Re:Ask HN: Is Everything Subjective?
by lcrc123 on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @09:44AM
(#20695477)
I would say yes. Everything is not black and white and many things can be interpreted differently. That being said, I'm sure there are some arguments that could be made against this claim that not everything is subjective just to play devils advocate.
Mailer describes what he observed when he participated in anti-war march. In some sense this is completely subjective, but it is more accurate in that he is describing what he experienced first hand as opposed to surmising things based on what other people said.
In the second half of the book he writes the kind of story which you would see in the newspaper which fits the standard of "objective journalism" but because he is reading what people wrote about what other people said, he is having to make many inferences, some of which would be necessarily wrong.
When somebody says there is an objective way to view a social situation they are trying to gaslight you.
For instance, Ayn Rand subjectively experienced great pain when the Bolsheviks killed her family and took their stuff; she named the philosophy based on that experience "objectivism" to negate the voices of people who disagree with her.
"Strict constructionists" often oppose themselves to "postmodernism" but their postmodernism is one of the most toxic around. You just can't say "the founding fathers" meant exactly one thing when they wrote the constitution because it wasn't "the founding father" but rather a compromise between different people who meant different things.
Generally the word "real" is a bad smell, because it is often used to reify something which is fake. See the concept of "hyperreal".
There's also the cases explained here:
http://virgil.azwestern.edu/~dag/lol/TwoPlusTwo.html
> "Humans require oxygen to breathe"
"breathe" is defined as:
> To inhale and exhale air using the lungs.
You can do that without oxygen. You might not live very long, but you can breathe.
Statements about mathematics can be objectively true.
I would point to this book as an illustration of the limits of statements about human reality:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Armies_of_the_Night
Mailer describes what he observed when he participated in anti-war march. In some sense this is completely subjective, but it is more accurate in that he is describing what he experienced first hand as opposed to surmising things based on what other people said.
In the second half of the book he writes the kind of story which you would see in the newspaper which fits the standard of "objective journalism" but because he is reading what people wrote about what other people said, he is having to make many inferences, some of which would be necessarily wrong.
When somebody says there is an objective way to view a social situation they are trying to gaslight you.
For instance, Ayn Rand subjectively experienced great pain when the Bolsheviks killed her family and took their stuff; she named the philosophy based on that experience "objectivism" to negate the voices of people who disagree with her.
"Strict constructionists" often oppose themselves to "postmodernism" but their postmodernism is one of the most toxic around. You just can't say "the founding fathers" meant exactly one thing when they wrote the constitution because it wasn't "the founding father" but rather a compromise between different people who meant different things.
Generally the word "real" is a bad smell, because it is often used to reify something which is fake. See the concept of "hyperreal".