This is useful. Thanks. However, I'm worried that it doesn't translate across
different types of *subject*. Obviously, we're talking about ordinary humans
with fingers, toes, eyes, whole brains, and language. But what about, say,
social insects? Or, to make the problem a bit easier, Japanese macaques?
Would things like shared genes (identical twins?, kin?) be a foundation for
intersubjectivity? Or, at the other extreme, perhaps does all intersubjectivity
require some sort of settling-in process/transient? E.g. I can't be
intersubjective with someone with whom I haven't negotiated shared context. In
between might be something like the zeitgeist. Maybe the degree of
intersubjectivity is higher between those who share language/culture?
If "objective" carries extra premises and "intersubjective" is graded, then it seems to
me the only extra premise is the existence of some perfect hash/index such that predicate, sign, and object
can be fully expressed uniquely in that index. (Or, maybe there is polysemy or ambiguity, and there are
interchangable classes of predicates, signs, and objects. But those schema can be - even if only
lazily/eventually - fully expressed -- But then the classes would be something like intersubjectivity. And
the only way to resurrect objectivity would be the requirement that those equivalence classes be
"unrollable" into a perfect hierarchical index.)
The very use of the term "objective" would then be a metaphysical commitment.
On 11/21/25 3:59 AM, Santafe wrote:
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
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