Of course, the answer is that the universal laws of logic and such are not materially verifiable, but are a product of analyzing our experience. As Descartes, Kant, and Husserl, among others, realized, the ground of science is in the rigorous examination of the object as determined in consciousness. The congruity between reason and the external word became itself, in Descartes, an argument for the existence of God. Kant, however, developed the idea that the world of experience was constructed by consciousness encountering Things- in- themselves, and thus that appearances were formally congruent with reason, whatever may be the case with the Things- in- themselves. This radical disjunction was very unsatisfactory, however, since it made little sense that phenomena did not reveal something about the objects that inspired them, and thus the question of the amenability of objects to be dealt with rationally remained. Husserl dealt with the encounter of the object in consciousness, to discover the principles that govern the encounter more rigorously, and possibly reveal something about the thing itself. This method of rigorous analysis of the interior encounter with things is called phenomenology. The problem is that for Husserl to "work", objects must essentially be objects of consciousness, and yet he never deals with the implications of that, although there is an implied Idealism.
Finally, it makes sense that there be a distinction between object and appearance; that, nevertheless, the object is to a greater or lesser degree revealed through its appearance in consciousness; and that the object is graspable through the structures of consciousness, and therefore "built" to be grasped. This "principle of intelligibility" embodied in things suggests their production from a consciousness that we, in turn, reflect more directly. |
