On the Objects of Our Subjective Knowledge

Abstract

The problem of the nature of the objects of human knowledge was most clearly raised for the first time by Plato. For him, our very understanding of the nature of knowledge depended on an adequate solution of this problem. Four things, among others, are noteworthy in Plato’s approach: (1) his sole concern with knowledge in a strictly subjective sense of this term, appearances to the contrary not-withstanding; (2) his firm commitment to infallibility as a necessary mark of (subjective) knowledge; (3) his view that perception is not a species of such knowledge; and (4) his view that the best candidates for objects of such knowledge are the (eternal and abstract) individual entities that he designated as ‘Forms’/‘Ideas’. In the course of the subsequent historical development of traditional epistemology (TE), it is only the doctrines (3) and (4) which have undergone radical modification, with the underlying basic assumptions staying intact and unquestioned. Thus while no philosopher from Aristotle onwards has ever subscribed to a Platonic doctrine of ‘Forms’ as objects of knowledge, or rejected perception as a pseudospecies of knowledge, there is discernible in TE a common commitment not only to the doctrines (1) and (2), but to the assumption that it is the individual things/processes of a suitable kind which alone can be the objects of our (subjective) knowledge.

... it is symptomatic of the confusion of philosophical language that the thing the painter refers to as his subject is what the philosophers call the object.

C. H. Waddington (1977)