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A Modern Understanding of...
for example, understand as itself in any way known as a separate item, but as just being a postulate of all knowledge, meaning that it consists just in that object being known. Reality of a thing known is, according to them, no content that is known: it is neither an immanent part of the thing known nor any content transcending it. The proposition 'An object is real is equivalent, according to them, to 'An object is known.'
Demands (cognitive faiths) and questions too they would interpret in simpler ways. Knowledge of these is no doubt knowledge of possibilities, but they would not take possibility (possible object) as belonging to a higher level. For them, there are no levels, either of reality or even of consideration. A possible object, according to them, is only an object that is known by thought, i.e. inferred. If by 'actual object' is meant an object that is known directly, in perception, as present before me, now and here, a possible object, in contrast, is one that is not so known either because it is not here and now or because, though it is here and now, I fail to perceive it, and that too either because there is some additional factor - some defect or some obstruction - or because it is constitutionally unperceivable. Except for this difference, the actual and the possible have the same ontological status. There is no level-distinction anywhere, not even the level-distinction of consideration. These thinkers are not worried over basic contradictions which, others hold, have only to be got rid of by distinguishing between levels (types) of consideration (language). They entertain an interesting attitude toward such basic contradictions. They hold that though one must try one's best to get rid of contradictions, if in spite of our best efforts we, in our normal objective attitude, cannot get rid of some we have to put up with them as final inexplicabilities, as inexplicabilities which are after all given. Because of these basic paradoxes they are not prepared to give up the normal objective attitude and indulge in all sorts of mystic flights in the subjective attitude the transcendentalists recommend
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