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I don't understand. To give you an objective response you force me to look up the dictionary:
OK. Note that I agree with John that <<Vocabularies usually list the historical common sense versions of obsolete world views>>. But I understand the move and will make some comments, if only to point toward the perhaps "obsolete views".
The main one is that the definitions implicitly assumes a little bit of Aristotelian physicalism: this entails we should distinguish the relativity with respect to our mind state, and relativity to our "position" with respect to some universe (which I do not assume the existence).
Objectivity: the ability to express or deal with facts or conditions as perceived without without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices or interpretationsthe ability to observe independetly of one's own mental state.
OK.
Subjectivity: [the ability to perceive a reality as] related to or determined by the mind as the subject of experience; the ability to ... identify by means of one's perception of one's own states and processes...rather than as independent of mind.
Too vague.
Relativity: the state of being dependent for existence on or determined in nature, value, or quality by relation to something else.
Mmmmh.... (By which I mean I can agree and I can disagree depending on the sense of each word in the sentence).
Absolut[ism]: [the quality of ] being self sufficient and independent for external references or relationships
With that definition, you can say that my starting point is "absolute" giving that physics will be entirely determined by self-introspection (but then at latter stage that introspection will be described by a machine after a choice of third person description of the first person states). I don't think it is important.
Therefore, subjectivity and objectivity are opposite, relativity and absolutism are opposite.
I totally agree.
A first person perception is a subjective or relative experience.
A third person perception is an objective or absolute experience.
Of course I would say
A first person perception is a subjective experience, and then an absolute one (in the sense that it is not relativizable, if you have a headache you cannot relativize the feeling itself, although you could relativize the importance of it, ...).
A third person perception is an objective experience, and then a relative one (in the sense that you will need to choose either a theory or a set of experimental devices, let us say a frame (?), without which the proof or the observation are not defined.
You have moved to a meta level: how do you deal with being a scientist. The paradox is that your research as a scientists should not be restricted by your need for communicating with other scientists. It's like Einstein worrying that his communication of the relativity theory would be corrupted by his relative motion with other scientists. We can assume for the time being that our frames of reference are sufficiently close that we can pretend to talk objectively about the first person or more precisely, that our relative talk about the first person will not be corrupted by our slightly different frames of reference.
I did move to a meta level indeed. About <<how do you deal with being a scientist>>. I would say by publishing, or ... perishing, I guess ... ;) When you say that my research as a scientist should not be restricted by the need for communicating with other scientist, I agree concerning the research itself, but the communication of it must take "the un-communicable" into account due to the nature of the subject.
Then I am not sure of the link with your last sentence, but I am dispose to assume our "frames of reference" are sufficiently close to pretend to talk objectively ...(OK) ... about the first person .... still OK but only if we agree on some definition or modelization (at some point) or even some intuition about the very notion of first person. Here I think we agree with the words "first/third person", and "subjective/objective", but apparently we are using "absolute" and "relative" in the opposite sense.
Now all theories come from and are ultimately addressed to first person.OK here we may have encountered the vocabulary problem. I would say it makes relative sense. As a proof, suppose my mental states are such that I interpret + as x. Then it would make sense to me that x+0 = 0.
So, when I propose an axiom, like "x + 0 = x", I can only hope it makes (absolute) sense.
But then you are using the term "relative" in my sense !?!?. That is relative with respect to a theory (resp a model) in which the behavior of "+" and "x" are defined. I was assuming here the intended meaning of "+".
We cannot axiomatize addition without having some basic intuition of it.
But I can onlyAs I said, depending on the states of my mind, I may not agree with this propostion,. I could interpret "or" as "and", and then the proposition would be false.
communicate such relative objective statements. This is the price of science imo.
Now, could you reassure me: do you agree with proposition like "x + 0 = 0", or prime(17)?
I guess and hope so.
That move leads us nowhere. You force me to ask you "is your mind in a state such as willing to recognize the truth of the proposition which I attempt to refer by "x + 0 = 0"? And in case you have forget the usual meaning of "+" don't hesitate to open your "objective" dictionary this time too.
Obviously the "yes doctor" proposition is more demanding, and that ispsychologists would not agree with that
why ultimately I eliminate it methodologically by interviewing a sound universal Turing
machine instead of "grandmother", but such an elimination is only "strategical". One of my
goal is to illustrate that although the first person discourse is unscientific,
by its very nature,
we still can, by giving genuine definitions and hypotheses build a pure third person discourse,
which can be scientific (that is: modest relative and uncertain) *on* first person discourses and views.
Does that make sense?
OK the discourse must be third person, we have no choice, but the content of the discourse must be first person.
Absolutely! But note that we can still have a PARTIAL third person description or modelization of that content. I really believe that modal logic will help us to clarify those subtle points.
Ah! About the gray hair problem, I think it is always the same problem, some lackhair dye?
of knowledge in the field of logic. You are not the only one (in the list and elsewhere),
let us think what to do about that.
"hair dye" ? That _expression_ looks terrible! Please don't do that. I am sure a tiny detour through logic will be wizer for the health of your hair, unless you continue to split them right at the start (just a pun!).
Are you ready for some definition? (We can abandon for a while the "absolute"/"relative" opposite view giving that we agree on the 1/3 distinction and on the subjective/objective opposition, and that's what counts in the interview of the Universal Machine (and its Godelian "Guardian Angel").
Bruno
