>Kenneth MacKendrick wrote:
>
> > Would you agree that we can differentiate between an internal state of
> > affairs (subjective), a social state of affairs (intersubjective) and an
> > external state of affairs (objective)?
>
>Tentatively, I would reject the first of these: no "internal state of
>affairs" exists independently of a social state of affairs.
>Chronologically, shared social states preceded self-consciousness by a
>million or more years. We _are_ our social relations, and those
>relations are prior to any internal state of affairs.
So there is no such think as a 'private' experience? The very idea of contingency indicates that we are unique beings - according to spacial and temporal coordinates. This, I thought, would be the most self-evident of all three claims. Certainly in a certain sense, we *are* our social relations, but individuals are not exhausted by these relations. It sounds like you are supporting some sort of Jungian determinism... although I suspect that this isn't what you intend. Do you not think that our experiences are unique - and that this uniqueness is not *totally* transparent in communication?
ken