Subjective-objective dichotomy

The subjective–objective dichotomy, a longstanding philosophical topic, is concerned with the analysis of human experience, and of what within experience is "subjective" and what is "objective." The dichotomy arises from the premise that the world consists of objects (entities) which are perceived or otherwise presumed to exist as entities, by subjects (observers). This division of experience results in questions regarding how subjects relate to objects.

The subjective–objective dichotomy can be discussed from two standpoints. First is the question of "what" is known. The field of ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences. The second standpoint is that of "how" does one know what one knows. The field of epistemology questions what knowledge is, how it is acquired, and to what extent it is possible for a given entity to be known. It includes both subjects and objects.

Subjective-objective dichotomy
The world "out there" is perceived by the mind, and so also is the interior world of conscious events. The relation between the two is much debated:

The objective aspects of experience often are considered to lie within the domain of science. Science has practical impact upon technology and our understanding of interconnections. However, there are areas where science so far has had little impact. So there exists a difference in optimism about science, with one view opining that science will gradually extend to everything, and the opposite view opining that won't happen. For example, the statement is found in many books:

This approach is the foundation of the 'blue brain' project, an effort to create a synthetic brain by reverse-engineering the mammalian brain. On the other hand, a contrary view is that aspects of mind are inherently subjective, and lie outside the reach of a scientific approach based upon objective observation by a detached observer:

One set of difficulties facing an objective study of subjective phenomena are summed up in the easy problem of consciousness and the hard problem of consciousness: The subjective aspects of science extend beyond the "hard problem", however. The formulation of a scientific theory is a mental process, not simply a matter of observation, although observation is involved. This realization takes the subjective-objective distinction to a more general level than arguments over the prospects of success in bringing certain areas of experience within the grasp of science.

For example, a statement of a scientific theory could take the form: All events p are determined by other events P . In order to be consistent with science today, and avoid oversimplification, one has to be very clear about how the events (p, P) are defined. One also has to replace "determined" by something like "logically imply".

This quote indicates the need for great care in defining "events" and what is meant by "determined". Their meaning involves detailed descriptions of what constitutes an "event" and how one is said to "determine" another. A Popper-like view emerges with an "event" as some kind of formalized "state" and the relationship "determines" phrased as a "logical implication" of connection between states, all combined as parts of one or another abstract theory. That formalization puts a lot of emphasis upon mental constructions. From the stance of a Duhem, or a Popper, or a Hawking, the use of an intermediary, elaborate mental construction is a meld of the subjective and objective. It is used to determine connections about objective events, but the form of the theoretical construct is a product of subjective activities, and its particular form may well be more about the brain than anything else. Perhaps some aspects of the universe's operation can be expressed in terms of mental constructs in an analogy with the expression of a computer algorithm in terms of assembly language instructions peculiar to a particular computer, a translation of the algorithm into specific tiny steps that particular computer can handle,.

Lest this apparatus be thought of as an entirely formal understanding, some among us actually do have an intuitive grasp of these creative abstractions, perhaps analogous to the fact that some among us hear music in ambient sounds. Quoting Feynman about his creative process:

This comment could be paralleled by others about the intuitions of musicians and mathematicians. The point is that the creation of scientific theories is subjective, and the very concepts of determinism are themselves subjective and mutable creations of the human mind. What is in charge here: the intuition conceiving the theory, or the theory that results; or is it an unending back-and-forth spiral from one to the other? The development of a theory is something of a bootstrapping process that might never converge.

A rather different aspect of the subjective-objective divide is the role of social inhibition, a factor at work from the times of the Roman Inquisition and Galileo to the Scopes trial and Kennewick Man. A more recent concern is the structure of the educational system and the control over financing of research. There is a concern about the intrusion of societal elements into what is supposed to be an objective matter.

Subjective-objective correlations
Some subjective personal experiences have aspects that fall squarely into the realm of objective fact, and have implications that can be objectively verified. In some instances, it is debatable as to which is the epiphenomenon, the subjective event or its observable correlate. For example, there is debate over whether the placebo effect indicates a mental influence over the body.

An example is the experience of pain, an entirely subjective matter, but one that sometimes (but not invariably) can be related to the objectively observable operation of receptors, communication channels and brain activity. The consequence is that the subjective sense of pain is sometimes empirically connected to observable events, but the fundamental experience of pain itself is subjective. Other examples are addiction and psychological disorders. Besides the subjective aspects, one may discuss the mechanisms connecting subjective experiences and objective observables, and the role of programming upon these connections, such as psychiatric treatment, behavioral conditioning, and evolutionary limits.

As technology advances, the ability of humans to detect what is happening around them advances. This progress in observational technique extends to the brain and possibly the mind, and to our perceptive abilities. An example is the use of the PET scan in observing correlations between addiction and dopamine activity in the brain.

These advances in observational technique require associated interpretation and theoretical models that explain what the observations mean. For example, when Galileo advanced the use of the telescope to observe the moons of Jupiter, skeptics doubted that the telescope actually showed reality. This old example only scratches the surface of relating scientific instruments to reality. After all, one could extrapolate from mundane terrestrial uses of the telescope, where its veracity could be directly examined, to more distant objects like Jupiter. The introduction of the microscope had a similar struggle for acceptance. Today however, only a few among us can understand the complexity of observations made with the hadron collider, and we rely upon certification by carefully selected experts. The importance of extremely technical theory in the experts' interpretation is obvious to all, and these theories, while supported by experimental observation, are products of the human subjective imagination.

To what extent our mental creations are limited by the innate functioning of our brain/nervous system (what might be called our "factory settings") and to what extent they mirror the real world is discussed in the field of psychological nativism, and is connected with the philosophers Kant, Schopenhauer, Popper, Chomsky, Pinker, Hawking and others.

The subjective aspect of scientific theories has led to a need to assess theories, to be able to choose one theory as preferable to another without introducing cognitive bias. Several criteria were proposed by Colyvan:
 * 1) It is elegant (Formal elegance; no ad hoc modifications)
 * 2) Contains few arbitrary or adjustable elements (Simplicity/Parsimony)
 * 3) Agrees with and explains all existing observations (Unificatory/Explanatory power)
 * 4) Makes detailed predictions about future observations that can disprove or falsify the model if they are not borne out.
 * 5) Boldness/fruitfulness: the emphasis by Colyvan is not only upon prediction and falsification, but also upon a theory's seminality in suggesting future work.

The goal here is to make the choice between theories less arbitrary. Nonetheless, these criteria contain subjective elements, and are heuristics rather than part of scientific method. It also is debatable whether existing scientific theories satisfy all these criteria, and they may represent goals not yet achieved, a set of "New Year's resolutions", if you like. The desiderata of a "good" theory have been debated for centuries, going back perhaps even earlier than Occam's razor, which often is taken as an attribute of a good theory. Occam's razor might fall under the heading of "elegance", the first item on the list, but too zealous an application was cautioned by Einstein: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." The falsifiability item on the list is related to the criterion proposed by Popper:

Thomas Kuhn argued that changes in scientists' views of reality not only contain subjective elements, but result from group dynamics, "revolutions" in scientific practice and changes in "paradigms". As an example, Kuhn suggested that the Sun-centric Copernican "revolution" replaced the Earth-centric views of Ptolemy not because of empirical failures, but because of a new "paradigm" that exerted control over what scientists felt to be the more fruitful way to pursue their goals (Colyvan's requirement of "fruitfulness").

In early philosophy
The question of what is objective and what is subjective, and whether one or the other is more "real" has been a topic of philosophy since its earliest days. In Western philosophy it can be found in Plato, who considered our perceptions to be mere approximations to the world of ideal Forms, in the way that circles we encounter in nature are mere approximations to the ideal circle. The world of Forms was accessible only by the mind, not the senses. Contrary views were held by Aristotle, who would hold the "ideal" circle is only an abstraction from its many real-world examples, and without those examples the ideal circle simply would not exist. See this discussion about "instantiation". These two views of how the concepts of the mind relate to the perception of the world resurface again and again in later centuries, rephrased in novel terminologies.

Some of these later treatments of the subject-object relationship were tied to theological issues. A not-so-serious example is the formulation of George Berkeley (1685-1753), who posed the famous question: "Does a tree fall in the forest when no-one can hear it fall?" He proposed that objects exist only when perceived by a conscious being, and to avoid the absurdities of this view posited that because God was omnipresent, things existed because they were in His consciousness.

According to a famous anecdote, Samuel Johnson responded to Berkeley's views by kicking a stone and saying 'I refute it thus.'.

In 18th and 19th century philosophy
To say it simply, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) pointed out that we all shape our experience of things through the filter of our mind. The mind shapes that experience, and among other things, Kant believed the concepts of space and time were programmed into the human brain, as was the notion of cause and effect. We never have direct experience of things, the noumenal world, and what we do experience is the phenomenal world as conveyed by our senses, this conveyance processed by the machinery of the mind and nervous system. Kant focused upon this processing. Kant believed in a priori knowledge arrived at independent of experience, so-called synthetic a priori knowledge. In particular, he thought that by introspection some aspects of the filtering mechanisms of the mind/brain/nervous system could be discovered. These observations summarize Kant's views upon the subject-object problem, called Kant's Copernican revolution. It was the inversion of the traditional relation between the observing subject and the outer object of knowledge.

Kant's successors Fichte (1762-1814), Schelling ( 1775-1854) and Hegel (1770-1831) also raised the issue of the relationship between the subject and the object, or what perceives and what is perceived, and stressed the importance of the subject, the observer. Fichte placed the demands of the individual self or ego as the starting point of all philosophical reflection. He transformed Kant's view, that the laws of rationality are set by forms of human understanding, instead into demands of the individual will. Hegel also rejected Kant's view that there was a noumenal world causing our experiences and instead proposed that the mind-shaped phenomenal world is the world. Hegel proposed that 'truth' was approached by a dialectical method, that is, a clash of an idea and its opposite, a succession of thesis and antithesis, followed by a synthesis of the two, and on, and on, a picture he felt described the evolution of history in an ever-upward spiral to 'truth'. Although a popular figure, many other philosophers found Hegel unintelligible, with Bertrand Russell suggesting Hegel's work as a model of the imprecise use of language, and A.J. Ayer declaring that most of Hegel's sentences said nothing at all.

Schopenhauer (1788-1860) claimed that “everything that exists for knowledge, and hence the whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation.” According to him there can be "No object without subject" because "everything objective is already conditioned as such in manifold ways by the knowing subject with the forms of its knowing, and presupposes these forms; consequently it wholly disappears when the subject is thought away.". Schopenhauer also asserted that the 'principle of sufficient reason' does not apply between subject and object, but only between objects. Therefore, Fichte was mistaken when he posited that the subject produces or causes the object. Realism and Materialism also are wrong when they assert that the object causes the subject.

In 20th and 21st century philosophy
In his lecture "Mind and Matter," Erwin Schrödinger stressed the distancing of the knowing subject from its 'objective' formulation of the world around us: He claimed that we are unaware "of the fact that a moderately satisfying picture of the world has only been reached at the high price of taking ourselves out of the picture, stepping back into the role of a non-concerned observer." As a result, in formulating the concept of the object, the subject is not considered at all. Schrödinger continues: These observations are supplemented by those of Northoff mentioned above.

The knowing subject can be brought into the discussion by considering how it colors its own observations. As stated by Schopenhauer:

Like Kant, Noam Chomsky raised the issue of the mind's inherent programming. Chomsky selected as a particular example the acquiring of language by children. Of course, language is indispensable in the formulation and communication of our perceptions of the objective world: Chomsky marshaled evidence that a child's rapid mastery of the complexity of language indicated an innate ability programmed into the development of the human mind from birth that could not be explained by the "blank slate" view of the infant mind. Rather, the mind has a built-in propensity to process symbolic representations. The origins of this ability were sought by Steven Pinker in a Darwinian struggle that established the survival value of the ability to communicate. According to Pinker, Charles Darwin himself "concluded that language ability is 'an instinctive tendency to acquire an art', a design that is not peculiar to humans but seen in other species such as song-learning birds."

These ideas still are under examination. Among the modern essays into the subject-object problem are the fields of cognitive psychology, behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology.

Complementary descriptions
The subjective and objective correlates of some phenomena (like addiction or mental disorder) actually might describe the same phenomena from distinct perspectives; in other words, they might be complementary views:

Niels Bohr also believed there were differences between first-person and third-person perspectives, an outgrowth of his experience in atomic physics. However, in his view the two descriptions are irreconcilable because of the disturbance of the subject's first-person mental state by the third-person's act of observation itself:

Some weak indirect support for this analogy is found in observations of the neural correlates of mental states: