A theme on The Amateur Logician YouTube channel deals with contrasting “objectivism” and “subjectivism.”
Roughly, the “subjective” is someone’s private individual realm of feelings and thoughts. That’s why we often claim that taste is “subjective.” I like ice cream, though you might hate it.
And, roughly, the “objective” is what is publicly true for all individuals. It is an “objective” truth that one plus one equals two. Nobody can change that truth; it is independent of my subjective thoughts and your subjective thoughts.
If humans didn’t exist, one plus one would still equal two. It’s also an objective fact that the Moon orbits the Earth. That’s true today and it was true before any human existed.
When trying to obtain truth, we should be “objective.”
We can think of having knowledge, at least as a general rule, as the merging between the “objective” and “subjective.”
Yet, in this above video, it is very briefly mentioned that we can, in some contexts, consider evidence from the subjective realm. What’s the evidence that I’m happy or sad?
For me, it is how I personally (subjectively) feel.
Someone else can, perhaps, figure out that I’m happy or sad by various signs or by trusting in me once I tell them what I feel.
But are there more areas where good evidence comes from the subjective realm? What about self-reflection on the nature of what it means to act and choose? Or what about self-evident propositions? Are some self-evident propositions true because it is “subjectively” obvious they are true (such as the Law of Contradiction)? Maybe we have innate knowledge?
Or consider spiritual experiences. If someone has one, he cannot just dismiss it. He has to ponder it. He has to consider if it truly means something or not. Maybe the experience was so strong that he thinks it provides him with evidence over the spiritual or theological realms. Could it be good evidence? Maybe, maybe not.
While I was going through the online resources for the textbook The Art of Reasoning by David Kelley and Debby Hutchins, it happened by happy coincidence that we got to work on a problem dealing with the Fallacy of Subjectivism.
You’ll see that fallacy in the above video.
