Subjectivity versus Objectivity

To say there is a reality is a tautology. To say there is anything is to say that thing exists, but reality by definition exists. To say there is not a reality is meaningless.

Reality is everything around you. The world of Star Wars is not reality.

I mean that even when you verify that the weather is warm by looking outside, feeling the air, etc., that is a subjective experience all the same (it comes from the senses) though it might also count as an objective experience (i.e. seeing a clear blue sky with the sun shining means that objectively there is a clear blue sky with the sun shining).

It means the existence of reality is not a matter of opinion or that it depends on one’s experience which can differ from someone else’s. If the existence of reality is objective, it means it exists for everybody whether they experience it that way or not.

You need to give me an example of a thing that is represented by the word “reality” and an example of a thing that is not represented by the word “reality”. If you cannot do this then your concept of reality is either too specific (i.e. all-exclusive) or too generic (i.e. all-inclusive.) If it’s all-exclusive, it means nothing. If it’s all-inclusive, it means anything.

In everyday life, we often say things such as “this is reality” and “this is not reality”. This implies that the category of reality, like every proper category, includes certain things and excludes others. What are the things it includes? They are assumptions that have the potential to influence our behavior. Everything else is not reality. This includes assumptions that do not have the potential to influence our behavior.

If the concept of reality is all-inclusive, which means, if the word “reality” refers to everything around us, then the world of Star Wars is also reality. The only reason we can say that the world of Star Wars is not reality is thanks to the fact that our concept of reality, in this particular use, is not all-inclusive i.e. it excludes certain things. These things are everything that is not an assumption that has the potential to influence our behavior.

How do you determine whether subjective experience counts as an objective experience?

A “thing”? There’s only one “thing” that’s represent by the word “reality,” and that’s reality. Perhaps you mean an example of a thing that is real–how 'bout the Statue of Liberty–but that hardly tells you what reality itself is. Or maybe you mean an example of what I think reality is (like the way a religious person might say: reality to me is all matter and energy, and also a transcendental, spiritual realm in which we find God). In that case, let me start by saying: to me, reality is fundamentally experience. All experience which we have, and all experience which we don’t have, constitutes the fabric of reality. ← That’s a start. There’s much therein to unpack.

Fair enough, so long as we understand that in order for me to give an example of something unreal, it has to be imaginary. For example, I can’t say “That chair is an example of something real but this table is an example of something unreal.”

I’m not sure I understand this. You’re saying that everything that is real is an assumption? What do you mean by assumption? And what allows for an assumption to influence behavior, and what disallows it to influence behavior.

Sure, if we define “reality” carefully–watching what gets included and what gets excluded–then the world of Star Wars is correctly recognized as belonging to the category of the unreal. But I don’t think saying “reality is everything around you” is all-inclusive in the way you mean. The world of Star Wars is not all around you. When I say “everything around you,” I’m already denoting a specific set of things and not others.

Through a lifetime of experiences and being in social groups. When you’re young, you might think of your favorite movie and think: that movie’s awesome! But then talking to others, you might find that some people agree with you but others don’t. You eventually learn that the awesomeness of the movie is something that only you feel (and others who agree with you) and not a fact of reality. Yet there are other things which everyone seems to agree on: the time of day, that the Sun exists, that 2 + 2 = 4, and you learn to call these objective.

Reality ≡ all that which really affects.
[size=50]… snicker…[/size] 8-[

Yes, a particular thing. Something that I can experience.
For example, a tree.

If you want to help someone understand the concept that you are using the best way to do it is to give them a number of examples that are labelled either as “this is an example of my concept” or as “this is NOT an example of my concept” and then let them make connections on their own.

That’s also how we train computers to differentiate between different classes of images e.g. those with a face and those without a face.

This is basically a style of learning that is known as constructionism. The good thing about it is that people do things on their own, i.e. you teach them how to be independent, so that when they face an unfamiliar situation they don’t freak out. The bad thing is that it requires a lot of experience and this means making a lot of mistakes.

If you cannot afford making mistakes then the alternative is instructionism which is about giving people instructions that they can follow independently from their experience. The good thing about this approach is that it’s easy to learn. All you have to do is understand language (i.e. what sort of action each one of the instructions refers to) and memorize the set of instructions on how to act that has been devised by someone else (usually someone who learned these things the hard way i.e. through laborious process of trial and error.) That’s what a theory is. It’s just a set of instructions on how to make predictions independently from your experience. All you have to do is fill the formula with input parameters and do the calculations. This is deductive reasoning. No need to be experienced. You can be clueless and still make accurate predictions. This is why theories, and instructions in general, are often used as a way to hide one’s inferiority. Anyways, the bad thing about instructionism is that it makes you brittle. The moment you leave your comfort zone, i.e. the part of reality the theory you are using is capable of predicting with sufficient degree of accuracy, you freak out. You crash in the most ungraceful way that is possible. Basically, if you simply follow other people’s instructions, you cannot adapt to new, previously unseen, situations. At best, you can go back to your instructor to give you new instructions.

All of this may seem irrelevant to you but it isn’t really. If you’re an instructionist – and by you I don’t mean specifically you – then it is not surprising that you place so much emphasis on language, words, definitions, etc. Because that’s where you get all of your knowledge from. Experience never enters your picture.

The more examples you give someone, the more accurate their understanding will be.
Categories are inductively inferred.

I am saying that the word “real” is a label that is attached to assumptions that have the potential to influence our behavior. This is a very modest understanding of the word “real”. When you cut out all of the pretenses, all of the references or pseudo-references to the world beyond our experience, that’s what you get. It’s just a plain and simple description of how the word “real” is used in everyday life.

You ask what do I mean by assumption.
An example would be any kind of prediction.
Whenever you say something will happen (which means you are predicting it will happen) you are assuming that that something will happen.
The purpose of predictions is to motivate us to take preventive measures.
Another example is the idea that humans evolved from monkeys.
This one isn’t a prediction because it is not an assumption regarding some future point in time. But it’s still an assumption. And the purpose of such an assumption is to help us predict the future.

Say you think there will be WW3 within next 10 years.
What does that mean?
It means you are predicting (or expecting) WW3 within next 10 years.
What does that mean in turn?
It means that you might prepare for it.
On the other hand, if you don’t think there will be WW3 within next 10 years, then what that means is that you won’t prepare for it.

I suppose that what you mean by “all experience we don’t have” is that the concept of reality has no temporal restrictions. For example, the concept of reality does not refer exclusively to my experience up to this point in time. It refers to my experience at any point in time which includes my experience at future points in time (i.e. future experience.) Otherwise, if you mean something beyond this, then you’re stepping into the territory of non-sense, I am afraid.

Let’s stick to the definition that makes sense. Reality refers to experience of any kind. Isn’t that all-inclusive? The world of Star Wars is also a form of experience.

But the world of Star Wars is all around me. In the form of movies, games, comics, novels, toys, etc. Are you saying that these things are not real?

The problem is resolved by realizing that the word “real” is attached to assumptions. In the case of Star Wars, the assumption that there is a physical world of Star Wars.

That is not what I exactly said. It is easier to be subjective than to be objective. So one may think that objects come out of subjects. But I am saying that the subject-object-relationship is less like the diachronic chicken-and-egg problem but more like the synchronic side-by-side-problem. If there “IS” something, then always according to a subject that refers to an object. Which of them was first is not decidable. The first one of our world was no subject, since: in order to know what a “subject” is, a second one is needed; but a second one is not only the beginning of subjectivity, but also the beginning of objectivity. So the subject and the object began at the same time. But the subject can always be one step ahead when it comes to the identification with the said first one before the second one. Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum” assumes that there is a one who thinks, that there is a conclusion and that there is being. If Descartes had been the said first one, then he would have known (in the way we do) nothing about thinking, conclsuion and being.

Epistemologically said, subjectivity and objectivity are oppositions. For example: the subject is the observing one, the object is the observed one. It is similar to the grammatic active/passive-opposition.

So you are saying: “inhaler 9, exhaler 1”?

:slight_smile:

I’m not actually using the concept “reality” all that differently from ordinary people. True, I’m a subjectivist, which means that I see reality differently than you, but if you want examples, I won’t give you anything different from what an ordinary person would give: bananas, shoes, tin cans, ear lobes, quasars, people, rock bands… these are all examples of things that are real. Santa Clause, Darth Vader, the Fly Spaghetti Monster, Harry Potter, Teddy Ruxpin… these are all examples of things that are unreal.

Ok.

True, but I have no idea how many examples or of what kind to give you before you inductively infer reality–unless, of course, you already know the category I’m trying to define, and you’re just seeing if I can make the connection with examples.

So an assumption is a prediction, or can lead to predictions. Sounds like you’re saying that everything we take to be real, we do so on the grounds of an assumption.

That’s not quite what I was saying, but it counts anyway. It’s more centered around the “we” in that phrase. By “we”, I mean humans. Other animals also have experiences. I was saying that reality is constituted by all experience that exists, not just those of humans.

No, it’s not all-inclusive. Thanks to the human imagination, we are able to conjure up ideas and images of things we take to be unreal, and at the same time, take the ideas and images themselves to be real (as mental things). The flying rhinoceros in the pink tutu I’m imagining is not real, but my mental image of it is. As I said earlier, I can give you a rough picture of what I take to be real and what I take to be unreal, but you’ll have to allow me to bring up examples of the imaginary or the fabricated in order to show you what’s in the “unreal” bucket, which is to say I have to bring up examples of the imaginary or the fabricated in order to avoid being all-inclusive in my definition of reality. The imagination helps a lot here–it’s a mental faculty that enables us to actually bring up such examples.

That’s not the “world” of Star Wars (except in a metaphorical way). You’re trying to have it both ways. You’re trying to say that the world of Star Wars is all around us (in the form of movies, toys, games, etc.) and at the same time can’t be all around us because that would make reality all-inclusive (I mean, if Star Wars counts as real, what doesn’t?).

Yes, if you really thought there is a physical world of Star Wars, you’d be making an assumption.

Reality is ALL of those real things together. And if you can’t experience it, well … then you can’t experience anything.

The point that I am trying to make is that the word “real” refers to a category of assumptions that have the potential to influence our behavior.

For example, when someone assumes that there is a physical world of Star Wars somewhere out there what they are doing is they are attaching the label “real” to the assumption that there is a physical world of Star Wars somewhere out there and assigning it a potential to influence their behavior. It does not matter what caused them to decide to categorize such an assumption as “real”. The fact that they did is all that matters.

What you’re doing here, it appears to me, is you’re trying to take the word “real” out of its context. You are trying to make it independent from human judgment. Which it is not. The word “real” is a label that is attached by humans to certain things (namely, assumptions) based on some set of rules. It is a word that refers to assumptions that have the potential to influence our behavior. And it is people who decide what assumptions have the potential to influence their behavior and what assumptions don’t. And they do so based on some set of rules. A lot of people do it by employing inductive reasoning. They look at the evidence they have, and then, based on it, they assign probability values to assumptions. But there are also people who do it based on their desires. An example would be a person who assumes he will become rich within next couple of years, not because his past experience suggests it, but merely because he wants it to happen. Every assumption has some sort of origin and based on that origin it can be categorized as either evidence-dependent or evidence-independent. The two terms translate to objective and subjective. That’s what objectivity and subjectivity really mean. They are epistemological concepts. They are not ontological concepts. In the same way that reductionism and atomism are epistemological (see Bertrand Russell’s logical atomism) rather than ontological (see Democritus and other varieties of physical atomism.)

I really think that there is a physical body behinid your Internet persona. That’s an assumption too.
Whatever hasn’t been experienced can only be assumed.

Reality is a reference to the category of assumptions that has the potential to affect one’s behavior. That’s what it is. Very simple. When you say “this is reality” what you are saying is “this assumption has the potential to influence my behavior”. Similarly, when you say “this is NOT reality” what you are saying is “this assumption has no potential to influence my behavior”. That’s all these words mean.

You are making a mistake in thinking that “what exists” is separate from “what one thinks exists”. It is not. You cannot say that something exists without it begin something that you think exists. It’s very difficult for people to accept that their opinions are merely their personal opinions and not an exact or an inexact reflection of some never-changing state of affairs. People don’t like fallibility. They cannot consider the possibility that what they are doing might turn out to be a mistake. They prefer to think that will keep doing what they are doing for all eternity.

Being corrupt and greedy makes you a subjectivist? Maybe it makes you biased, but being subjectivist just means you believe reality is based on subjective experience. If one becomes greedy and corrupt because they’re tempted by money, that just means they can’t resist temptation that well. Has nothing to do with how they see the world or what they believe.

I don’t follow. What do you mean by “the first one of our world” and “a second one is needed”? You mean in order for there to be a subject/object distinction, you need at least two beings? One to be the object being observed, and the second to be the observer?

I think this is true in order to experience an object, but not for something just to be an object. The first thing to exist (if we’re reverting to the diachronic chicken-and-egg issue) is an object (that’s what a “thing” is). Insofar as it experiences, it is also a subject. As an object, it has the potential to be observed, but it doesn’t have to be observed just to be an object. To be a subject, it just has to experience (which implies the experiencing of something, and that something could be said to be a second object).

Yes, that’s more or less how we define these terms, but that doesn’t mean an object can’t be a subject at the same time. Nor does it mean something that is objective can’t also be subjective.

It’s like the relationship between a client and a server. In the context of that relationship, there is the client and then there is the server. They are thought to be different and opposite. But the client could also be a server to someone else, and the server could also be a client to someone else.

I also think the object/subject relationship is subtley different from the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. ← Let’s not get confused here.

According to my understanding, scientists have to be objectivists; but when they become corrupt and greedy, so that they depend on their money givers, then they are no objectivists, but subjectivists; because they only say what their money givers want them to say. The methods are the other reason why scientists can and mostly do become subjectivists.

The words “subject” and “object” are linguistic (grammatic) and philosophic (epistemic) concepts.

The object/subject relationship is different from the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity and different from the relationship between a subjectivist and an objectivist.

Many scientists got fired because they had been objective.

Yes.

The enlightenment was the era with the most real or objective scientists. So, one can say: the farther away the enlightenment, the more subjective the scientists.

When science depends on money and on dictating methods, then science is almost always very much more subjective than objective, because there are almost always subjective interests behind the money and the methods. Only those money givers who have interests in science as an institution of objectivity are friends of science, of objectivity; and only those methods that do not depend on subjective interests are no dictating methods.

The only way I can interpret this is: the word “real” refers to the truths we believe in. I agree that reality encompasses truth, but it also encompasses objects. “Real” also refers to things we see right in front of us.

As I said before, I’m not interested in disputing what is real and what isn’t. I try not to deviate too much from common sense in my assessment of what’s real and what isn’t (which is why I told you the examples I’ll bring up for what’s real and what isn’t won’t be all that different from what the common man will bring up). But I will dispute what makes it real and what doesn’t. I don’t think this counts as taking the word “real” out of context, except in the sense that it changes what we mean by “real”, but still not in such a way that we change what we think is real.

All assumptions are about reality. Saying “I assume X is the case” is the same as saying “I assume X is the case in reality.” If I believe in God, then that’s an assumption that effects my behavior (I might prey more). If I don’t believe in God, then that’s an assumption that effects my behavior (I won’t prey). In both cases, my assumptions effect my behavior. There’s no such thing as an assumption that doesn’t effect behavior.

I’m a relativist, so I’m quite comfortable with the notion that what exists depends on one’s experience (sometimes on what one thinks), but we need to be more precise in our language here. When you say it’s a mistake to think “what exists” is separate from “what one thinks exists,” I can easily refute that by saying Santa Clause doesn’t exist even though a child may think he does exist. But if you were to say it’s a mistake to think what exists relative to a person is separate from what that person thinks exists, then I’ll agree. I’d say that Santa Clause doesn’t exist relative to me, but he does exist relative to the child. If I disagree with you about whether the world of Star Wars exists, it’s because I’m speaking on behalf of my own views (I don’t believe the Death Star exists, for example), even though I’d fully agree that relative to you the world of Star Wars exists (if that’s what you really believe). But it’s pretty standard in philosophy to speak on behalf of your own views, so even as a relativist, I won’t readily sanction everyone else’s view just because it’s technically true that those views are true relative to them. I’ll speak from my own views and allow the relativistic language remain implicit.

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.

Right, so are we agreeing or disagreeing?

We are much more agreeing than disagreeing.

I would say that I am more an objectivist than a subjectivist. And you have said that you are more a subjectivist than an objectivist.

On average, the subjectivist/objectivist distribution is not 50%/50% (as certain people probably expect), but perhaps about 80%/20%. Instead of 80%/20% one could also say 8/2, at least when it comes to the self-evaluation I posted 16 days ago:

Personal self evaluation in terms of the subject(ive) object(ive) configuration, seems as if it’s based on a functional derivative, where the values are never a constant.

At times an individual becomes more objective, where the referential route is either mitigated, or suppressed within situ.

At times when binary systems prevelant in a reduced set of circumstances\implying a relaxation of censure, or pressured bias, or loss infringement of societal conformation pressure, = then the shift toward more opiniated expression becomes possible.

So called objectivist or subjectivist persons can with the change of venue, develop an ever shifting self opinion on the scale. Self analysis can be the result of continuous change caused by multi functionally derived opinions based on some kind of averaging of both kinds of personal assessment.

This may work only in people with fairly stable and predictable functionally derived sets of opinions, far from approaching a stable automatic set.

How to judge or evaluate ones self where the values of stability, etc., are not consistent within parameters, carry an equivalent uncertainty about them. I would, therefore, not hazard to evaluate mysel in any case, prone more to the doubt which beset one who feels they are being objective, but have no commensurate information to judge by. In order to do that,one would, instead, have to rely on outsider sources of comparable objective criteria.

Bottom line is a variable matrix of fairly predictable self regard, but without the qualifying signification.

I would go further than merely indicate percentages between the two types of character types, it would seem that when such becomes improbable, is, when the difference between them is at a minimum.

In this case, it does not matter whether there is a variation or not, because we have to relate to likelihood and to average values anyway.

That would be “what Gib thinks exists” versus “what a child thinks exists”. That is not “what exists (independently from what anyone thinks)” versus “what a child thinks exists”. To think that “what Gib exists” is the same as “what exists (independently from what anyone thinks exists)” is to eliminate Gib from the equation i.e. it is to take things out of context.

It is true that what one man thinks exists is separate from what another man thinks exists. However, it is not true that what exists is separate from what someone thinks exists. For example, when you say “Santa Claus does not exist” what you are saying is “Gib thinks that Santa Claus does not exist”. We remove “I think” from the sentence for the sake of convenience (imagine if we had to preface each one of our statements with “I think” or “In my opinion…”) and not because the sentence reflects something that is independent from what we think.

That’s true.

Exactly. That’s the difference between relativism and egalitarianism. Relativism merely claims that truth is relative to one’s viewpoint (i.e. method of reasoning and experience.) Egalitarianism claims that anything goes i.e. that every possibility is equal to every other. Since possibilities are equiprobable, what you believe is insignificant. This means that other things, such as social cohesion, can take priority and dictate what you’re going to believe.

What’s the point of saying that what you see in front of you is real? Is there a situation in which it makes sense to say that what you see in front of you is not real?

It is assumptions that are either real or not. Consider the work of an illusionist. Whatever you see in front of you (e.g. a woman cut in half) is neither real nor unreal. Rather, it is your assumptions about what goes behind the scenes that are either real or unreal. For example, you might think that at the point in time when the woman appears to be cut in half that her torso is physically cut in half and that she is therefore dead. But if you were to peek behind the scenes you’d see that’s not the case.

Assumptions are about what we did not experience.
There are two types of assumptions: predictions and retrodictions.
Predictions are about what we have yet to experience.
Retrodictions are about what we haven’t experienced in the past (they are also about what we did experience in the past, but we can ignore that.)

Ultimately, the purpose of assumptions is to predict the future, so retrodictions are subservient to predictions.

You can use the word “reality” if you want to but it introduces vagueness. Why say that assumptions are about reality when you can simply and clearly say that assumptions are about what we did not experience?

Does that mean there is no such a thing as an event that does not have an effect?

What does it mean for an event to have an effect?
It means that you can predict some other event based on it, right?
If there is no such an event, then it has no effect.