The Problem of Objectivity in Modern Philosophy

Since the 17th century, philosophers have sought to discover what assurance we can have that our beliefs are (or even can be) objectively valid – that they are true of the real world and hold for all knowers. Largely ignored by Descartes and Arnauld, the problem of objectivity was conspicuous in Berkeley and Hume, as Idea-ism, with its Cartesian framework, gradually collapsed into Hume’s neutral monism.Enter Kant. The empirical world around him, Kant argued, was constituted from the raw data of experience, through the application of universal and necessary concepts. But Kant’s very success in solving the old problem of objectivity gave rise to a “new” problem: for what guarantee can there be that the concepts that constitute the object of knowledge are in fact universal and necessary? The response to Kant of 20th-century Analytical philosophy has varied, from Wittgenstein’s notion of a “conceptual framework” to Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation to Kuhn’s theory of “paradigms.” In The Problem of Objectivity in Modern Philosophy, James R. Mitchell argues, against Stroud and Davidson, that the possibility of “alternative frameworks” poses no threat to objectivity, because ultimately the problem of objectivity arises from a misunderstanding of the relationship between knower, conceptual framework, and world.