When is? House a Home, Enemy a Friend, Banker a Thief

[coberst]

When is? House a Home, Enemy a Friend, Banker a Thief

 

Are qualities inherent in the object?

 

Are qualities inherent (essential character) in my apperception (the process of understanding something perceived in terms of previous experience) of an object?

 

We have all been raised within an objectivist philosophical view wherein the object is ‘out there’ and it possesses certain qualities such as color, roughness, and stands in certain relationship with other objects.

 

“Most people tend to adopt this objectivist metaphysics, because thy use their basic-level, body-relative experience of objects and forces as a model for all that exists. They thus come to think that objects have their properties “in themselves”, independent of sentient organisms, since as infants they learn object permanence and eventually come to experience properties as adhering in objects.” We have through social osmosis learned that objects are mind-independent.

 

SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) has begun the effort to correct this fallacious view.

 

It seems to me that we must recognize that we can have a phenomenal world and a scientific world that often challenge one another but that each world is valid in its own way. That is to say that each world, the phenomenal (known through the senses without sophisticated thought) and the scientific, are “value-dependent”. Being value-dependent means that each world can be framed within its own “explanatory framework that presupposes differing interests, values, and views of what counts as data and adequate explanation”.

 

The most egregious and the most difficult to clarify error that objectivist make is the common sense assumption that objects are mind-independent.

 

“The world does not come to us prepackaged with determinate objects with their determinate properties. Instead we have to learn the meaning of physical objects, which we do by watching , handling them, subjecting them to forces, and seeing how they can be used—in short, by forms of interactive inquiry that are at once bodily and reflective.”

 

Quotations from “The Meaning of the Body” by Mark Johnson.