Hägerström’s standpoint constitutes a compromise between pure subjectivism and pure objectivism. As far as he understands the issue, the principle of knowledge tells us under which specific conditions it is possible to establish and find the grounds deciding the truth value of a given subject’s judgments. In the end, the focus necessarily returns to the fact that the principles governing the subject’s work must cooperate with the object’s principle when determining the truth value of a judgment.159 Every reference to the “self ” is a reference to a psychophysical individual or organism and it, the “self ”, is also primarily an individual’s manifestations of consciousness that are understood by the concept “oneself ”.160 From every individual’s point of view, all other persons can justifiably be imagined as psychophysical organisms analogous to the individual itself, which is an analogy based upon the projection of the manifestations of the individual’s own mind on to the intellectual life of other organisms having similar behavior and physical characteristics as that of the perceiving subject.161 The “self ” is nothing more than a mass of experiences, ideas, and manifestations of consciousness serving as the unitary principle of order into which all the other factors fit.162The latter part is an idea fundamental to subjectivism which, however, overestimates the philosophical meaning of its definition of the “self ”, for according to subjectivism the subordination of objects under the “self ”, or subject, simultaneously entails an elevation of the subject to the level of the Absolute, whereby the reality of everything which is not subject(ive) becomes devaluated. Consequently, that which is non-subjective (that is, objective or external to a ca l l f o r s c i e n t i f i c p u r i t y 221 159 Cf. ibid., pp. 74-75. 160 Ibid., pp. 11-14. 161 Ibid., pp. 14-15. N.B.The similarity between Hägerström’s method of ascertaining the “I-character” of other organisms and Allen Turing’s test for the determination of whether or not a cybernetic organism is intelligent. 162 Ibid., pp. 13-14 and 21. 3. 4 the nature of the “se lf ”
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