Jester: âmy choice of words is better than your choice of words!â
Fool: âoh yeah? how would you describe this situation?â
Jester: âusing the same mental acrobatics I did before, of course!â
Fool: âyou rapscallion, that would imply x, y and z, which is sillyâ
Jester: âaha, but I have redefined x, y and z and therefor itâs not silly at allâ
Fool: âyou canât just redefine x, y and z, they have a meaning, itâs in the dictionaryâ
Jester: âI can and I have, if you were not such a slave to authority you would think for yourself and agree with me!â
Fool: âIâm going to think by myself, good day sir!â
This reminds me of the phrasing âbut x is only a theoryâ.
The layman uses the term âtheoryâ as conjecture, or at best âhypothesisâ. Of course in the scientific world, there are many steps to take before even considering something to qualify highly enough as âtheoryâ. Even a hypothesis isnât simply a guess, it has to be founded on something⌠but when the layman sees that term âtheoryâ in the scientific context, they take it in their own context and dismiss it easily thusly - when that is the last thing they ought to be doing.
âBut x is just subjectiveâ.
As above the layman understands âsubjectiveâ much the same as âarbitraryâ. One may dismiss the arbitrary on the grounds that it may just as validly be thought of differently, with no reason to pick one over the other. But of course, the philosopher isnât using the term âsubjectiveâ in this same way. Subjective merely implies the dependence of e.g. some phenomena on a person or consciousness for it to take the form that it takes - for instance qualia. Without human consciousness, what is the experience of yellowness but an electromagnetic wave frequency? All human knowledge, even, is human knowledge - requiring or at least involving a human to found it and take it to the point that passes for knowledge. Even if it is resolved that the inclusion of the human does not ultimately appear to be necessary for such a thing to be known - such as with âobjectiveâ knowledge that seems to happen regardless of there being anyone there to perceive it. In such a case we have subjective methodology to potentially result in objective conclusions through a dialectic interaction between human understanding and that which humans are understanding: a subject-object interaction no less. There is quite clearly a presence of both.
Isnât it then so convenient a toy for the layman or even the sophomore to play with: the phrase âbut thatâs just subjectiveâ - being either not wiling or able to appreciate the meaning of the word in its appropriate context?
Youâre not worthless, Ecmandu, but what you are resorting to here is truly facile and deserving of its treatment as such. You should be ashamed of resorting to such low depths, and correct yourself as quickly as possible.
Iâm guilty of no underhandedness, but what does criticizing someoneâs means of conveyance say about you? Well, I guess it depends whose microscope youâre under.
âYour argument about [personal, etc.] subjectivity, is on the meta-subjective level.â
At the meta-subjective level we bring out all the relevant tools of philosophy to extract what is objectivity from intersubjectivity.
Therefore our argument about subjectivity [or anything else] can be made objective when we rely [via intersubjective consensus] on philosophy-proper and its tools to infer whatever as objective.
Note scientific theories are claimed to be the most objective [relative] of all human knowledge at present, BUT note, according to Popper [as implied] scientific theories are at best, merely polished [via intersubjective consensus] subjective conjectures.
It is equivocation.
You are using different concepts of âsubjectivityâ in the same sense, i.e.
Subjective as in one personâs subjective judgment
Subjective as in many subjects arriving at intersubjective consensus
You are equivocating and conflating 1 and 2.
Objectivity is always reducible to subjectivity, i.e. intersubjectivity consensus by many subjects but not to the view of one subject [which is also subjective].
Why canât objects exist without subjects? How do subjects observe them if they donât exist?
Hereâs what subjectivists look like to objectivists:
Some of the best proofs we have are called inferential proofs.
The most popular one is the well ordered set of counting numbers, which we will never count all of, so how can we know that itâs a complete ordered set. We just do.
So, in comes the subjectivist, and says itâs not a well ordered set, prove it, count them all.
Objectivists understand that you can make this argument, but it is absurd.
Thatâs how a subjectivist looks to an objectivist
To me it sounds like this argument relies on distinguishing between the quale and the object, which would mean it hangs on the distinction between objects and experience of objects. Itâs not that I see realism as without problems. I just find it odd that there is a sudden defense of pure subjectivism where I wouldnât expect it: in you and Seredipper. Though I am more surprised but you.
I havenât followed the whole debate, but it seems to me that here you are focusing on knowledge whereas Serendipper is working at a deeper ontological level. There are no things beyond experience, he seems to be saying. You might be being Wittgensteinien and saying that we cannot speak of those things, or our knowledge always has subjective aspects. He seems to be going beyond that and making a quite different ontological claim. Not external reality, perception, fallible and filtered knowledge and beliefs of subjects, but something closer to pure idealism.
I mean, Iâm a pantheist, so I have little problem with his position. Iâm just surprised it seems to be his and, then, yours.
I get it, you are not ruling out degrees of justification. Fine, no surprise there. I get the âjust a theoryâ comparison.
But thatâs in the knowledge of what is out there. Serend is saying there is no out there.
If you take away all realism, this becomes a reasonable response. If one argues that our knowledge will always be via our experience, and so the knowledge is tailored to how we experience things, and hence our knowledge helps us to have certain specfic experiences and is not a perfect image of the ding an sichâŚpeachy. But once you get to what I think Serendipperâs position is, you are into idealism. Not aspects, but just subjectivity. There need be no connection between what is called knowledge and what it is about. In fact it is not about anything.
This is old old old to me. I started this as kid when I first heard of âsubject and objectâ then wondered what the heck it could possibility mean (without reading the ownerâs manual, mind you). I simply thought âWell, if subjectivity has a subject observing an object, then objectivity must be void the subject. What else could it possibly mean?â Then I was done with it and put it on a shelf until now. Iâm actually surprised there is so much debate and pretty much figured it was common knowledge contained in any philosophy textbook⌠like a definition. Iâll concede that conceptualizations of subjectivity and objectivity can be terribly difficult to get oneâs head around, but if I have any advantage itâs just that the idea has been rattling around my head for many years, which doesnât warrant any parades in my honor.
[/quote]
I am not sure what the Sâ> O means. It seems to me ideas about what objectivity is include the existence of subjects. That objectivist scientists would not claim they have something that completely eradicates a perceiver with a point of view, but that some things are more objective than others. And also that there is something out there that affects what subjects experience. Like your posts do. Or mine. Of course they are experiences via consciousness, but they limit those consciousnessesâ options for experiencing them.
And you just ignored my point, which is why I was intending on leaving this thread alone.
Letâs say that you build a closet, and every perceiving being drops dead instantly⌠the closet disappears?
There canât be objects without subjects?
What about object permanence? The stage that most people grow out of when theyâre 2 years old. If a self cleaning vacuum robot turns the corner, does it unexist?
The lack of object permanence is actually on the narcissistic scale of personality disorder
Some reasoning to consider after the following analogue: you place a VR headset on, and in front of you appears a closet. At least in the visual sense, the pattern of photons that hit your eyes and the subsequent electrical response that is interpreted by your brain is loaded into computer memory and displayed before you. When you switch off the headset, the closet code is dereferenced and the memory unallocated, ready to be turned into whatever else in future. If you put the headset back on, itâll appear right back in the same place thoughâŚ
My reasoning: I hope you appreciate that sensory experience occurs entirely in the mind - it appears to take âinputsâ commonly thought by the layman to be âfrom out thereâ, but the exact same experience can be achieved through brain manipulation without any âinputs from out thereâ at all - only internal tweaking. Dreaming a dream that feels so real at the time is an example of this. Without the mindâs involvement, there can be no experience of the closet or anything at all - itâs absolutely necessary to the process: the subject, that is, and any supposed objects are in practice optional.
There is no way to prove you are not âa brain in a vatâ or âin the matrixâ etc. where indeed the closet disappears as soon as every perceiving being drops dead - just like in my VR example.
Itâs certainly a lot easier, convenient, with extremely sufficient predictive utility, to simply disregard these examples and thought experiments as most people do: living as though such things remain even if all perceivers look away. But when you feel your equilibrioception alter, your muscles contract, such as those of your eyes, neck, face, causing the visual image to change, are you really moving (the layman understanding), or are the objects you perceive moving? An analogue to this is point is two bodies passing each other in space without any other reference point⌠which is moving? If any? Perhaps it is simply spacetime itself bending? Relativity throws all the layman absolutes out of the water - Iâm sorry but it really isnât as simple as your simplistic and common understanding is assuming.
Human beings [ homo sapiens ] have existed for I00 000 years while the Universe has existed for almost I4 billion years
It is therefore demonstrably true that objects have existed without subjects as they have for virtually all of known time
The Universe had to come into existence from its simplest point of origin before something as complex as human beings could be created
It therefore makes absolutely no sense physically or logically to presume that objects can only exist when they are perceived by subjects