The exercise of the object

Charles Travis

pp. 893-917

in: Objectivity, space, and mind, Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences 18 (5), 2019.

Abstract

What is an object? A prior question: What is objecthood? Au fond, and to logic's eye, object is a role to be played with respect to a thought (on a decomposition). It is to be a countable which that thought represent as being some way for such a countable to be; what restores the business of truth-of to that of truth outright. What plays that role for some given thought is then an object with respect to that thought. Given this, there are corresponding absolute notions, to be fit for this role, and to be fit only for this role. So the fundamental task here is identifying the conditions on playing this role at all. All this is a contribution, however limited, to a topic called "ontology". This last word also occurs in the plural in several contexts. The end of this essay considers how these notions (non-countable, and the several countables) might relate, and what assumptions underlie what some have seen them to.