allowing us to discern objects from one another and concepts from one another.133 The principle of selfbeing predicates that an existing object or condition necessarily is in a determined selfidentical way, and selfbeing is the factor recurring in every judgment; not the “self ”, consciousness, or any other mental subject. All judgments refer to objects and have them as their logical subjects, and such judgments do not necessarily refer to the epistemological subjects as such, or to “me” or “self ” or anything else personal as their logical objects.The specific object of synthetic judgments is invariably something other than the subjective self (of the speaker). Hence, a synthetic judgment never constitutes a self-referring act, insofar as the synthetic judgment would then be indeterminate with respect to its verifying facts, and as a result would have an indeterminate truth value, making the judgment unintelligible. However, if judgments only understand an object as the subject expressing a judgment, then judgments are self-referring, necessarily true, and tautological with respect to physical reality, and consequently are analytic rather than synthetic.Accordingly, every judgment only reaffirms the thoughts of the thinking subject and that which was already known. In other words, the judgment expresses solipsistic tautologies, which cannot possibly convey any information about the external world to the thinking subject (cf. the problems of Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum”). Hence, idealism safeguards the formal correctness of thoughts, but to Hägerström the specific problem is material and objective; he wishes to prove the possibility of objective knowledge as well as to safeguard its certainty. And if idealism is valid, then certain knowledge is doomed to travel in solipsistic circles, making the material truth value of judgments impossible to verify, thus making the correspondence theory of truth superfluous. In all, idealism implies that every judgment has only one objective element, namely thinking as such, while the object content of thoughts, a ca l l f o r s c i e n t i f i c p u r i t y 211 133 Ibid.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=