Objective and subjective

This is a topic where we can discuss what we mean by “objective” and by “subjective”.  It is not tied to anything specific.  We don’t have to reach a consensus.

Here are a couple of examples to illustrate the issues:

  1. Is mathematics objective or subjective?  On the one hand, it is mostly a mental construct, so in some views that would make it subjective.  On the other hand, there is very strong agreement between mathematicians, and that seems to suggest that it is about as objective as anything could be.
  2. If we assume Berkeley’s idealism (the world is nothing more than a mental construct derived from our perceptions), would that imply that everything is subjective and nothing is objective?  Or, since we seem to all refer to the same things (cats, trees, etc) should we say that those are objective even if only mental constructs.

 

21 thoughts on “Objective and subjective

  1. My view is that “objective” refers to anything which is not of the subject. It is that which continues to exist regardless of whether or not a conscious agent such as ourselves has any awareness of it. The fact that mental entities like mathematics or morality might be shared by a number of conscious agents does not make them any the less subjective. If some cosmic catastrophe wiped us out of existence, not just killed us but vaporized any trace of us, our mathematics and our morality would be gone with us.

    My difficulty with this position is that, similar to Berkeley, I hold that the world we experience around us is a mental construct, an imperfect model of what is really out there, based on the limited information supplied by our senses. On this view, the red car I can see in the parking-lot outside my window is as much a mental construct as mathematics or morality. I assume that the difference is that the car continues to exist whether or not I am looking at it but proving it would be a different matter, Dr Johnson’s famous refutation notwithstanding.

  2. I wouldn’t take mathematics to be subjective, or a mental construct, at all. By which I mean: the validity of a theorem doesn’t depend on wanting it to be true, or believing that it’s true. As you say, it’s as objective as anything can be. And the distinctions we’re drawing should be distinctions that we can use. So I’m quite happy to say that mathematics is objective, and my attitude towards my cats is subjective, and that delimits the range of options for human concerns.

    Berkeley is a tricky matter (ha ha) because he has to bring God into the metaphysics in order to avoid solipsism. In a Berkeleyian world, we ‘d have to say that everything is mental, but not everything is subjective, because the divine mind provides an objective constraint on human minds.

  3. Seversky: My difficulty with this position is that, similar to Berkeley, I hold that the world we experience around us is a mental construct, an imperfect model of what is really out there, based on the limited information supplied by our senses. On this view, the red car I can see in the parking-lot outside my window is as much a mental construct as mathematics or morality.

    Thanks.

    I don’t agree with Berkeley, but in some sense I do agree that the red car is a mental construct. And, sure, I realize that sounds contradictory. I might comment more on that at a later time.

    If everything is subjective and nothing is objective, then the words “objective” and “subjective” both lose their meaning, in the sense that they are not making useful distinctions. So, my take is that “objective”, in effect, refers to a consensus derived from the subjective.

    I have come to this view from studying cognition. Roughly speaking, that we have subjective experience is biological. As we develop and learn about the world, we manage to represent the world as subjective experience, and our view of “objective” derives from that.

    Some people, perhaps including Chalmers, want an objective account of the subjective. But if the relation of subjective and objective is as I suggest, then I think that’s impossible. That still allows us to investigate how subjective experience arises, and how we use it to represent the external world.

  4. It doesn’t have to be black and white. We bring subjectivity into our explorations, but that doesn’t mean that what we’re exploring isn’t objective.

    What we perceive and interpret is a mix of each.

  5. I’d like to play with these ideas by considering a quote from the science-fiction TV series “Battlestar Galactica”

    “I don’t want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to – I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly because I have to – I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I’m a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I’m trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way! ” (Brother Cavill, “Battlestar Galactica”)

    We don’t experience gamma rays, X-rays, or dark matter with our senses. We experience a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic field, and of the pitch of sound waves, and unlike some animals, we don’t perceive electrical fields or thermal images. Does that mean that what we do experience isn’t real? I don’t see why.

    It’s common to think of our perceptual and conceptual capacities as the “lens” through which reality is filtered, but I wonder if the better metaphor is that they define the size of the “aperture” and not the “lens”. (Science and technology allow us to play with the f-stops?)

    Carl

  6. On the other hand, there is very strong agreement between mathematicians, and that seems to suggest that it is about as objective as anything could be.

    Agreement might follow from objectivity but it’s not sufficient to establish it.

    We can all agree that Darth Vader is Luke’s father but outside the Star Wars universe, and by extension outside the minds of humans, it has no basis in fact.

    Similarly the validity of mathematical statements may be self evident to everyone but all that tells us is something about the human mind, not whether mathematical statements have any objective basis in reality.

  7. We can define objectivity methodologically. Objectivity is a complex social process that seeks to *minimize* the role of subjectivity through such means as communication, record-keeping, instrumentation, multiple observers, multiple methodologies, et cetera. There is always an element of the subjective in even the most careful scientific enterprise.

    As for mathematics, given the axioms, the proofs are objective as they are verifiable.

  8. I think it’s much more fruitful to think of objective/subjective as an epistemological distinction rather than a metaphysical one. The notion that objectivity has to do with mind-independence or “out-thereness” seems to me to be quite vague and of dubious value. Rather, I think knowledge is objective if it is acquired using processes of justification that are communal, in the sense that the justification can in principle be checked and acknowledged by all members of the relevant community.

    Whether or not someone is off-side in soccer is an objective fact, because there is a set of rules accepted as authoritative by virtually everyone seriously engaged in the game, and these rules can be used to decide (and convince others) whether a person is off-side. The objectivity of mathematics is similar. The relevant community has honed a set of tools that can be used by anyone engaged in the enterprise to check whether or not a particular claim is adequately justified. My preference for dark chocoloate over milk chocolate is subjective because it is not open to public justification in the same way. There is no set of tools I can use to more or less definitively convince a reasonable person that dark chocolate is better than milk chocolate.

  9. Sotto Voce: Rather, I think knowledge is objective if it is acquired using processes of justification that are communal, in the sense that the justification can in principle be checked and acknowledged by all members of the relevant community.

    As I see it, that would make religion objective and science subjective.

    It seems to me that religion does accept communal justification, and could not exist without that. But most scientists are skeptics and as such they are not satisfied with communal justification.

  10. Always interesting and fun, this. How about: to change one’s mind about something subjective is reasonable, to do so about something objective is absurd?

    Would that help?

    fG

  11. Or, in a slightly different way: is it possible to objectively classify stuff as subjective or objective?

    fG

  12. Neil, thanks for posting this. Hope to get to it later! It’s important. Well, keeps tripping me up anyway.

  13. Neil Rickert: As I see it, that would make religion objective and science subjective.

    It seems to me that religion does accept communal justification, and could not exist without that.But most scientists are skeptics and as such they are not satisfied with communal justification.

    When I said “communal justification”, I meant there is a set of procedures that people recognize as authoritative tools for justification. This certainly seems to be the case in science. If I make the claim that a particular drug cures depression, then the scientific community would be of more or less one mind on what I should do to confirm my claim. I must obtain statistically significant benefits over the placebo in a sufficiently powerful randomized controlled trial.

    Now of course, it may be the case that some scientists will not be happy to trust that I have employed the tools honestly and may want to conduct the study themselves to make sure. This sort of skepticism is not incompatible with objectivity as I define it. The “communal” aspect I was talking about is that the community as a whole accepts that if the methodology is properly followed, it confers support on the claim, and that the community as a whole can check whether the claim is supported in this way. Of course, conferring support on a claim does not mean definitively establishing a claim as true. Justification does not have to be beyond a reasonable doubt anywhere but in a courtroom.

  14. Neil Rickert: As I see it, that would make religion objective and science subjective.

    It seems to me that religion does accept communal justification, and could not exist without that.But most scientists are skeptics and as such they are not satisfied with communal justification.

    As for the objectivity of religion, I think in some sense objectivity is relative. We must all make a decision to commit ourselves to certain discourses of justification. We cannot commit to them all. You can’t be playing rugby and Aussie rules football at the same time. So at bottom I think there is a pragmatic decision, one that reflects one’s fundamental values and commitments.

    Once one is committed to a certain set of norms of justification, though, it is illegitimate to simultaneously commit oneself to another set of norms whose output disagrees with the former. For instance, I think one cannot be fully engaged in both the community of scientific justification and the community of literalist scriptural justification. What the tools of scientific justification tell us straightforwardly conflict with what scripture says. One set of norms must be jettisoned if one is to maintain intellectual integrity.

    Now if someone chooses to completely abandon the tools of scientific justification and fully commit themselves to scriptural justification, I have no quarrel with them. Quarrel would be pointless, since we would not have a common basis of agreed norms on which to conduct it. Such a person is playing a completely different game from me, a game that I regard as mostly pointless and unfulfilling.

    But this is not how it works with a vast majority of believers. Most of them wish to commit to both the discourses of scientific and scriptural justification. Here they are open to criticism, since I can now use the norms of scientific justification to undermine their commitment to scriptural justification. There is something problematic with saying both science and scripture give us access to objective knowledge, and since most people agree that science does, they must abandon the claim that scripture does.

  15. I agree that the concepts break down as we drill down, but I always use the general idea that perception is objective and value is subjective.

  16. I’m posting something from the “materialism and morality” thread, where it didn’t receive much attention — maybe this is a better place for it — we’ll see —

    The key idea is this: norms are social. They are not private, mental entities (as feelings and desires are), and they are not part of the basic Furniture of the Cosmos (as studied by the natural sciences). By norms I mean the standards and criteria employed for assessing theories, theorems, and moral beliefs. There are different kinds of norms: epistemic norms, ethical norms, and maybe others. (But those are the two that stand out: epistemic norms, or norms of belief, and ethical norms, or norms of conduct.)

    On this view, norms are authoritative, but it’s a always-in-principle, frequently-in-practice provisional authority. There aren’t any unchallengeable norms. Norms can be, are, and should be challenged in all sorts of ways — in the case of ethical norms, often in response to various kinds of suffering, of coming to see suffering beings, esp. suffering human beings, as members of the moral community from which they had previously been excluded.

    So, moral principles have objective validity insofar as their validity does not depend on the beliefs or desires of any particular moral agent. They are “objectively binding”, in the sense that if one is a moral agent, one ought to acknowledge them. Here an analogy might help.

    We have no problem (it seems) regarding scientific theories as objective, in that the acceptability of a scientific theory doesn’t depend on the beliefs or desire of any particular scientist. The acceptability of a theory depends on whether the theory best accounts for the available data, not on whether any particular scientist wants it to be true or believes it to be true. Analogously, moral principles are objective in that their validity doesn’t depend on the beliefs or desires of any particular agent (or any particular group of agents).

    The dis-analogy, of course, is that in scientific theories, the question is how well the models fit the data, how rigorously the data have been collected, and so on. We don’t have that kind of evidence to go on with respect to moral principles. But we do have lots of experience about what contributes to or diminishes human flourishing and well-being, and we also have empathy and imagination for testing our moral principles against our experiences as moral beings in the world.

    Central to this view is the idea that “objective” is not “absolute”. Here too I think the parallel with scientific theories is helpful. We have no problem with the idea that scientific theories are objective; if someone refuses to accept a theory that passes muster by the community of inquirers, we usually don’t hesitate to say that he or she is being irrational. Likewise, moral principles can be in principle (and in practice) revisable in light of experience. There are many cases, past and present, that can be understood as revising or rejecting moral principles previously held. For example, the way that we made personhood a central moral concept, rather than religious or ethnic identity.

    The revisability of norms accommodates both scientific and moral progress. What counts as “good science” is subject to change, and so too what counts as “ethical conduct”. Aristotle saw nothing unethical about slavery. That’s not our view today, thank goodness. No doubt our descendents, if there are any, will wonder at how we could have been so blind as to the suffering caused by the institutions we take for granted, just as we wonder at Aristotle’s blindness. For that matter, what counts as “a good argument” is subject to change. If one translates many of Aristotle’s arguments into symbolic logic, several errors are easy to see.

    In short, my suggestion is that “absolute or arbitrary?” is a false dichotomy, and that just as we can happily say that scientific theories are objective but not absolute, so too we can hold our moral principles in the same way. But it does follow from this that people can be mistaken about moral principles, or what follows from them, just as we can about theories. If someone maintains that racism or sexism is morally acceptable, I have no qualms about saying that they’re mistaken.

    What there is not, on this account, is anything deeper than the norms themselves which grounds them or justifies them. There’s nothing necessary about any particular set of norms (the contingency of cultural-political history) and there’s nothing necessary about normativity, either (the contingency of evolutionary history).

    As to where norms came from, I suspect that the answer to that question lies in an account of the transition from primate communication systems to hominid proto-languages and human languages. But giving an account of how normativity emerges from nature, or how infants are initiated into normativity through socialization and acculturation, is not grounding those norms on something deeper than themselves.

    Best,
    Carl

  17. Thanks for all the comments (and keep them coming). This has been a good discussion.

    My conclusion (from the discussion), is that while we tend to think of the subjective/objective distinction as clear, it isn’t actually as clear as it looks. What seems obvious from the discussion, is that people disagree on how to characterize subjective and objective. But they would probably agree on most particular instances.

    Then there’s the question of to what we apply the distinction. Do we apply it to facts, to concept, to objects?

    I rather like Carl’s idea of connecting it with norms. And roughly speaking, that suggest that “objective” refers to what we can talk about, while “subjective” refers to what we cannot talk about.

    As a mathematician, I’ll try to relate that to mathematics. What we say about numbers, as in books, research papers, etc, is thus objective. But how we think about the nature of numbers is subjective (and probably unimportant). For example, I tend toward a fictionalist view (numbers are useful fictions), but I can still discuss math with Platonists. The distinction between fictionalism and Platonism doesn’t show up in the discussions.

  18. I think of numbers as fictions also. But the short operational definition I use is the same for math. The values are subjective. You decide what way you want to slice the number line and what axioms you are going to use. But the procedures follow steps which are perceived, either in the imagination or on paper or whatever. The outcomes are objective.

  19. Thanks, Neil. I hope it helps.

    One nice point, made by Wilfrid Sellars, Donald Davidson, and Richard Rorty, is that ‘the subjective’ isn’t “what we can’t talk about”, but rather than the norms are different. When I report on my own mental states (“That hurts!” or “I’m depressed!”), other people accept my own authority about those states. No one would say, “how do you know?” or “no you’re not”. Whereas when it comes to assertions about publicly observable phenomena (“There are more pandas in zoos than living in the wild”), the question, “how do you know?” is not always inappropriate. (Whether it actually is appropriate or not depends on context.)

    I too tend towards nominalism about universals and abstract objects, and certainly debates about the metaphysics of mathematics aren’t centrally located in most debates within mathematics. Although, they do play an interesting marginal role — for example, if I understand the issues correctly, an intuitionist will not accept certain proof-techniques that a realist would accept. But maybe I’m conflating metaphysics and epistemology (as usual).

    Carl

  20. It seems to me that to design is to objectify the subjective. But its often true that designers deliberately act to subjectify the objective. Confusing, huh?

  21. Does God recognise a distinction between the objective and the subjective … ? (cue Twilight Zone: doo-doo-doo-doo doo-doo-doo-doo).

    I don’t think you can just draw the subjective/objective distinction between that-perceived-by-minds and the rest, since the existence of minds – including one’s own – is an objective fact (by ‘fact’ I don’t mean ‘necessarily true’, I mean a state-of-affairs that could either be true or not independently of any particular observer’s perceptions of it). I have the subjective experience that leads me to conclude that there is an objective fact: me experiencing those things. I set some store by objective reality, because however imperfect my perceptions, I am able to drive a car at 70mph and not hit anything. If I shut down the movie my eyeballs snd brain are playing me, I crash.

    As a ‘sciencey’, non-religious kind of guy, I guess my approach would be to mentally reverse the evolutionary process, and determine what remains after stripping out each layer – would the thing still exist without a particular x that manifests it?

    Is there an objective fact of ‘funny’? These apes gather in large rooms and listen while someone says things that, periodically, cause them to open their mouths and utter an odd sound, a bit like “hahahahaha”. They say they do that because the chap on stage said something ‘funny’. Clearly, if you strip the world of these apes, there is nowhere else for ‘funny’ to reside. Yet ‘funny’ is objective, because the comic knows that something that, subjectively, he finds ‘funny’ can be communicated to others with a pretty fair guarantee that they will too. He can appeal to the objective fact of a subjective sense of ‘funny’ that exists in other minds.

    But there was no ‘funny’ in the universe before apes started finding things amusing. Nor, I contend, was there morality, before there was anything capable of moral sense. If God came before anything else, it is not clear why he would have a moral opinion regarding the activities of things that have yet to be created – on such matters as sex, or stealing, or cussing, for instance…

    Mathematics has a bit more rigour than ‘funny’, because it deals with more reliable regularities. But it is just a language, so without those minds that languages bounce around, mathematics would go the way of ‘funny’. But the regularities that mathematics describes would remain. There would still be an equivalence between matter and energy, related – bizarrely – by the speed of light. When boy dinosaur met girl dinosaur, there would still be two of them.

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