Philosophy of Objective and Subjective

Philosophy of Objective and Subjective

If concepts divide into the objective and the subjective, it should be possible to conduct a survey of them and assign them accordingly. We should be able to group and rank them according to their objective or subjective character. This would be an exercise in conceptual analysis—not analysis into components but into general categories. It should be philosophically illuminating. Think of it as a philosophical project or program: discovering which concepts qualify as subjective and which objective (or possess these attributes to different degrees). How do we think of the phenomenon under consideration, objectively or subjectively? For example, how do we think of color and shape–do we think of shape objectively and color subjectively, or vice versa? What about identity and existence? Or the self. Or truth and knowledge. Do we think of these things from a specific point of view, or do we abstract away from this to obtain a more impersonal conception? Do the relevant concepts have a subjective structure or an objective structure? What kind of structures might these be? The obvious idea is that subjective concepts reflect our perceptual point of view, while objective concepts (if there are any) reflect more universal faculties (e.g., reason). Do we think of color perceptually, possibly by means of mental images, and shape by means of abstract geometry grasped by pure reason? Do we think of existence subjectively as what we perceive with our senses, or do we have a more abstract objective concept of existence that takes in numbers? Do we employ ourselves in our concepts or do we set ourselves aside and focus on the object? What is the architecture of our conceptual scheme—is it based on a foundation of subjective viewpoints or something more universal and absolute? Are we representational subjectivists or representational objectivists? And what about other animals and aliens from outer space?

We need some guidelines. I think we do well to begin with a subjectivist hypothesis: all concepts have a subjective ingredient or origin or history, even if they also possess a measure of objectivity. Concepts begin with the self and probably the perceiving self. They come from innate constitution plus experiential history. They are relative to the creature that has them. The simplest theory is that all concepts of the external world derive from sensory experience (empiricism) and hence embody a subjective perspective; look closely and you will always see perception lurking in the background. Let’s formulate this as the Special Theory of Subjective Relativity: all our concepts of empirical reality are based on perceptual subjectivity. Then we can say that all such concepts incorporate perceptual subjectivity (they are all relative to the subject’s specific mode of sensory experience). In the obvious case, they are visually based: seeing is the subjective mode under which we conceptualize things. We thus need to understand the subjectivity of seeing—how it works in the representation of objects. In what does the subjective character of seeing consist? The answer is not far to seek: vision involves fleeting and variable stimulations of the retina that are processed to produce a stable world of constant objects. It is the correction of the idiosyncrasies of the ceaselessly changing retinal image. It manufactures constancy from variability.[1] Thus, concepts incorporate this kind of corrective operation; they result from acts of proximal stimulus regulation in the direction of constancy. The variation of retinal stimulation has a phenomenological counterpart: an area of the retina corresponds to what is called “apparent size”. We need not go into the details; the essential point is that correction plays a central role in producing a picture of reality—correction of the proximal stimulus. What we can say, then, is that all concepts result from this kind of operation: subjective states that have been processed to produce something endowed with (a degree of) objectivity—as it might be, seeing a ball coming towards you and not changing in size. In the case of the concept of existence, then, the subjective dimension consists in perceptions of objects that result from operations on proximal stimulations or apparent qualities. In short, our concept of existence incorporates a perceptual process: for something to exist (for us) is for it to emerge from the chaos of sensory bombardment. This is what the Special Theory of Subjective Relativity (STSR) is telling us: it is offering a theory of the subjective make-up of the concept in question. This would be the beginning of an investigation into the subjective character of human concepts. Concepts are imbued with the kind of subjectivity characteristic of visual perception.

Methodologically, the program is like Chomsky’s program in linguistics, but where he sought to identify underlying syntactic structures, this program looks for underlying subjective structures (you could write a book called Subjective Structures). Concepts evidently have a subjective composition and we want to know precisely what that composition looks like. The current proposal is that it is perceptual in character, with the kind of structure present in visual perception (proximal stimulus, correction, constancy). The subjectivity is of a familiar pattern. But we must remember that there is also objectivity of a sort—the world does get represented more or less as it is, subject-independently. Concepts do apply to things outside the subject’s head. So, concepts have both a subjective dimension and an objective dimension; they are a mixture of the two, like a visual percept. The objective aspect is harder to analyze and I doubt that we know much about it at present (how does the mind manage to latch onto things outside of itself?). Still, we can recognize its existence, if not delineate its nature; concepts are hybrid entities, combining the subjective and the objective (like percepts). The program, then, has a dual goal: investigate the subjective and objective aspects of concepts—what they are, where they come from, how they evolved, etc. That is the basic structure of the inquiry; the details need to be filled in by future research.

It is beginning to look as if we don’t have a single concept corresponding to a given word but a duality of concepts: we conceive the same thing both subjectively and objectively. We can’t ask what is the concept of knowledge, say, because there are two concepts (possibly more): we have both a subjective concept and a (more) objective concept. One concept derives from our perceptual faculties, the other from somewhere else (language, reason?). We have experienced knowledge in ourselves and others and formed a conception of it based on that, but we also seem to have a concept of knowledge that extends beyond such episodes of acquaintance and whose origin is obscure. These paired concepts can pull in different directions, creating conceptual perplexity; they need not cohere. We have subjective conceptual analysis and objective conceptual analysis (consider space and time). The structure of our thinking is thus more complex than we supposed; our concepts are multi-leveled. It won’t be easy to excavate them, perhaps next to impossible. Maybe we can only scratch the surface. What methods can we use?  The standard approaches of cognitive science seem inadequate to the task; the computational model seems inappropriate. The idea of a language of thought is unhelpful. The cognitive mind seems intolerably complex when viewed through the subjective-objective lens. But the project looks well-defined.[2]

[1] Tyler Burge’s Origins of Objectivity contains a nice discussion of constancy directed towards philosophers, but any introductory textbook on perceptual psychology will fill you in.

[2] Part of the problem in this area is that the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity, though frequently used by philosophers, are commonly left at an intuitive level; we need to do some conceptual analysis on them.