On Simplificatory and Diversificatory Aspects of the Presentation of an Object

What is it about?

In this article, I present and defend the view that our cognition of complex objects is on the one hand incomplete and unavoidably simplificatory, and on the other diversificatory, in the sense of conferring additional internal diversity on them by introducing features they do not otherwise have. To substantiate this viewpoint, I make use of the ontological analysis of both the object and its cognition carried out by the founding father of the Lviv-Warsaw School of philosophy, Kazimierz Twardowski, in his work On the content and the object of presentations. I also model Twardowski’s findings topologically, using Fréchet’s theory of types of dimension.

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Why is it important?

There are, we might be tempted to suppose, three protagonists: a subject, an object, and a relation of cognition that connects them. The subject gets to know the object, and the object becomes known by the subject. Getting to know the object is a complex process.1 A first and naive approximation of that process might be the view that holds that within the subject certain presentations occur,2 these being some form of mental duplication amounting to something like a photographic copy of the object that the subject seeks to know. The more exact the photographic duplication, the more adequate the cognition of the object. That viewpoint is false, for at least two reasons. Firstly, cognition cannot be confined to instances of photographic mirroring, as in that case how would we get to know such abstract objects as Hilbert spaces? What would the copies of these objects be? Secondly, the totality of what counts as getting to know an object cannot be equated solely with the adequacy of that object’s presentation. Presentations furnish the basic elements of cognition: they are the beginning of the cognition process, and as such do not themselves exhaust the entire cognition process. Amongst the components omitted by such an account there is, at the very least, the final result of cognition: i.e., the making of a judgment.