Ken Wilber, a popular and respected transpersonal psychologist, in his Eye to Eye, 1 does a superior philosophical job of distinguishing empirical-analytical knowledge from the intersubjective knowledge of the humanistic disciplines. He uses Bonaventure's metaphor of three eyes: "the eye of flesh, by which we perceive the external world of space, time, and objects; the eye of reason, by which we attain a knowledge of philosophy, logic, and the mind itself; and the eye of contemplation, by which we rise to a knowledge of transcendent realities" (p. 3). Ignoring the third eye of contemplation for the moment, we can appreciate the distinction between objective knowledge of the external world with the model of public sensory observation to support the ideal of certain knowledge and the intersubjective realm of knowledge that is the domain of the humanistic disciplines that must deal with what is "in people's minds". I have long been concerned with this distinction and dissatisfied with philosophical attempts earlier in the century (logical positivism) to deny this distinction by reducing the intersubjective domain to logical and mathematical truths only. On this positivistic view, most of philosophy and the humanities were reduced to the "non-cognitive" category of the subjective.
In recent years, since the end of World War II, the development of ordinary language philosophy or linguistic analysis in England and Phenomenological and Hermeneutical philosophy on the continent have countered the philosophical popularity of reductionism. Whatever distinctions that can be expressed clearly in ordinary language are taken seriously in philosophical discourse. Clarity is sought in ordinary language rather than by translation into a narrow logical language. The phenomenologists have provided a variety of models of human interaction that offer new approaches in the humanistic disciplines and the social sciences. My point is that the present philosophical scene seems willing to welcome inquiry into a wide variety of problems without categorizing and rejecting issues as subjective or non-cognitiv~ in the manner of pre-World War II logical empiricism or positivism.