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

Stressed Cheese wrote: If we're talking about them as two opposed terms, any and all complications come purely from the philosphical realm.

Stressed Cheese wrote: David_D wrote: Good point, an opinion is necessarily subjective  Yes. but can also possess a certain degree of objectivity No, it really can't. If I express an opinion ("Strawberry is my favorite fruit", "Tales from Topographic Oceans is a 10/10 album", "This boss battle is too hard"), what part of that is objective at all?

Stressed Cheese wrote: ....("Strawberry is my favorite fruit", "Tales from Topographic Oceans is a 10/10 album", "This boss battle is too hard"), ....

David_D wrote: Anyway, it's not just question of different languages but also of possible different epistemological positions.

Stressed Cheese wrote: ... Well, not really. This is just a case of not knowing the definition of certain words. I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm trying to lecture you, but there's a difference between having different points of view on something and just being wrong about how certain terms are used.

David_D wrote: Anyway, it's not just question of different languages but also of possible different epistemological positions. Smile

Hmm, I don't think that the confusion between "opinion" and "statement" depends on epistemological positions, but just on the common use of language... I've seen in other threads that you confer a lot of value to the notion of objectivity, but you seem to want to apply it to things (opinion, perception...) that are by definition subjective - anchored in the human mind, the subject.

Which leads me to the question, merely out of curiosity, David, since you started this philosophical topic: other than the internet pages you are referring to, have you dived into some philosophical literature to base your views on? The IEP article has an interesting bibliography at the end of which I would particularly recommend Richard Rorty's works Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. His work is more based in Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy tradition, which gives an interesting counterweight to some of the continental philosophers (and I already mentioned Nietsche, Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer, which betrays that I'm more into continental philosophy). Gadamer's Truth and Method is a seminal work in contemporary philosphy on some of the questions you raise here. Easier to read, more recent and somewhat in the line of Gadamer's work are Gianni Vattimo's writings, and I'm especially thinking of Beyond Interpretation and A Farewell to Truth.

The title of the latter might make you frown. It has a link to my quote of Nietsche earlier and his statements that "there are no facts, but only interpretations" and "the true world has in the end become a fable". This, I think, provoked rdtprog's reaction that implicitly (I think, but he may correct me if I'm wrong) referred to the relativism or even nihilism this may lead to. Somehow, Nietsche - and Kant to a lesser extent - is at the beginning of a paradigm shift in thinking about these kind of notions of objectivity, truth, knowledge... When Nietsche declared "God is dead" it wasn't so much a stance against religion (he was an atheist anyway, so God would never have existed and could thus not be dead either), but about the end of the metaphysical certitudes ("truths") that religion - and the positivist sciences - had provided sofar. He was not praising nothingness, but rather claiming that we would need a new frame of reference to build our truths on: Nietsche's nihilism was rather a questioning of the established values and, in extension, through Heidegger, Gadamer and Vattimo, the basis of considering the essence of truth as an interpretive one. To quote Vattimo on this, in The Transparent Society:

Gianni Vattimo wrote: It makes more sense to recognize that what we call the 'reality of the world' is the 'context' for the multiplicity of 'fablings' - and the task and significance of the human sciences lie precisely in thematizing the world in these terms

And in a continuation of that and as a reaction to a point moshkito expressed earlier:

Gianni Vattimo wrote: The images of the world we receive from the media and the human sciences, albeit on different levels, are not simply different interpretations of a 'reality' that is 'given' regardless, but rather constitute the very objectivity of the world.

Now, I understand that some might not accept that "truth" and "objective knowledge" don't have a clear monolithic - metaphysical - frame of reference (a dogma), but is rather grounded in this multiplicity of narratives about the world that we create ourselves and that this would be constitutive of "truth", and that some are afraid of relativism or even nihilism, but I think this is part of the challenges of our world today: to accept that knowledge and truth are human creations that have not just one single frame of reference but multiple ones, of our own creation. This is not about "nothingness" but about challenges of conceiving the world, and our "Being-in-the-world" (to use a Heideggerian notion) not through "objective knowledge" but by accepting that this knowledge - and thus the reality of our world - is an interpretive one.

Edited by suitkees - July 30 2023 at 13:53

^^The hard problem for I guess all or most of us is at the same time to realise how problematic any concept of objectivity and truth actually is, and still to not give all the fakers, snake oil salesmen, and conspiracy theorists a free pass by implying that everything somehow has the same validity.


Edited by Lewian - July 30 2023 at 14:26

Gerinski wrote: In my usage of the language (and remember I'm not a native English speaker), an opinion is usually subjective but not necessarily so, it can be rooted in an objective fact

It's funny how people get lost in definition coming from thinkers that don't talk about their own being but the views of other thinkers. You learn in school not how to think but how people are thinking.