other, then they have tones as tokens of types. The logical ground of the relation is formal iconic similarity. There may of course be a kind of class that must definitely be deemed mainly subjective, rather than mainly objective, but this need not include art and science if they are based on formal similarity or lawful similarity. There may however be kind of class that might otherwise be somewhat relative if they are based on original continuity or causal contiguity to perhaps include god and hell and life and sin and man and mind. The point here is that there exists an object in the world found as a class, and that might carry members in common. (6) The stuff behind a nomination is a notion of an object called or named by way of a symbolic word. The stuff behind a notion, even without being nominated or mentioned and notated, is a vision imagined or envisioned by way of an iconic form. The stuff behind a vision is the prior experience of objective phenomena originally given uncontrolled to sense. The subjective stuff of mind is the objective stuff of matter, so that the mechanistic actions of matter make matter effete mind. The stuff of mind, be it a vision or notion or nomination, is not epiphenomenal. (7) The logical methods of empiricism allow for psychical or mental entities to yield abstract samples that can be concretely tested and discretely concluded, such as the premised predicates of lingual statements and arguments or the equations and formulas of mathematics. The results may be feelings in mind, but they are from findings of fact based on the known reasons of law. What objectivity and relativity and subjectivity, or the mystical and physical and psychical, all have in common is the fact that they are phenomenal, which is what seems to be sensed. (8) The forms of art and the laws of science are sensed to seem as objective phenomenal facts. The sense of ideal forms and ideareal
