objective

Objective and subjective are ontological classifications. It is not by any means a given that those things epistemically subjective can be understood using the methods for those thing that are objective.

A statement is objective if it can be known to be true or false independently of feelings, attitudes and prejudices of people. It is subjective if its truth depends essentially on the attitudes or prejudices of observers.

Things that have an objective existence do not require a subject to experience them. The Eiffel Tower is an object. That is in contrast to the perceived beauty of the tower, which is subjective, therefore requiring a subject.

Source: Malik, 2000, pp 338. See object, subject, and subjective.

Objective perception (Source: Bateson, G., 1978, 'Afterword', in J. Brockman (Ed.) About Bateson, London: Wildwood House pp. 244-245 , as shown at http://plato.acadiau.ca/courses/educ/reid/papers/PME25-WS4/SEM.html (accessed September 8, 2007)) --

Finally, let me try to give you an idea of what it felt like, or what sort of difference it made, for me to view the world in terms of the epistemology that I have described to you, instead of viewing it as I used to and as I believe most people always do.

First of all, let me stress what happens when one becomes aware that there is much that is our own contribution to our own perception. Of course I am no more aware of the processes of my own perception than anybody else is. But I am aware that there are such processes, and this awareness means that when I look out through my eyes and see the redwoods or the yellow flowering acacia of California roadsides, I know that I am doing all sorts of things to my percept in order to make sense of that percept. Of course I always did this, and everybody does it. We work hard to make sense, according to our epistemology, of the world which we think we see.

Whoever creates an image of an object does so in depth, using various cues for that creation. But most people are not aware that they do this, and as you become aware that you are doing it, you become in a curious way much closer to the world around you. The word ""objective"" becomes, of course, quite quietly obsolete; and at the same time the word ""subjective"", which normally confines ""you"" within your skin, disappears as well. It is, I think, the debunking of the objective that is the important change. The world is no longer ""out there"" in quite the same way that it used to seem to be. Without being fully conscious or thinking about it all the time, I still know all the time that my images - especially the visual, but also auditory, gustatory, pain, and fatigue - I know the images are "" mine"" and that I am responsible for these images in a quite peculiar way. It is as if they are all in some degree hallucinated, as indeed they partly are. The shower of impulses coming in over the optic nerve surely contains no picture. The picture is to be developed, to be created, by the intertwining of all these neural messages. And the brain that can do this must be pretty smart. It's my brain. But everybody's brain - any mammalian brain - can do it, I guess.

I have the use of the information that that which I see, the images, or that which I feel as pain, the prick of a pin, or the ache of a tired muscle - for these, too, are images created in their respective modes - that all this is neither objective truth nor is it all hallucination. There is a combining or marriage between an objectivity that is passive to the outside world and a creative subjectivity, neither pure solipsism nor its opposite.

Consider for a moment the phrase, the opposite of solipsism. In solipsism, you are ultimately isolated and alone, isolated by the premise ""I make it all up."" But at the other extreme, the opposite of solipsism, you would cease to exist, becoming nothing but a metaphoric feather blown by the winds of external ""reality"". (But in that region there are no metaphors!) Somewhere between these two is a region where you are partly blown by the winds of reality and partly an artist creating a composite out of the inner and outer events.