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The Bridge between the Subject and Object

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The Bridge between the Subject and Object

MarchHare
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Posted 06/25/09 - 04:32 PM:	#11
cosscos wrote: There is a pretty girl in a kitchen. Now. she is thinking of beauty. Which means your entire post is about imagination, not perception. "cosscos" wrote: Her mind is connected to the object, namely, beauty. What she see now is an image of the beauty, not the beauty itself. Therefore, it is the image that bridges between she and the beauty, or the subject and the object. I'm not sure what "beauty" would look like, if it were an object. I can think of beautiful things, but I've never come across beauty as an object before. "cosscos" wrote: According to inter-subjectivity theory, the object transforms itself into the subject, in other words, the beauty will see an image on her or herself as well. Therefore, inter-subjectivity would get rid of her alienation about beauty, completing the identity. That's a very surreal image.
Doubt requires a reason to doubt. Nothing is immune from potential doubt. The correct response to a question isn't always to try to give the question's answer.

brussel4
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Posted 06/30/09 - 12:27 PM:	#12
MarchHare: Thank you for the detailed post. Please bear with me as I ask a few questions that will help make some preliminary classifications so that we can move forward in our discussion. Am I understanding you correctly by stating that a "direct realist" holds that we have immediate access to the object without the need of mediation by an intermediate representation between the subject and object, i.e. a bridge? It appeals instead to internal or external factors to explain why we can have mistaken perceptions? Your example of pane of distorted glass and problems with neural processes being cited here. I am assuming the distinctions between the intermediate representation and the object is formulated as primary and secondary qualities in Locke and phenomena and noumena in Kant. My question at this point is is it not the case that an appeal to neural processes and issues with internal organs to explain perceptual aberrations are subject to a idealistic critique? Specifically, that any fact is a mediated by the subject's activities. I enjoyed your discussion of perception as active. I think it is important insight to grasp. treysuttle: Thank you for your post. I guess I should make my self a bit clearer about what I mean by isomorphic. Let me attempt to illustrate using your example of the apple. Could we, through reflection upon our own cognitive activities grasp that the object has three metaphysical constituents. 1.) a potency or bare ability to be sensed. 2. an essence or whatness that makes it an apple, and finally (3) its particular existence or individual concrete occurrence. I know this sounds quite classical but what if these were correlated with the subject's cognitive activities of 1. embodied senses actualizing the given data, 2. the act of cognition or understanding that actively grasps the essence of the object, and 3. a judgment about concrete occurence of the object.

StaticAge
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Posted 06/30/09 - 02:09 PM:	#13
I thought the "gap" was simply the fact that all of our experience comes from an individual "subjective" point of view, and we can never have the whole "objective" point of view (which really would not be a point of view at all). I see a coffee cup from one side at a time, and only I have this particular experience which I currently am experiencing. I don't think its a question of if there is a something out there, but that whether one's experience of that something is the whole enchilada. For instance, we experience time in a particular way, but there is a question as to just how "objectively" justified that "subjective" experience of time is (some cosmologists think our experience of time is illusory). On the other hand, I also agree that its not really a problem. There is a real phenomena though where we all have differing perspectives of whatever reality is. But as far as subject/object go, I think that its not a good idea to privilege either term over or against the other, but that both object and subject depend on each other for definition and meaning, and it does not really do any good to carve one off from the other and treat it as if it could exist in such a way without the other side helping to define it.
"All that your hand finds to do, do with your very power, for there is no work nor devising nor knowledge nor wisdom in Sheol, the place to which you are going." -Ecclesiastes 9:10 "Overpower, overcome." -The Cro-Mags

Johnfloyd6675
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Posted 06/30/09 - 06:36 PM:	#14
treysuttle wrote: My view is that there is no mediation by anything like a 'sense-datum', 'idea' 'qualia' 'sensation' or the like, between the object and my experience of the object. There is surely mediation by many non-cognitive conditions (environmental factors, physiological factors, and the like). With that being said, when we perceive an object, there is a direct causal chain between the object and our experience thereof.... I guess for knowledge to be isomorphic would be for it to accurately 'map' or 'represent' the object. I don't have a problem with that -- if I say 'This apple is red'..and there is an apple and it is red, then I guess my knowledge claim is isomorphic, in your sense here? I agree with the broad sense of your claim that our experience of objects (i.e. objectivity) is unmediated- that is to say, when we place something (ideation, qualia, etc.) between what we call the "subject" and the experienced object. But why, then, do you reference a "causal chain" of cognition, independent of (objective) environmental and physiological modifications of the experience? We run into a problem when we privilege cognition, or rather cognitive phenomena (in the Greek sense of "appearances," to speak broadly of thought) in the objective appraisal of an object- in this case an apple- as the door to some sort of armory for epistemologists that allows us to account for "external" phenomena through reliable, "causal" (and therefore accounted-for) cognitive flourishes. I think- in fact I am sure- that private events (such as a "direct causal chain" trustworthily ferrying unadulterated accounts of objects to the subject) are, in the presence of a subject, objective. Whether or not knowledge claims are "isomorphic," integrity of structure between the apple and our experience of the apple does not change the objectivity of that experience- that is to say, for a Cartesian subject, experiences are objects. The subject is an absence, which is why some here try to replace it with "agency;" the underlying reality that privileging mental events over physical events does not account for the difference between object and subject endures. For this reason, I regard objectivity and subjectivity as unacceptable dualisms given that the apple and the person experiencing it both are- they are both beings, accounted for by their common presence in the world.

brussel4
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Posted 07/01/09 - 10:48 AM:	#15
StaticAge: I appreciate your reply. Your thought is clear and distinct on this matter. I think that I agree for the most part. You say "I don't think its a question of if there is a something out there, but that whether one's experience of that something is the whole enchilada." I think this is getting at where I am at currently in this discussion. It seems to me that one must postulate a base "given" if one is to make any further distinctions or determinations. It also seems to me that this given could have no particular content since it is merely a potential to be determined and particularized. Now, I am taking this primary given as that which is differentiated by making judgments, such as the distinction between appearence and reality, between subject and object, and any other distinction for that matter. Perhaps any use of the symbol "object" whether understood realistically or idealistically presupposes this bare data.It seems one could also make a distinction between our experience of the given, and the experience as described, understood, and verified. So, for instance one could experience the color red, attempt to describe it as it appears to ones senses, or one could understand it as a particular frequency of a wavelength. The latter would of course remove it from the simply "subjective" arena of perception. As a side note the above determinations do not bracket the effects of neurological and environmental elements that condition the proper functioning of cognition. It further does not postulate that cognition is any way independent of its neural base but simply that it has its own immanent intelligibility that can be understood in its own right.

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