The myth of subjectivism

Again quoting Metaphors We Live By, Chapter 25.

"The myth of subjectivism says that:

1.In most of our everyday practical activities we rely on our senses and develop intuitions we can trust. When important issues arise, regardless of what others may say, our own senses and intuitions are our best guides for action.

2.The most important things in our lives are our feelings, aesthetic sensibilities, moral practices, and spiritual awareness. These are purely subjective. None of these is purely rational or objective.

3.Art and poetry transcend rationality and objectivity and put us in touch with the more important reality of our feelings and intuitions. We gain this awareness through imagination rather than reason.

4.The language of the imagination, especially metaphor, is necessary for expressing the unique and most personally significant aspects of our experience. In matters of personal understanding the ordinary agreed-upon meanings that words have will not do.

5.Objectivity can be dangerous, because it misses what is most important and meaningful to individual people. Objectivity can be unfair, since it must ignore the most rele-vant realms of our experience in favor of the abstract, universal, and impersonal. For the same reason, objectivity can be inhuman. There are no objective and rational means for getting at our feelings, our aesthetic sensibilities, etc. Science is of no use when it comes to the most important things in our lives." [...]

"What we are offering in the experientialist account of understanding and truth is an alternative which denies that subjectivity and objectivity are our only choices. We reject the objectivist view that there is absolute and unconditional truth without adopting the subjectivist alternative of truth as obtainable only through the imagination, unconstrained by external circumstances. The reason we have focused so much on metaphor is that it unites reason and imagination. Reason, at the very least, involves categorization, entail-ment, and inference. Imagination, in one of its many aspects, involves seeing one kind of thing in terms of another kind of thing—what we have called metaphorical thought. Metaphor is thus imaginative rationality. Since the categories of our everyday thought are largely metaphorical and our everyday reasoning involves metaphorical entailments and inferences, ordinary rationality is therefore imaginative by its very nature. Given our understanding of poetic metaphor in terms of metaphorical entailments and inferences, we can see that the products of the poetic imagination are, for the same reason, partially rational in nature.

"Metaphor is one of our most important tools for trying to comprehend partially what cannot be comprehended to-tally: our feelings, aesthetic experiences, moral practices, and spiritual awareness. These endeavors of the imagination are not devoid of rationality; since they use metaphor, they employ an imaginative rationality.

"An experientialist approach also allows us to bridge the gap between the objectivist and subjectivist myths about impartiality and the possibility of being fair and objective. The two choices offered by the myths are absolute objectivity, on the one hand, and purely subjective intuition, on the other. We have seen that truth is relative to under-standing, which means that there is no absolute standpoint from which to obtain absolute objective truths about the world. This does not mean that there are no truths; it means only that truth is relative to our conceptual system, which is grounded in, and constantly tested by, our experiences and those of other members of our culture in our daily inter-actions with other people and with our physical and cultural environments.

"Though there is no absolute objectivity, there can be a kind of objectivity relative to the conceptual system of a culture. The point of impartiality and fairness in social matters is to rise above relevant individual biases. The point of objectivity in scientific experimentation is to factor out the effects of individual illusion and error. This is not to say that we can always, or even ever, be completely successful in factoring out individual biases to achieve complete objectivity relative to a conceptual system and a cultural set of values. It is only to say that pure subjective intuition is not always our only recourse. Nor is this to say that the concepts and values of a particular culture constitute the final arbiter of fairness within the culture. There may be, and typically are, transcultural concepts and values that define a standard of fairness very different from that of a particular culture. What was fair in Nazi Germany, for example, was not fair in the eyes of the world community. Closer to home, there are court cases that constantly in-volve issues of fairness across subcultures with conflicting values. Here the majority culture usually gets to define fairness relative to its values, but these mainstream cultural values change over time and are often subject to criticism by other cultures.

"What the myths of objectivism and subjectivism both miss is the way we understand the world through our inter-actions with it. What objectivism misses is the fact that understanding, and therefore truth, is necessarily relative to our cultural conceptual systems and that it cannot be framed in any absolute or neutral conceptual system. Ob-jectivism also misses the fact that human conceptual systems are metaphorical in nature and involve an imaginative understanding of one kind of thing in terms of another. What subjectivism specifically misses is that our under-standing, even our most imaginative understanding, is given in terms of a conceptual system that is grounded in our successful functioning in our physical and cultural environments. It also misses the fact that metaphorical under-standing involves metaphorical entailment, which is an imaginative form of rationality."