Object and Objective

Jose Ferrater Mora has written:

‘Objeto’ deriva da obiectum, que es el participio pasado del verbo objicio (infinitivo, objicere), el cual significa «echar hacia adelante», «ofrecerse», «exponerse a algo», «pre- sentarse a los ojos».

F. Minazzi (è)

University of Insubria, Varese, Italy e-mail: fabio.minazzi@uninsubria.it © Springer International Publishing AG 2017

E. Agazzi (ed.), Varieties of Scientific Realism,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51608-0_10 algunas de las significaciones que se han dado al termino ‘objeto’ (y a los correspondientes terminos en varios lenguajes) y a los terminos ‘objetivo’, ‘objetivamente’, etc. (y a los correspondientes terminos en varios lenguas). En la historia de la filosofia occidental estas significaciones pueden dividirse en dos grupos: el que puede llamarse «tradicional», especialmente entre los escolasticos, y el que puede llamarse «moderno», particolarmente desde Kant y Baugmarten (Ferrater Mora 2001: III, 2603, italic in the text).

Hence the term Objective (Italian Oggettivo, French Objectif, German Objecktiv) refers, in the first instance, to what exists as an object or to what possesses an object, or, again, to what belongs to an object. The semantic field of the adjective “objective” therefore appears much broader, more highly articulated, and more dilated that what the corresponding noun refers to, because the adjective, in addition to the meanings of the noun, has been expanded in order to indicate both everything which appears to be valid for everyone, and what appears to be independent of the subject, as well as everything which is “external” with respect to consciousness or thought and, last but not least, everything which is found to comply with certain rules or methods (Abbagnano 1971: 631-632).

1. objective understood as what exists as an object in its own right;

2. objective as what possesses an object;

3. objective as what appears to be valid for all

The first meaning refers to objectivity as something which exists as the limit or term of a given operation (whether active or passive). In the tradition of late Scholasticism—for instance, in the reflection of an author like the Doctoris subtilii John Duns Scotus, or in that of Durand de Saint Pourgain, or again that of Fran­cesco Majrone—‘objective’ constantly refers to what exists as an object of intellect, insofar as it is thought or imagined, without that existence implying, in itself, the existence in the real world, or outside the intellect. In this sense, the notion of universality possesses a certain objectivity only and exclusively in the intellect, because the intellect can understand the lion in its universality without referring to this or that specific and particular living lion. Therefore, in this acceptation of late scholasticism, the concept of objective existence coincides with the possibility itself of elaborating a representation or an idea, which are all objects of thought or perception.

This acceptation of what constitutes what is objective has been widely accepted also by several modern philosophers such as Descartes, who reformulates it and recognises it explicitly in his first Meditationes de prima philosophia (in particular in the third meditation), and by Spinoza in his Ethica ordine geometrico demon­strata (I, 30; II 8 corollary.), and again by a singular thinker like Berkeley, who illustrates it in his Siris. A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries Con­cerning the Virtues of Tar Water (Section 292). In particular Descartes writes about the objectivity of ideas:

And in order that I may have an opportunity of inquiring into this in an orderly way [without interrupting the order of meditation which I have proposed to myself, and which is little by little to pass from the notions which I find first of all in my mind to those which I shall later on discover in it] it is requisite that I should here divide my thoughts into certain kinds, and that I should consider in which of these kinds there is, properly speaking, truth or error to be found.

Nunc autem ordo videtur exigere, ut prius omnes meas cogitatione in certa genera dis- tribuam, & in quibusnam ex illis veritas aut falsitas proprie consistat, inquiram. Quaendam ex his tanquam rerum imagines sunt, quibus solis proprie convenit idea nomen: ut cum hominem, vel Chimaeram, vel Coelum, vel Angelus, vel Deum cogito. Aliae vero alias quasdam praeterea formas habent: ut, cum volo, cum timeo, cum affirmo, cum nego, sempre quidam aliquam rem ut subjectum meae cogitationis apprehendo, sed aliquid etiam amplius quam istius rei similitudinem cogitatione complector; & ex his aliae voluntates, sive affectus, aliae autem judicia appellantur.

Jam quod ad ideas attinte, si solae in se spectentur, nec ad aliud quis illas referam, false proprie esse non possunt; nam sive capram, sive chimaeram imaginer, non minus verum est me unam imaginari quam alteram. Nulla etima in ipsa voluntate, vel affectibus, falsitas est timenda; nam, quamvis prava, quamvis etiam ea quae nusquam sunt, passim optare, non tamen ideo non verum est illa me optare. Ac proinde sola supersunt judicia, in quibus mihi cavendum est ne fallar. Praecipuus autem error & frequentissimus qui possit in illis reperiri, consistit in eo quod ideas, quae in me sunt, judicem rebus quibusdam extra me positis similes esse sive conformes; nam profecto, si tantum ideas ipsas ut cogitationis meae quondam modos considerarem, nec ad quidquam aliud referrem, vix mihi ullam errandi materia dare possent (Descartes 1964-1974, vol. VII, pp. 36-37).

Thus for Descartes ideas, if considered in themselves, can never be false, because they are always images; nor, in his view, should we fear lies in relation with volitions and desires, because even if, for example, we wish bad things, nonetheless, we actually desire and want them. For Descartes we must instead pay close attention to our judgments in relation to which we must be careful not to deceive ourselves. According to Descartes the main mistake in this area is precisely to consider our ideas, which are in us, as authentic copies of the things that are outside us. In short, in his view, only the illusion of dominating this conceptually problematic relationship between the ideas that are in us and what exists outside us, generates the most valid premises (and the deepest ones from a metaphysical point of view) producing a real error. Thus the Cartesian dualism—between res cogitans and res extensa—is rooted in the image of knowledge itself, giving rise to the classical gnoseological dualism whichhas variously marked the history of modern epistemology.

On the same, overall metaphysical horizon is located a thinker like Spinoza, who, in the corollary previously indicated of his Ethica, recognises that:

Hence it follows that as long as individual things do not exist except insofar as they are comprehended in the attributes of God, their being as objects of thought- that is, their ideas —do not exist except insofar as the infinite idea of God exists; and when individual things are said to exist not only insofar as they are comprehended in the attributes of God but also insofar as they are said to have duration, their ideas also will involve the existence through which they are said to have duration (Spinoza, Complete works, 2002, p. 248).

Hinc sequitur, quod, quamdiu res singulares non existunt, nisi quatenus in Dei attribuitis comrehenduntur, earum esse objectivum, sive ideae non existunt, nisi quatenus infinita Dei idea existit; & ubi res singulares dicuntur esistere, non tantum quatenus in Dei attributis comprehenduntur, sed quatenus etiam durare dicuntur, earum ideae etiam existentiam, per quam durare dicuntur, involvent (Spinoza 2010: II, 8, corollary, 1232).

For Spinoza, too, objectivity therefore coincides with ideas which exist only because they are included in the attributes of divinity. In any case, for all these very different authors of the modern era, “objective” always stands only for what con­stitutes an intellectual object, and thus does not have anything to do, in the first instance, either with what is real, or with what appears to be unreal. Which, of course, does not preclude the possibility that, on second and fuller consideration, what is an object of the intellect may also be either real or unreal, as the case may be.

Immanuel Kant moved, by contrast, explicitly against this traditional view of the objective. He held that objective always refers to something that does not exist only subjectively in the intellect, but which relates to something real and objective. Kant insists in fact in emphasising that the object of knowledge is, and cannot be any­thing but a “real” object, empirically determinable, as part of a real experience. Thus for Kant “objective” refers to that which has as its object its own particular and specific reality, empirically established, experimentally given and circum­scribed. Which, of course, is directly connected with the problem of the “limit” which characterises, more generally, the whole new Kantian conception of knowledge, since for Kant knowledge can be established solely and exclusively within a well-defined and precise “boundary” that we must be able to trace, nor­matively, within the scope of possible experiences. Kant in fact writes, in the first section of the first book of Transcendental Dialectic in the Critique of Pure Reason,

The genus is representation in general (repraesentatio).

Eine Perzeption, die sich lediglich auf das Subjekt, als die Modifikation seines Zustandes bezieht, istEmpfindung (sensatio), eine objektive Perzeption ist E r k e n n t n i s (cognitio). Diese ist entweder Anschauung oder B e g r i f f (intuitis vel conceptus). Jene bezieht sich unmittelbar auf der Gegenstand und ist einzeln; dieser mit- telbar, vermittelst eines Merkmals, was mehreren Dingen gemein sein kann. Der Begriff ist entweder ein empiischer oder r e i n e r be g r if f, und der reine Begriff, so fern er lediglich im Verstande seinen Ursprung hat (nicht in reinen Bilde Sinnlichkeit) heisst Notio. Ein Begriff aus Notionen, der die Moglichkeit der Errfahrung ubersteigt, ist die Idee, oder der Vernunftbegriff (Kant 1787: A 320-B 377).

For Kant, therefore, an objective perception constitutes knowledge only if there is a conceptual mediation by which a concept can refer to several realities unifying them. If, in fact, by perception we refer to a single reality it is only by judgment that we come to an objective understanding, thanks to which the multiplicity of intuitions is combined in a concept capable of pointing out the characteristic traits common to several realities. In this perspective, the idea, by presuming to go beyond the limits of possible experience, inevitably places itself beyond the plane of objective knowl­edge, because the latter is always a synthesis by which human rationality is con­figured as a function of critical unification of what is experienced by the senses. In any case, for Kant the conceptual mediation which unifies experience is the ground on which one builds an objectivity which always takes into consideration the equally fundamental dimension of possible and actual experiences.

In this way Kant introduced a very important epistemological breakthrough, because thanks to his innovative critical perspective, objective validity coincides with the reality itself empirically known and tested, where the latter is therefore no longer conceived metaphysically as reality itself or as the classical noumenon (Ding an sich), but, precisely as a given empirical reality actually known, through con­ceptual mediation, always in an objective, experimentally verifiable and control­lable way. In other words, for Kant objectivity always coincides with empirical reality (cfr. infra).

After Kant's arguments—but, in part, also thanks to them-a third, different, sense of objectivity was delineated, by which it coincided with what appears to be “valid for all” within a specified area of investigation, in which a limited number of rules and also some methods shared by the vast majority of the experts in a particular area of research play a unique heuristic role. Henri Poincare was one of the first episte- mologists who, in La valeur de la science (1905), has best expressed this concept:

Cette harmonie que l’intelligence humaine croit decouvrir dans la nature, existe-t-elle en dehors de cette intelligence? Non, sans doute, une realite completement independante de l’esprit qui la congoit, la voit ou la sent, c’est une impossibilite. Un monde si exterieur que cela, si meme il existait, nous serait a jamais inaccessible. Mais ce que nous appelons la realite objective, c’est, en derniere analyse, ce qui est commun a plusieurs etres pensants, et pourrait etre commun a touts: cette partie commune, nous le verrons, ce ne peut etre que l’harmonie exprimee par des lois mathematiques. C’est donc cette harmonie qui est la seule realite objective, la seule verite que nous puissions atteindre; et si j'ajoute que l'harmonie universelle de monde est la source de toute beaute, on comprendra quel prix nous devons attacher aux lentes et penibles progres qui nous la font peu a peu mieux connaitre (Poincare 1905: 11-12).

If Poincare, in his epistemological reflection, had the mathematical sciences as a reference point, very soon his concept of objectivity as the sharing of certain rules within a given field of research was, however, widely accepted, endorsed and claimed also by many other scholars. For example also by a scholar of the social sciences such as Max Weber, who claimed the validity of scientific objectivity in the context of the methodology of the social sciences and even within the social policy itself, and he advanced this claim by appealing to the observation made by Poincare that scientific truth coincides substantially with everything which proves to be valid and shared by all those who are investigating a particular field of study.

This kind of objectivity is configured, therefore, as a form of intersubjectivity, because in this acceptation “valid for all” comes to coincide exclusively with what appears to be “intersubjectively valid”, and this appears to be because it is con­figured as something that turns out to be “in conformity with a specific and precise method of investigation”. In this particular acceptation, objectivity as intersubjec­tivity shared by a certain community of scholars, then ends up also by absorbing the concepts traditionally associated with objectivity, that is both its “independence of the subject,” and its characteristic (of Cartesian origin) of being “outside the con­sciousness” of the investigator. The inter-subjective value of knowledge imposes itself on all researchers regardless of their subjectivity, and also of their preferences and of their often very different and conflicting assessments. Moreover, this acceptation of objectivity as mere intersubjectivity comes to present an obvious problem, at least insofar as it seems to have formed as a kind of authentic episte­mological weakening of the second sense of objectivity, namely of the realability of human knowledge to grasp effectively objective aspects—and not only inter-subjective ones—of the reality which is studied and investigated. This should then lead us to take into serious and attentive epistemological consideration pre­cisely the notion of objectivity in its second acceptation, in order to determine the true nature of scientific knowledge, which turns out to be true because it is capable of understanding some effective aspects of the world studied by human beings.

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