I understand what you’re saying. When scientists are pressured to generate the results that their money givers paid them to generate, they become less reliant on the standard objective methods that science is normally based on. I suppose in a sense that makes them more subjectivists, but I wouldn’t say it means they believe their results are true because they believe in them or that they feel it’s true. If they believe in the results at all (in these kinds of situations, they may just lie with a guilty conscience), it would be based on a different set of subjective experiences than the standard scientific ones (pressure to deliver what they were paid to deliver rather than objective observations and measurements), but even the standard scientific methods are based on subjectivity as far as I’m concerned. Remember, I’m saying that there is a subset of subjective experiences which also count as objective. Scientific observation and measure are examples of these. They are subjective because they are grounded in experience, but objective because they are typically met with unanimous consensus among all other scientists who also make the same observations and measurements. I will agree that when corrupted by greed and pressure from money givers, scientists tend to become only subjective, but even then not necessarily in terms of their beliefs but rather their methods.
Sure they are, but that doesn’t address our disagreement (if there is one). My main point is that objectivity is a special case of subjectivity, not an opposite. Your main point seems to be that they are opposite, and that this is decided as a matter of language. We define subjectivity and objectivity as opposites. I agree that this is how we define these terms, but there are also instances of subjectivity and objectivity themselves (not just words and definitions), and when I look at these, I find they aren’t always opposite. I conclude that we’ve got the definitions wrong (at least insofar as we’re defining them in terms of opposites: i.e. objectivity is defined as the opposite of subjectivity). This can happen sometimes. Definitions aren’t always just a matter of how we choose to construct our language. They are sometimes a matter of things in the world, and experiences we can have. We sometimes draw our definitions from how we describe these things, how they feel to us, and what we understand about them. So I’m saying that I think we can question the conventional definitions of subjectivity and objectivity because we can have subjective and objective experiences, we can examine these experiences and draw conclusions about their nature, and thereby rethink our definitions. In my experience with subjectivity and objectivity, I find there are many example in which they overlap, so I disagree that they are opposite.
The object/subject relationship is different from the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity and different from the relationship between a subjectivist and an objectivist.
Right, so are we agreeing or disagreeing?