Subjectivity

Experience and judgement from a particular position - both a limitation on knowledge and the only place any of it happens.

Theme: Knowledge, truth and reason
Tradition: Western
Term fixed: 1846

In plain terms

Everything anyone knows is known from somewhere. That is not a complaint about human limitation; there is no other way for knowing to happen.

Subjectivity gets treated as the enemy of getting things right, and for some purposes it is - which is why measurement, blinding and instruments exist. But it is also where all the evidence enters, and some things cannot be stated without it. What a pain is like, what a decision cost, what it is to be the one who has to live with a result: these are not failures of objectivity, they are subjects that objectivity has no way to address.

So the interesting question is not how to eliminate it. It is which questions require it and which are corrupted by it, and telling those apart is harder than either side of the argument usually admits.

As a philosopher would put it

Two distinct senses run together. Metaphysical subjectivity is the fact that experience has a point of view - Nagel's what-it-is-like, and the reason consciousness resists third-personal description. Epistemic subjectivity is the dependence of a judgement on the judge, which is the sense in which a bias is subjective and a measurement is not.

Kierkegaard's subjectivity is truth belongs to neither and is routinely misread. His claim is that for ethical and religious matters, how a truth is held - with what commitment, at what risk - is part of whether the person has it at all, and that the objective mode is the wrong instrument rather than an insufficient one.

The standpoint tradition makes a third claim: that positions differ in what they make visible, and that some are epistemically better placed for some questions. That is not relativism, since it holds that some standpoints yield better knowledge - but it does mean that whose subjectivity is in play is an epistemic question and not merely a political one.

Where you meet it

Robert Hodgson, a Californian winemaker with a background in statistics, persuaded the California State Fair to let him analyse its wine judging. From 2005 he had the same wines served to the same judges three times in a single flight, from the same bottle, without their knowledge.

About one judge in ten was consistent to within a single medal grade across the three tastings. Most varied by four points or more on a twenty-point scale, and a wine that received a gold in one pour might get no medal in another. Judges who were consistent one year were rarely consistent the next.

Nobody suggested the judges were unskilled or dishonest; several were professionals of long standing. What the design isolated was the size of the subjective component in a judgement everyone treats as expert assessment - and it did so by the only method that can, which is repeating the identical stimulus and comparing the same person against themselves.

What is actually disputed

Whether subjectivity is a defect to be minimised.

The methodological answer is that it is: the history of measurement is the history of removing the observer, and the results speak for themselves. The counter-argument is that this works only for questions where the observer is irrelevant, and that applying the same standard elsewhere does not produce objectivity but produces a subject matter with the interesting part removed - which is Nagel's charge against physicalist accounts of consciousness.

The standpoint claim is separately contested. That different positions reveal different things is hard to dispute; that some positions are epistemically privileged is much stronger, and critics argue it either collapses into the trivial claim that people know their own situations or requires a criterion of privilege that cannot itself be standpoint-neutral. Neither side has produced an argument the other accepts.

Defined against

Objectivity Neither term has any content without the other, and the whole of modern epistemology is arranged along the line between them

Philosophers

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard Subjectivity as the mode in which some truths must be held
Edmund Husserl The first-person structure of experience described systematically
Jean-Paul Sartre Subjectivity as the inescapable starting point
Simone de Beauvoir The analysis of being made the object of another's view
Friedrich Nietzsche Perspective as unavoidable, and the denial of a view from nowhere

Works

Concluding Unscientific Postscript The claim, in its original and much-misquoted form
Being and Nothingness The for-itself and the look
The Second Sex Subjectivity denied and reclaimed
Phenomenology of Perception The perceiving subject as situated and bodily
On the Genealogy of Morals Perspectivism, stated most sharply

Schools

Existentialism Where subjectivity is the starting point
Phenomenology Where its structure is described
Nietzscheanism Where the view from nowhere is denied
German Idealism Where the subject constitutes the object
Lacanian Psychoanalysis Where the subject is an effect rather than an origin

Related concepts

Objectivity 1781 · Qualia 1929 · Consciousness 1641 · Self 1694 · Intersubjectivity 1913

Kierkegaard's claim that subjectivity is truth is a claim about the mode in which certain truths must be held, not a denial that facts are facts; it is misquoted more often than almost anything in philosophy.