First of all, a S-truth is only sufficient for a corresponding O-truth, which also means that not O-truth necessarily implies not S-truth. A subjective proposition like "the shirt seems red to me" depends on the objective truth of a conscious event occurring in the individual. In other words, understanding of subjective beliefs are reducible to relations of individuals to his or her objective context. For instance, the proposition that "I saw a good movie today" can be analyzed as denoting a specific individual having a conscious event simultaneous with date of the proposition's utterance.
The second issue with which this reduction deals is passions and opinions like the goodness of the movie. How one as a particular feels toward another thing often leads to the assumption that there is a private subjective realm where these relations are true for the unique individual. Kierkegaard specifically brings up the aspect of the subjective as being about the "how" rather than the "what" (Kierkegaard 20). When an individual says "that movie is good," the objective truths that contextualize that statement are the individual's brain state and how that translates into a natural preference to one or more properties of the movie's contents and appearance. This reduces the "how" to the "what".
Kierkegaard, Soren. "Truth is Subjectivity." Existentialism. Edited by Robert C. Solomon. Oxford University Press, New York: 2005.
Mellor, D. H. "McTaggart, Fixity, and Coming True." Metaphysics. Edited by Ronald C. Hoy and L. Nathan Oaklander. Wadsworth, Canada: 2005.
I think that this perspective completely ignores the defining characteristic of objective truth: it is universal. It applies to everyone.
ReplyDeleteYou can break down individual views and opinions ("that movie is good") to their most basic level, i.e. simple chemical reactions in the brain, but doing so does not show the disparity between others' views. That is the purpose of subjective truth: it represents a specific personal perspective. While opinions are based on the occurrence of "conscious events" and one's "brain state," such terms do not provide the whole picture, and thus are not the whole truth. They do not fully describe how someone felt when he watched that movie, but merely acknowledge the fact that he watched it, was mentally stimulated by it, and formed an opinion about it.
Sure, the existence of subjective truth is unnecessary, but only if you never want to qualify anything.
The point is not to say we cannot make subjective propositions like "life is good" but rather that reality is objective and that all subjective claims are rooted in the objective. It is to break the barrier between the two realms of objective and subjective and give an hierarchy of dependency. I also have passionless thought ethic so sometimes I really do not care about how people feel as individuals when it comes to the truth.
ReplyDeleteFor clarification for those who are not familiar with D. H. Mellor, a portion of his paper that Eric references has to do with the fact that certain statements about time which refer to a past, present, or future (like, "Tomorrow, I'm seeing a friend.") still have meaning even though our notions of past, present, and future may not exist (which, of course, is a complex metaphysical issue that we're going to avoid here). The point is that these statements are still meaningful because the criteria for making them true actually does rest in reality, an objective truth. (e.g., The time at which the statement is made determines the statement's truth.)
ReplyDeleteEric is noticing a parallel here concerning the relation between objective truth and subjective truth, and what I'd like to do here is to make his ideas understandable in terms of passion. Eric says that a subjective proposition is NOT so because of some ethereal world of subjective truths that we can somehow access. Rather, a subjective proposition is so because, objectively, there exists a brain state in which the individual experiences his subjective truth. Hypothetically, then, we can perhaps measure the amount of subjective truth a person is experiencing by analyzing the objective, observable brain state. This may make more sense if we understand subjective truth as a measure of passion one is experiencing, and we can certainly at least imagine as passion being a result of heightened activity in the brain. The point here then that Eric is making is that our subjective propositions are not grounded in what he calls "a private subjective realm" -- for that would be presumptuous and raise problems as to the nature of such a place -- but rather are grounded in the objective state of our consciousness, the objective amount of passion we feel, at the time. Subjective truths then are still grounded in reality.
If subjective truths are grounded in reality, then what makes them subjective? Would they not be objective then if they are grounded in something? Unless of course you are talking about them being grounded in reality as the perception of the brain state at the time of experience, but this would not necessarily ground them in reality, but rather be a reflective of the brain activity on how it interprets sensory details. I find this problematic and fairly inconclusive. Just because our brain-states represent something doesn't ground it. We could be perceiving the brain state wrong or the brain itself could be reacting falsely to stimuli.
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