From inter-subjectivity, via inter-objectivity, to intra-objectivity. In Understanding the Self and Others Explorations in Intersubjectivity and Interobjectivity, eds.G. Sammut, P. Daanen and F. M. Moghaddam, Routledge, 2013: 31-50. (original) (raw)

Abstract

My primary concern in this chapter will be, not with how we can come to share a particular set of momentary meanings and understandings with others in a particular shared circumstance, but with how certain particular understandings (or our expressions of them) can come to function as fixed ‘hinges’ or ‘pivots’ – seemingly exempt from doubt – upon which the questions we raise and the doubts we utter depend for their unambiguous expression over some quite long period of time. Indeed, as Wittgenstein (1969) puts it: “If I wanted to doubt the existence of the earth long before my birth, I should have to doubt all sorts of things that stand fast for me” (no. 243, my emphasis). A paradigm example of such things that ‘stand fast’ for us in this way are certain mathematical propositions, such as E=mc2. As he puts it: “The mathematical proposition has, as it were officially, been given the stamp of incontestability. I.e.: ‘Dispute about other things; this is immovable – it is a hinge on which your dispute can turn’” (Wittgenstein, 1969, no.655). Indeed, in our science based culture, such a “proposition seems set over against us as a judge and we feel answerable to it. – It seems to demand that reality be compared with it” (Wittgenstein, 1978, p.132). How is such an interobjectivity possible?