SUBJECTIVITY VS OBJECTIVITY
I’ll try to answer this question as correctly and completely as I can.
**Subjectivity** refers to any change in state that is reducible to a difference in state that we can experience directly with our senses and faculties if we possess necessary experience.
Subjectively experienced:
– yes, I like vanilla more than chocolate. (demonstrable, not testable)
– yes, I can see/feel/hear that change. (testable)
– yes, I can feel it is cold in here. (reportable not testable)
– yes, I can agree that statement is true. (reportable)
– yes, that seems reasonable if I were in that circumstance. (reportable)
– no, that’s not believable. (reportable).
**Objectivity** refers to any change in state that is reducible to a difference in state that can be directly perceived or instrumentally perceived, and whether those instruments are physical or logical.
Objectively experienced:
– that volume will hold more or less water than this volume, (despite our perceptions)
– I took longer for this than for that (despite our perceptions)
– this is moving at the same velocity as that (despite our perceptions)
– the car caused the accident (despite our perceptions)
– the world is less violent today (despite our perceptions)
– that seems what a reasonable person would think (false, despite our perceptions).
**Neither** Subjectively or Objectively Experienceable – or knowable:
– Just about everything at very great or very small scales of time, space, velocity, size, and number.
– Another person’s (or creature’s) experiences and intuitions.
– ‘the Good’ (despite everyone’s intuition to the contrary).
**SCIENCE AND THE WEST**
The purpose of the scientific method is to demand that we perform due diligence against our natural limitations, whether they are biological, emotional, social, or intellectual. And it is the competition between the free association that our minds evolved to do so well, the clarity of our thoughts that we evolved through language and then reason, and the scientific method that we use to constrain our thoughts and observations, and measurements such that they are as free of ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, and deceit as they possibly can be.
The west never engaged in totalitarianism or conflation of other societies and we retained competition in all walks of life including the epistemological, such that only that which survives the best from competition might remain a truth, or a good.
This competition is what made the west evolve faster than the rest in the bronze, iron, and steel ages.
But we still wish we could escape that competition in all walks of life – despite it being the reason that we and the rest of the world, have been dragged out of ignorance, superstition, poverty, starvation, violence, and disease because of it.
What we intuit is often not a good thing.
Cheers
