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0 pointsbccdee6mo ago0 comments

Interesting example! What role would you say clothing and housing play in "objective" survival? Humans can survive in space, given a space suit or capsule, and a small contingent of humans live in Antarctica by way of warm clothes and an insulated habitat. If we eliminate protective clothing from consideration, however, most of North America isn't even survivable during the winter.

Certainly the line is drawn somewhere, and if we really nail down our definitions, we can get to a place where we all agree where we're drawing that line. But at that point, all we've really established is consensus, not true objectivity. Conversely, if we can't agree on a set of definitions, objectivity becomes impossible to establish.

I'd argue that all we really mean by "objectivity" is "a strong consensus among informed individuals," which is (a) ultimately still subjective, strictly speaking, and (b) subjectively determined, since reasonable minds can disagree about where we draw the line on what is considered objective. At the end of the day, consensus is the most we can establish. We can't access any truly objective, perspectiveless reality.

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fsflover6mo ago

glenstein6mo ago

I'm happy to grant that if you change my example to an entirely different one where someone is in a climate controlled environment, such that the temperatures I mentioned are not being experienced, it is true that people will survive in this different example, but to me that seems to miss the point.

I think our operative notions of objective reality in this context do not hinge on claims to absolute knowledge, but are about distinctions between things we already agree to be objective in the sense that people are already comfortable granting, e.g. how tides work, what safe ranges of blood pressure are, how physics and math work, what really happened on this day in history etc. Those are one kind of thing, and then on the other side you have questions of opinion or societal consensus.

So the canonical example would be, are opinions about the "fairness" of a tax policy more like a math problem with a right answer, or more like opinions about the "best" type of cheeseburger. The answer isn't that there's no such thing as the former category and therefore it's in the latter category by default.

The motivation, of course, is to say that some things fall into one category and some things fall into the other. I think for purposes of this conversation the philosophical move of taking this kind of Cartesian skeptic approach to ALL of objective reality, would throw out ALL of science, even the stuff that people would normally agree is real, when what it was supposed to do was draw a line down the middle to help us understand which things are the sciency things and which things are the opinions/values/societally negotiated things. Extreme skepticism in this context, instead of helping refine that distinction, bombs the village in order to save it. I even go so far as to argue that such an extreme skeptic view would make it impossible to establish that anything was even really socially negotiated in the first place, but maybe that's a can of worms for another time.

It's true that a kind of contextual embeddedness is characteristic of human experience. But I think it's deeply confused to think that such a thing is a counterpoint to objectivity, because the bones of context are made of objective things. The climate-controlled space capsule insulates humans against the coldness of space due to facts of the matter about the nature of temperature, the materials science that makes insulation possible, and biological facts of the matter about being a human being. Science is perfectly alert to this kind of contextual variability. Those values would be what they were even if social negotiation concluded otherwise.

What I really think is as follows: saying something isn't like science, means, in practical terms, that it's unrealistic to try and model it and come out with clear prescriptions. I think treating it like the upshot is supposed to be a wholesale denial of objective reality would count as a misdiagnosis. Sometimes the skies clear and we do know, for real, that (say) climate change is real, or that enforced sleep deprivation really is torture. Wholesale denial of objective reality leaves you with no theory as to why the skies can possibly clear in that way, or why people can be right about polarized topics.

Anywho I wouldn't make a response this long if you were not giving a very thoughtful gloss on the topic so kudos for imo one of the more nuanced takes in the whole thread.

bccdeeOP6mo ago

> if you change my example to an entirely different one

No, it's the same example. You said that, objectively, humans can only survive within certain temperature bands. I said that depends what you mean by "survive." Whether you can survive indefinitely at -15°C depends on whether you have a jacket. Granted, you said near absolute zero, not -15°C, but don't we also make "clothes" warm enough for outer space? Does that mean that the vacuum is as survivable as a New York winter? Kinda. We do take the availability of warm clothes for granted sometimes.

> The motivation, of course, is to say that some things fall into one category and some things fall into the other.

My point is that there are not two distinct categories here to begin with. When we call a particular belief objective, we're actually making a claim about what sort of consensus exists around the belief, whom it exists among, and how confident they are in it. That consensus depends upon a lot of things, including shared definitions and how the belief is expressed. There are degrees of objectivity, and different people will reasonably disagree about how objective a given belief is. When you say some things are simply objective and others simply aren't, you're glossing over all of that.

> facts of the matter and biological facts

When we talk about scientific "facts," we're talking about scientific consensus, which is the product of a vast social institution and an evolving body of scholarship which doesn't always agree with itself. If you'd said the Newtonian model was objective, Einstein would have proven you wrong. However, the nature of the institution of science means that physics is subjective in a very different way than how literary criticism is subjective. Physics makes reliable predictions, even when those predictions aren't 100% reliable or are based on imperfect assumptions (e.g. Newtonian physics). A binary either/or classification of "objective or subjective" leaves no room for nuances like these.

> I think for purposes of this conversation the philosophical move of taking this kind of Cartesian skeptic approach to ALL of objective reality, would throw out ALL of science, even the stuff that people would normally agree is real

I agree, and I don't think the full Cartesian approach gets us very far. However, I think if we simply lump all science together as "objective," it makes it very hard to make constructive critiques of science. Social science can make reliable prescriptions; at the same time, the replication crisis is a real thing that puts the reliability of those fields in jeopardy. At the same time, the existence of valid critiques like these doesn't mean that the consensus about (e.g.) climate change is not reliable.

> Anywho I wouldn't make a response this long if you were not giving a very thoughtful gloss on the topic

Thanks! That means a lot. Writing a good post takes a surprisingly long time.

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