Frances to Cheerskep and Geoff and others...
This topical subject and its many threads on objectivity are most interesting for me and especially in regard to their aesthetic and artistic applications, but they have clearly given us a rough snarl of twine to unravel. The basic thorn of contention for me and challenge to resolve turns on the antirealist position that virtually every object sensed is a subjective mental making of the normal human mind. The antirealist ideas posted on subjectivism and psychologism are nonetheless good, but only as special theories of some stuff human beings may encounter in the world, because they simply fail as general theories of all stuff in the broad vastness of the whole wide world. The best stance to address these theories in my opinion is likely found in the root core of mental acts, to include the origins and causes and sources and limits of such cerebral acts as visions and notions and nominations. The beginnings of such acts should of course be addressed both from their broadest cosmic states, as well as from their narrower epistemic states in the sense of aroused stimulations and evoked propositions. The posited suggestion that say entities of sense usually found or held to be objective physical constructs, such as atoms and facts and sets and signs and classes and relations and actions and existence, are to be deemed only as subjective psychical constructs and never as objective physical constructs, goes too far both in empirical practice and in conjectural theorice. The realist counters to this antirealist global stance are probably best found in such fields of study as mathematics and logics, along with semiotics and linguistics. The pertinent fields of these studies might entail inquiries into infinity and continuity and surety as objective stuff. The doctrine of pragmatist fallibility as an objective factor should furthermore be an overriding guide to such research. There may be more professional philosophers on this list who might be able to cite thinkers who have discussed this topic, but who have not been encountered by members here. The thinkers of recent times who come to my mind would include such familiar angloamerican pragmatists as Peirce and James and Royce and Mead and Lewis and Dewey, along with Langer and Morris and Carnap and Weiss and Sebeok, and even Goodman and Quine. In his 1986 american book "Pragmatism Without Foundations" the philosopher Joseph Margolis writes about reconciling realism and relativism, which may be on point here. Cheerskep partly wrote... More remarkable is how much philosophers have assumed non-notional entities, including actions, seemingly without ever questioning that the things "exist". Perhaps the most indefensible and unquestioned assumed "real" or not simply notional entity is "relations". Philosophers since Plato's time have accepted that each relation is a "thing" somehow "out there" in the non-mental world. A comparable entity is "sets". "But didn't you right there assume the existence of something you can't prove, a non-mental world?" Yes, but not without questioning the assumption with an awareness that I'm assuming the entity. Right now the one that's most on my mind is the seemingly universal acceptance of the idea that words do such things as referring, signifying, naming, denoting, and meaning. I need to make clear that at the moment my focus is not on whether or not words (and paintings and dances and plays) do mean. (I don't believe that.) It's on this, the belief that noun-words denote or names name and all words mean, entails that they act. I claim that the objection to this erroneous notion is not trivial or "merely verbal". Throughout philosophy for millennia thinkers have built elaborate theories in philosophies of language, mind, ontology and even aesthetics based on the delusion that inert objects act.
