Bilig 49. sayı

Soykan, A Proposal for the Classification of Objects 
 
183 
sensation that is a physiological thing is always a material thing to me 
whether it comes to me from my body or from outside. For instance, I 
receive a sense of touch by means of the communication via neurofibrils to 
my brain of signals received by nerve endings from a pen in my hand. The 
same is true for the senses of hearing, smell and taste. As for the object of 
feeling that I feel in my soul, evidently there is no such physiological event. 
Here, the situation is much more complicated. Not only is the cause of the 
feeling a thing that cannot clearly be determined, but there is also no thing 
touching my body. Winning the lottery jackpot, receiving good news that I 
have been waiting for, or a happy moment in the past that I am 
remembering gives me a feeling of joy and cheerfulness. However, 
sometimes I may have similar feelings for reasons I do not clearly know. In 
my soul, my consciousness, I feel all the senses that I receive both from my 
body and from outside; I cannot doubt whether these sensations are present 
or not. The psychological object is always one and same with a thing and an 
object, whether it is an object of sense or of feeling. There can be no 
intuition for a psychological thing. Intuition is the thing seen from a 
perspective. The psychological object has no representation either. However, 
a trace of it may remain in my soul and I can recall it in a particular manner. 
This recalling is not in the form of representation or intuition. I cannot 
remember directly a psychological object that has left a trace on me (my 
soul), i.e. I cannot remember the trace directly. For instance, the trace of a 
feeling of joy that I obtained in the past is available in my memory, but I 
cannot remember that feeling. I can remember that I had such a feeling and 
the moment, but this is not the remembering of that feeling regardless of it 
arousing a feeling of joy in me now. This feeling of joy is a new feeling; it is 
not the previous feeling.  
Communication of psychological objects is carried out in the following ways: 
Communication about an object of sense experienced by both me and 
another is exactly like it is for an intuition object. For instance, if a sound 
comes from within or outside my body in such a way that someone near can 
also hear it, I draw the attention of the person to it; I show it to him/her. 
Communication is carried out assuming that the nearby person hears what I 
hear. When the object is not common i.e. when it only belongs to me, then 
the communication of sense and feeling are of the same type. When I say a 
word expressing a sense or a feeling that I have, for instance when I say “I 
have a stomachache”, the other can understand that I have such a pain in 
the following way: If he/she also had stomach pain before, he/she would 
have also said “I have a stomachache”. As he knows what this utterance 
means he understands what I mean, although he does not remember the 
pain he once felt. If he has never had a stomachache but had another pain, 

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bilig, Spring / 2009, Number 49 
 
184 
he would have expressed that pain. He puts the organ in which he felt the 
pain in the place of the “stomach” and understands what I say. In both 
cases, there must exist a shared use of language because the other person 
has to know the use of language in order to decide that the same utterance is 
used for both my and his sensation. As a third possibility, let us assume that 
he has never had a pain experience. In this case, he does not understand 
what I mean, but since he shares the use of the language he can use a 
similar utterance appropriately. This is similar to a person born blind using 
the word “red”, despite having no colour representation. Communication of 
a sense of pain as well as a feeling of joy are both connected to words; there 
is nothing commonly perceptible to hand. We have said that a psychological 
object is momentary in both types. My communicating to another the object 
of sense or feeling that I have had before occurs by participating in the 
manner of remembering the moment of feeling and also by participating in 
the use of language.
5
  
I perceive things or events as intuition objects although I appoint them 
values such as “beautiful” or “good” in an aesthetical-ethical sense. The 
feeling of pleasure they give me is also a psychological object. In answer to 
the question of whether they produce a third kind as a mixture of these two 
types, the answer must be no. “Beautiful” or “good” are not available in a 
thing shown by an intuition object like the presence of a colour, a form etc. 
nor as the presence of pain in a pain experience (a psychological object) in 
those things to which I am appointing these features. This is the subject that 
ascribes the thing that is not available in the object and that we call “value”. 
For this reason, it does not stand as a different type of object from the 
standpoint of its appointment to the subject. Though value judgments and 
the things that are their subject have a great place in our life and an 
important role in determining our actions, the things they show do not 
constitute an object classification. For the same reason, religious beliefs do 
not have a place in our classification. As value is not a feature of the thing to 
which it is appointed, there is no problem of truth here in the sense of 
inquiring whether there is compatibility between the value and the thing. 
All the objects we assembled under the titles of intuition objects, mental 
objects and psychological objects are classified under the general title of 
objects of sensibility as they are provided through sensibility. Among them, 
intuition objects, objects of appearance and psychological objects are directly 
objects of sensation, while mental objects are indirectly an object of 
sensation since they are pictures of sensation in the mind.  
Now we are moving to a new kind which we call an object of reason. The 
intellect or mind acquires representations and concepts from things outside 

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