p.223
Some Inadequacies of the Myth of Subjectivism
In Western culture, the chief alternative to objectivism has traditionally been taken to be subjectivism. We have argued that the myth of objectivism is inadequate to account for human understanding, human language, human values, human social and cultural institutions, and everything dealt with by the human sciences. Thus, according to the dichotomy that our culture would foist upon us, we would be left only with a radical subjectivity, which denies the possibility of any scientific "lawlike" account of human realities.
But we have claimed that subjectivism is not the only alternative to objectivism, and we have been offering a third choice: the experientialist myth, which we see as making possible an adequate philosophical and methodological basis for the human sciences. We have already distinguished this alternative from the objectivist program, and it is equally important to distinguish it from a subjectivist program.
Let us consider briefly some subjectivist positions on how people understand their experience and their language. These flow mainly from the Romantic tradition and are to be found in contemporary interpretations (probably misinterpretations) of recent Continental philosophy, especially the traditions of phenomenology and existentialism. Such subjectivist interpretations are largely popularizations that pick and choose elements of antiobjectivist Continental philosophy, often ignoring what makes certain trends in Continental thought serious attempts to provide a basis for the human sciences. These subjectivist positions, listed
p.224
below, might be characterized jointly as "cafe phenomenology." They include:
Meaning is private: Meaning is always a matter of what is meaningful and significant to a person. What an individual finds significant and what it means to him are matters of intuition, imagination, feeling, and individual experience. What something means to one individual can never be fully known or communicated to anyone else.
Experience is purely holistic: There is no natural structuring to our experience. Any structure that we or others place on our experience is completely artificial.
Meanings have no natural structure: Meaning to an individual is a matter of his private feelings, experiences, intuitions, and values. These are purely holistic; they have no natural structure. Thus, meanings have no natural structure.
Context is unstructured: The context needed for understanding an utterancethe physical, cultural, personal, and interpersonal contexthas no natural structure.
Meaning cannot he naturally or adequately represented: This is a consequence of the facts that meanings have no natural structure, that they can never be fully known or communicated to another person, and that the context needed to understand them is unstructured.
These subjectivist positions all hinge on one basic assumption, namely, that experience has no natural structure and that, therefore, there can be no natural external constraints upon meaning and truth. Our reply follows directly from our account of how our conceptual system is grounded. We have argued that our experience is structured holistically in terms of experiential gestalts. These gestalts have structure that is not arbitrary. Instead, the dimensions that characterize the structure of the gestalts emerge naturally from our experience.
This is not to deny the possibility that what something means to me may be based on kinds of experiences that I have had and you have not had and that, therefore, I will
p.225
not be able to fully and adequately communicate that meaning to you. However, metaphor provides a way of partially communicating unshared experiences, and it is the natural structure of our experience that makes this possible.