I guess this thread is stale by now. And EricC gave a response that I agree with and that is probably sufficient for anything that needs to be said.
But still I wanted to comment on this at the time, and have not had an allowance to do such things for the weeks since then. I will clip; not to take out of context — I won’t go off in the direction of the use-case of migraine auras — but to get to the main point: > On Nov 7, 2025, at 20:31, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]> wrote: > > I wonder what the difference is between intersubjective and objective? > > Nick I find it interesting that, when I took in the conventions for using these three terms from the common language, it was as if subjective/objective were alternatives, or a basis for a dichotomy. And in that sense — in the haphazardness of common speech — they would have to be values within some category that they have in common. But everything about my own use of them increasingly says they are distinct categories, and not alternatives or a basis for a dichotomy at all. My own approach is, I guess, what one might call “a perspective from discourse”. Something about deciding what “kinds of meanings” characterize my various states of mind. I think I am willing to argue that any assertive sentence is “about something”, and here, by its target, I don’t necessarily mean “an object”, but whatever “meaning” the sentence is meant to carry from speaker to hearer. We can then ask, how much we need to know, to even assign that meaning. If I say something is “subjective”, then I need to know not only what is being said, but by whom, or in relation to whom, because the assertion itself is about some kind of relation of the subject to whatever aspect of the experience is being asserted. It is not that which subject asserts it, per se, is important, but at least that without reference to the fact that it is the kind of thing a subject asserts, I am not even capturing what the meaning is. If I say something is “intersubjective”, then I can declare a meaning without respect to whoever-in-particular happens to say it, or to how the experience is conveyed to one or another informant. But if I say something is “objective”, I am including in the discourse a lot more premises. I am saying that I assume there is “something that is the case” “about” “a world” — all those being somehow placeholder terms, but nonetheless terms to which other things besides this assertion get attached — and that “the case” affords this assertion to be made (to be packaged in a sentence somehow). Not only is the sentence itself not inherently about a relation to an experiencer, and not only does it not matter which experiencer is the informant, as is true of the inter-subjective; but the affordance to make such assertions is now assumed as part of my imputation of meaning, whether or not any experiencer ever takes advantage of it and makes the statement. The Earth went around the Sun, the same as now, in the billions of years before there were people to talk about it; that kind of thing. Relations between the intersubjective and the objective are built up by some much more indirect sequence of deliberative reasoning, which is a scaffolding for the system of meanings, but not really within their basic types. My three-type characterizations above aren’t fundamentally about how stable these assertions are, or how one chooses to keep making them or to change them through time, which I take to be the pragmatist’s concern, but rather just about what-all goes into attaching a “meaning” in the cognitive-state sense to using such sentences. From that perspective already, it seems to me that they are of qualitatively different kinds, for the types of meanings they characterize. Eric .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
