My point here is that there are pragmatic and Kantian aspects of so-called objective knowledge. And for me, this article doesn't stand alone. It's part of a series I've written on epistemology. If the account doesn't seem reasonable or "sophisticated" to you, I guess you can stop reading these articles.

I'm not going to follow all these rabbit holes you've dug. But let's look at the relevance of goals to objectivity. You say having a goal doesn't affect the objective status of the knowledge that's supposed to help achieve the goal. But I identify objectivity with the species-wide goal of our domination of nature.

If you say there's no such goal that establishes the objective mindset, how would you explain what objectivity's supposed to be? A neutral meeting of the human mind with the natural facts? And how would you explain that neutrality?

I don't say goals change the facts. The facts are as they are, noumenally in something like Kant's terms. But we're talking about human knowledge of those facts. Objectivity is a strategy for uncovering facts. The facts aren't objective in their noumenal capacity, although scientific objectivity gives us a more eerie sense of the noumenon than does flagrant, idiosyncratic subjectivity.

For me, objectivity is a more polite way of speaking about objectification. We objectify nature to dominate it, carving it up in human-sized portions, portions that fit in our mind. Noumenally, the facts of nature aren't so carved up. They're interconnected and quite incomprehensible.

Again, that's just a pragmatic, neo-Kantian take on objectivity. If it's not for you, so be it. But your condescension is no substitute for a good argument.

While I'm here, I'll saying about Superman and intersubjectivity. The objective fact that Superman is from Krypton isn't really about the author's choice of labels, not even in a roundabout way. You're leaving out the suspension of disbelief, the imaginary evocation of fictional entities. We ignore the authorship and treat the fantasy world as though it were real, for the sake of our entertainment. That makes for the inversion I speak of in the article. What begins as fiction ends as quasi-objectivity (in a fan club, for example) via the suspension of disbelief that's integral to the non-philistine treatment of fiction.