Notes on ‘subjectivity, ‘intersubjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’ by Torrey Byles

Logic is rooted in the social principle.


Human consciousness and behavior are not that different from other animals. Our distinctive difference is the extreme elaboration of certain cognitive mechanisms which underly language, as an instrument in planning, and the practical skills by which those plans are executed. This elaboration has made us the most generalized and adaptable animal on earth. This small difference has mighty consequences. (Ingold, Tim. The Animal in the Study of Humanity. P. 372)


The appearance of language was a major event in the natural history of intelligence. Language gave humans the capacity to represent reality and develop a mythic culture. (Lestel, Dominique. Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture. P. 381)


With a sophisticated capacity to communicate, assert and depict events and experiences to each other, humans suddenly could reason. Reason is a social activity enabled by speech and symbolic communication [TKB].

The sociality that arises in people who speak a common language and use common terms and symbols to communicate personal experience with each other, is rooted in the logic of the symbols. 

With language and the capacity to deliberate practically with each other, came rationality and rational organization of the community.When a level of complexity among the communications of the agents is reached, there comes into being an individual ‘subject’ after which deterministic, instinctual causes of
behavior are superceded by mental reasons. (Lestel, Dominique. Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture. P. 401).


Human ‘subjectivity’ emerged due to improvements in intra-species social communication. (Lestel, Dominique. Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture. P. 377).


The semiotic dimension is crucial (Lestel, Dominique. Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture. P. 401).

To evoke reason is to take a semiotic stand (Lestel, Dominique. Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture. P. 381)]


Action can be characterized as deliberately designed and authored and is distinct from behavior, which is thoughtless, automatic, instinctual. (Ingold, Tim. The Animal in the Study of Humanity. P. 372)

Production of artefacts depends on the capacity for symbolic thought unique to homo sapiens, a capacity that is based on the faculty of language. We are not that different from animals, but only for this capacity for language and symbolic thought. (Ingold, Tim.The Animal in the Study of Humanity. P. 358)

The boundary between innate vs. artificial is not congruent to the boundary between instinctive vs learned (or genetic behavior vs symbolic behavior). The field of ‘traditional’ behavior overlaps the boundary between human and non-human conduct. (Ingold, Tim. The Animal in the Study of Humanity. P. 358)


Although judgements about reality are formed upon the basis of individual experiences, they are true if and only if they are vindicated by the objective course of future events. The [truthfulness] and content of assertions [by individual persons] is given solely by reference to a public world. (Forster, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. P. 707)

The notion of assertion involves public evidential vindication. The concept of objectivity entails intersubjectivity. (Forster, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. P. 707)

“It is not ‘my’ experience but ‘our’ experience that has to be thought of.” (C.S. Peirce quoted in Forster, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. P. 707)


Peirce removes the isolated individual from the locus of epistemic authority and renders the individual incapable of serving as his or her own measure of truth. (Forster, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. P. 706-707)

A commitment to vindication along with shared cognitive limitations [of individual subjectivity], ensures among individual human knowers a mutuality: all particular knowledge claims involve deference to a potential epistemic community. (Forster, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. P. 708)


Subjectivity is meaningfully defined as that which resists and persists despite the individual’s wishing it away. (Forster, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. P. 701)


Subject and object are not ready-made self-contained entities. They are interdependent and inter-defined. Interaction does not only reveal their existence, it constitutes it. (Forster, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. P. 702)

Mind and world can be discriminated but not prescinded; distinguished but not separated. (Forster, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. P. 702)


Experience does not separate mind and world; it is a point of contact where mind and world meet. Reality is nothing but logically ordered experience. The distinction between mind and world is drawn within the world of experience, not between experience and a noumenal reality. (Forster, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. P. 701)

Real objects are (logically) nothing but law governed experiences. (Forster, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. P. 704)


Reality, although prefigured by reason, is not created by thought. Truth is independent of individual belief. (Forster, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. P. 705)


Peirce’s pragmatic maxim introduces meaningfulness as a condition of truth (TKB statement). This is in congruence to the line of thinking of the existentialists and romantics reaction to the Enlightenment (see Re-Envisioning Psychology). 

Beliefs are confirmed by the actions to which they give rise.  Beliefs are not mental states, they are dispositions to behave. (Forster, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. P. 709)

False beliefs will eventually be met with resistance. It is this kind of resistance that constitutes an inquirer’s
subjectivity. (Forster, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. P. 709)

Agents as individual subjects are manifested by conflicts between habits of conduct and experience of objects and other knowers. (Forster, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. P. 709)


The process of learning involves the reconstruction of an inquirer’s habits in order to accommodate recalcitrant experiences. (Forster, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. P. 709)


Inquiry is therefore a process of overcoming subjectivity, idiosyncracy and prejudice in a truly “self”-less pursuit of epistemic perfection. (Forster, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. P. 709)


Since reality – although represented by and belonging to a community – transcends the experience of finite
communities and individuals, epistemic perfection is always beyond their grasp. (Forster, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. P. 710)


Rationality demands cooperation and self-sacrifice of which, according to nominalism, agents are incapable. (Forster, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. P. 711)


Logicality requires our interests shall not be limited to my or your personal interests or limited by our finite
idiosyncratic experiences. Our interests must embrace the whole community, and the community itself cannot be limited. It must reach beyond all bounds. Logic is rooted in the social principle.  (Forster quoting Peirce 2.654, 1878 inForster, Paul. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism. P. 711)


Then we go to Gadamer, Aristotle and the Greek’s and their depictions of multiple kinds of knowledge – theoretical, technical, and moral/prudential. Underlying them all is symbolic communication and hermeneutics.


Readings:
• Paul Forster. Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism.  
• Tim Ingold. The Animal in the Study of Humanity.
• Dominique Lestel. Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture.