What to think of "subject(ive)" and "object(ive)"?

I better tell that I've edited my OP to this:

"or 2 . objectivity - the concept of truth independent from individual subjectivity (bias caused by one's perception, emotions, 

Kees already alludes to this: The major problem with the concept of objectivity is that to the extent that it refers to anything independent of (individual) mind and perception, mind and perception can never secure objectivity, because it is out of their reach. And if individual minds can't access it, neither can society.

Philosophers and others have discussed objectivity a lot and have come up with ideas about objectivity that refer to something that mind and language can grasp more easily. All these are controversial though, none is without problems. Here are a few: You could call "objective" statements/facts/truths that can be arrived at on the basis of "logical necessities"/formalised logical rules such as mathematical truths (these usually are consequences of premises that themselves can be questioned). You could generally refer to "playing by the rules" within a formal system as "objectively correct", which would then be relative to the rules of course (note that in chess it is far more easy to see whether rules are violated than in football/soccer as chess itself is formalised). The positivists would acknowledge observables, i.e., statements that can be clearly checked and verified or falsified on the basis of observations; those verified would be the objective ones. The law system and other decision making institutions would have rules that are meant to secure impartiality; although you can ultimately not verify impartiality, often you can identify partiality and try to explicitly avoid it. There are also ideas that state that consensus or "consensus among experts" are a key ingredient of objectivity, but these accounts will usually have to deal with the uncomfortable fact that consensus will not normally comprise 100% of the people (or even the experts) and the hard problems are (a) who counts as qualified enough to take part and (b) how many deviants would you still allow in the group defined by (a)? Furthermore in thought experiments you can easily imagine a 100% consensus on something that "in reality" is wrong. That said, neither "logical necessity" nor verifiable observation nor impartiality nor rules can be upheld without overwhelming consensus regarding their basis (unless of course you'd accept an unquestionable absolute authority). 

A fun fact is that Daston and Gallison in their Objectivity book of 2007 trace the history of the concept and the change of its meanings in science, and they argue that, if I remember it correctly, around the 18th century the terms of objectivity and subjectivity switched meanings, i.e., before they were used closer to the opposite of what we'd think of them now. (This has to be understood within a framework of continuous gradual change of the use of the concept also at any other time.)

And Humberto Maturana once said, referring to the role of objectivity claims in social discourse: "A claim to objective knowledge is an absolute demand for obedience."

^ Neither the word "opinion" nor the word "judgement" are used in this IEP article, let alone the combination "objective judgement/opinion" because it would be contrary to what they're explaining. Objective opinions or judgements do not exist - it is in essence impossible.

Edit: I think I spelled "judgement" when searching for it, so it returned no results since in the article it is spelled "judgment", and it is quite extensively used. This doesn't change my point, though.

Hi,

I think one of my concerns with the media in general, when objectivity, all of a sudden, is almost impossible, since it ends up coming from a "subject" ... now we have the another one of those chicken and the egg routines ... and our discussion hits a wall.

I'm not even sure that a framework, or rules, are even applicable at that point. Many a philosopher over the last millennia have tried hard to define that only to end up getting us all even more confused, with terms and ideas that we can not even ... conceive, or think about. This is what makes the stories of Jesus of Nazareth, Buddha and others so difficult ... we can not see much in them that would seem to be truth ... mostly because the words do not translate properly. (Serious issue here, btw !!!! Translations are the worst drag of all!). And a bad translation does not a philosophy make! PERIOD on that one I think!

My thoughts, and I've posted this before, is how this is used HERE on the board and seeing folks that post their top 5, not spend a whole lot of time posting about other threads about different and new music ... a good example of this is two special threads ... Damo's and Andrea's. You would think some of these folks would listen to something else and have something to say ... but when you, or I don't have anything to say, isn't it mostly because we subjectively don't care?

Yes, there's still some logical inconsistence in IEP's definitions and points of view, but on the other hand, the subjective reality is not just some human imagination without connection to the objective reality - when speaking in general.

There's a couple of different ways to look at it. There's at least:

For 1), you can talk for ages about what different philosophers think, but in philosophy you can always keep talking in circles for ages, so while that can be a fun thought exercise, everyone would be able to come to completely different conclusions.

I am more interested in 2), the practical applications of the term and how we define it, and for that, it's very simple to identify a statement as either objective or subjective. A child can do it. Of course, there's always different usages/definitions of words, e.g., the Wikipedia article talks about journalistic objectivity. But at that point, you're simply talking about something else. If we're talking about them as two opposed terms, any and all complications come purely from the philosphical realm.

For 3), specifically on this forum, a lot of people mistakenly believe that a review/rating of an album can be objective (verrrrry technically speaking, you can use objective criteria to rate albums, e.g., you can rate an album a certain about of stars based on the amount of songs that have the letter A in the title). Well, maybe not "a lot" of people believe that, but it comes up here quite often.

Those things don't really have anything to do with objectivity/subjectivity. Objective statements can be wrong. I can say "I have blue eyes", and "I have brown eyes", and yet only one is true, while both are objective statements. And even if 100% of all living human beings would agree that pineapple is gross, that wouldn't make "pineapple is gross" an objective statement. So consensus has nothing to do with it. But like Saperlipopette pointed out in the other thread, unanimity isn't necessary for consensus anyway.

^There's some vagueness whether or not true objectivity can exist (again, a philosophical topic more than anything else), but when it comes to assigning either the label objective or subjective to any thought or statement a human can come up with, there's not much wiggle room. Some people just use the terms in the wrong way. A lot of debate just comes down to that. 

I would love to hear some examples. So far I haven't really found anything that chances my mind, but I'm interested in what you are talking about exactly.