Frances belatedly to Armando and others... 1. Your resistance to "objective relativism" as a philosophic support for objects including artworks confuses me. The individual mind is clearly brought into a relation with the object of sense, be the object a quality or fact or law, and not with the subject of their sense and self or with their own sense of the object. It is admitted that sense will yield in mind a degraded and degenerative version of any object that is sensed. Between the object and the subject after all is a contextual relation or connective ground that relates the sensing subject to the sensed object. It is nonetheless the object that is sensed. The concept of what is held to be an "object" and the role "sense" plays must of course be more clearly addressed. My attempt to do this will follow below. 2. As a preliminary orienting overview of my tentative stance on this issue, the normal human being is found to have a physical body that to be a life must also contain a psychical brain, and potentially but not necessarily a brain with a mind engaged in thought. The human being is thus a biotic and organic phenomenon. It is further the spirit of life that likely makes it a soul. Simply put it is my guess that the being is a soul full of spirit, and that the body is a being full of life, and that the brain is a body full of senses, and that the mind is a brain full of signs, and that the thought is a mind full of sign systems or systemic methods. While thought can be nondiscursive with any kind of semiotic signage signs, or discursive but then only with the symbols of linguistic language signs, and knowledge can be perceptual or conceptual, it is assumed by me that thought is needed to know stuff. It is the mind however that is deemed to be in thought or in thought signs, rather than the thought deemed to be in the mind, so that say any image or idea is in the thought as signs and sign systems and methods, and not in the mind. This is to hold that the vision or notion or nomination a person has in mind will actually be in the sign as say it is drawn or spoken or gestured or written, even if it is a mental thought sign. 3. The psychical brain is held to seat and bear feeling and consciousness and experience; as well as to yield a mind of sensation or sense, and of volition or will, and of cognition or thought; and to even endure the thought of knowledge and reason and wisdom. The mind of the individual human being is held to have or bear within the cerebral brain of their somatic body: (1) a private often unknown self; and (2) a proposed or referred subject; and (3) a public presented person. The subject here is furthermore held as the inner referred object or content meant of the referring self that acts as a sign of the subject, with the person as the responsive effect. The mind then houses or carries the self and subject and person. In summary, the range of basic mental action starts with feeling and ends with knowing, but in between these poles it runs with sensing and willing and thinking; yet beyond knowing the result can be further rationalizing and reasoning and realizing. The umbrella term for all this psychical action might best be called the psyching of the psyche. 4. In another manner of explanation it therefore might be held that between the objective and the subjective as poles will lay the relative. Between the outer object or inner object as subject matter, and the inner workings of the brain and mind and thought, probably lays the combinatory psyche. This inner fact of the psyche intervenes and intrudes and interferes with any direct awareness the human would otherwise have of the outer or inner object. The initiate say sense of the object may be immediate and holistic or intermediate or even mediate, but such a sense of the object will always be indirect. Between the objective and the subjective always lays the existence of signs in a related ground. The subjective of the individual human however is also objective to that same human, and thus the whole of the psyche must too be moderated by signs. Even a feeling of say pain by inner consciousness can be wrong and thus should be doubted by the human, because everything felt or known is a sign that must be interpreted. Not even an inner awareness of our own existence can be assumed for sure. What is given to the psyche of the object, and of the subject as an inner object, is a sign that stands for the object, so that the object is moderated by other objects acting as signs. If it were not for signs that moderate objects for the psyche in mind, then the human and its subject would be dead. What is psyched however is the object and not the subject nor the psyching of the object. The logic of relativity or of grounded relations is the key to understanding this kind of psychical action. 5. The individual human being furthermore is unreliable and undependable in determining what object is really and truly signed or psyched, from their feeling it to their knowing it. The individual member psyche must therefore form a collective communal psyche that can tentatively agree on what is signed and psyched. The subjective must hence conform to the objective, as the referred object must conform to the referring sign, and only the signing group of signers can give some tentative assurance to all others of this connectivity by controlling the degree of conformity. In other words, the individual human must doubt anything and everything they come into contact with, whether those things are outside or inside themselves, because nothing can be psyched exactly and certainly for sure. Sometimes even whole groups of peoples like religions or nations can be wrong in their beliefs, and thus should be doubted and corrected by still other larger groups of peoples.
Armando wrote... Frances partly wrote "7. It still seems reasonable for me to conclude that the sentient percipient is brought into a relation with the objective object of sense, and not merely with their subjective sense of the object." But only to the individual minds that sense the object, and agree.
