Thus, if the test of objectivity of import is to be that the judgment
shall present an object or a fact which, as presented, is socially
current among men and not shut away in the individual intelligence
apart from the possibility of social verification, then the apparent
nominalism of the objection we are considering turns out to be the
uttermost extreme of realism. Such a test amounts to a virtual
affirmation that the sole objective reality is the conceptual, and that
the "accidents" of one's particular object of sense-perception are the
arbitrary play of private preference or fancy. At this point, however,
the objection may shift its ground and take refuge in some such position
as the following: The real object is indeed the object which the
individual knows in relation to his particular purpose, and it is indeed
impossible that the individual's judgment should be limited in its
content to coincidence with the conceptual elements of meaning which are
socially current. The building-stone which one has judged precisely fit
for a special purpose, the specimen which the mineralogist or the
botanist examines under his microscope, the tool whose peculiarity of
working one has learned to make allowance for in use--these all are, of
course, highly individual objects, possessing for the person in question
an indefinite number of objective aspects of which no other person can
possibly be conscious at the time. And, more than this, even though the
individual may, in his scrutiny of the object, have discovered no
conspicuous new qualities in it which were not present in the socially
current meaning, the object will still possess an individuality making
it genuinely unique merely through its co-ordination with other objects
in the mechanical process of working out the purpose in hand. It is at
least an object standing here at just this time, a tool cutting this
particular piece of stone and striking at this instant with this
particular ringing sound, and these perhaps wholly nonessential facts
will nevertheless serve to individualize the object (if one chances to
think of them) in the sense of making it such a one as no other person
knows. All this may be granted, the objection may allow, and yet the
vital point remains; for this is not what it was intended, even in the
first place, to deny. The vital point at issue is not whether the object
which I know _is_ known as I know it by any other person, but whether,
in the nature of things, it is one that _can_ be so known.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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