Abstract
Subjectivity is a theme common to many of those philosophers eager to deflate the ambitions of cognitive science. The claim is that persons differ from all other things in that they cannot be exhaustively described in the third person. Any attempt to do so will fail to capture something about every human being that is essentially subjective. This expression covers many things, and the word sounds all the more impressive for the fact that the things it purportedly designates are lumped into a very mixed bag. When lumped together as if they constituted one hugely complex problem, they tend to induce a sense of hopelessness. Which is exactly what some of the champions of subjectivity count on to preserve its mystery and irreducibility.
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de Sousa, R. (2004). Twelve Varieties of Subjectivity: Dividing in Hopes of Conquest. In: Larrazabal, J.M., Miranda, L.A.P. (eds) Language, Knowledge, and Representation. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 99. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2783-3_10
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