In defense of objectivity: pursuing truth with respect to core cognition
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Citation
Abstract
It is a necessary truth of human existence that every experience we are able to perceive must be filtered first through our senses, which must then be interpreted by the brain. Our perceptions are inherently biased by our very biology; each individual’s reality is merely an approximation of events that are limited and altered by their body’s biological hardware. We obtain information from experience which we necessarily must integrate within individual conceptual frameworks, as our own perceptions are all we may ever know. But there are universal qualities that are retained across all humans—including our unique ability for higher-order logical reasoning and complex inquiry. Logic and reason themselves draw their sources from our external environments; the existence of the outside world underlies all things, even if we may not ever be able to fully understand its intricacies as biological beings. Even still, the consciousness that our brains have bestowed upon us struggles to understand how we may arrive at objective truths in a world that is necessarily filtered through perceptual bias. Modernist thought in the philosophy of science explains that there exists objective truth which we find coherent, even in spite of our inherent cognitive limitations. Reaching objective truth is only possible because we are rational beings—it is our capability to use reason which defines a central “core cognition” retained across the human species. This cognitive core is an intrinsic quality within all humans that allows us to understand the outside world separately from our lived experience by using logic and rationality. We may accept the existence of coherent, objective truths describing reality despite our brain’s subjective interference by maintaining that our consciousness allows us to justify empirical observations in relation to a rational cognitive core–a trait which itself lies central to the universal human experience.