The problem with discussing whether something is subjective or objective is that there are not always clear lines between between these two concepts. — Sam26

There are clear lines between the two in my usage, but the terms don't really matter anyway--it's just a convenient way of making a particular distinction. What matters are the upshots of the distinction, the upshots of whether something is mental/mind-dependent or not mental/mind-independent.

Re "the objective nature of language," the objective aspects of language are the sounds we make, the text marks we make, etc.

OK, skip that line of thought for now.

An objective fact, for example, is that which is mind-independent. — Sam26

I will never not take joy in pointing out that 'objective' used to mean exactly the opposite, and that for the Scholastics, that which was objective was that which existed for - and only for - a mind: "For [Duns] Scotus and [John] Poinsot, something was an 'objective being' to the extent that it existed in awareness. The sun and the sea were 'objective beings,' but so were unicorns - they also existed 'in' our awareness. So, within experience, all beings were by definition objective beings. However, not all of them were physical things or events." (Bains, The Primacy of Semiosis). This being the case for the 'subject' as well, which used to mean that which is precisely independent of someone (as in: 'the subject of analysis'). A silly distinction.

An archetype of an objective statement:

Common salt is composed of chlorine and sodium;

and an archetype of a subjective statement:

Fred believes that common salt is composed of chlorine and sodium.

again, making propositional attitudes central.

I will never not take joy in pointing out that 'objective' used to mean exactly the opposite, and that for the Scholastics, that which was objective was that which existed for - and only for - a mind: — StreetlightX

Of course, the meanings of words often change over time, but how does this hurt the goal of this thread, at least the beginning goal, that we should at least be able to agree upon a working definition of what the concepts subjective and objective means. I can always say that at some time in the past such-and-such a word meant this. I don't see how this helps the discussion right now, except to point out that meanings change over time. It surely doesn't mean that the concepts are useless, we use them every day.

Fred believes that common salt is composed of chlorine and sodium.
again, making propositional attitudes central. — Banno

I don't see how the proposition you've used here is an example of a subjective statement. Just because one utters a false statement, that in itself doesn't mean it's subjective. Fred may think he has uttered an objective statement, but has just got the objective facts incorrect. It's not like, using your words, the archetype subjective statement, "I like oranges," or even, "Sam likes oranges."

This is an error on my part, the statement isn't false. Duh. Thanks Banno for pointing that out.

But are you looking for some everyday meaning - when everyday meanings are never sharply demarcated anyway? Or are you seeking a well-founded philosophical distinction? In which case clearly it is the metaphysical-strength claims the words might invoke that are in contention. You can't avoid that by some kind of ordinary speech manoeuvre. — apokrisis

You haven't read what I said closely enough. How many times does the mantra have to be repeated, that there are no clearly defined overarching meanings to these words. There is a built in vagueness to these concepts, and Banno also pointed out this fact. However, by the same token it doesn't mean that we can't use the words in contexts where we're being precise. This is true of the word game, there is no clear definition that will subsume every use of the word under one definition. However, if I say, "Baseball is a game," am I being imprecise? No. So context sometimes will drive the precision, based on that one contextual use, but the trick is in realizing that that one use is not indicative of one overarching definition that fits all uses. All games are not baseball games.

You keep making the same error, that I'm talking about ordinary speech in the sense that the meanings are based on what someone might say on the street. I've tried explaining this earlier, at least partially, but your brain seems locked into position.

that we should at least be able to agree upon a working definition of what the concepts subjective and objective means. — Sam26

Why? Without some conceptual motivation to which the distinction responds to, it's just an arbitrary excercise. Kant, Scotus, and Poinsot all had a set of conceptual motivations which made their employment of the terms non-arbitrary. In the absence of this, its just a trivial bit of language wringing. Linguistic engines on idle.

Rather than the mind receiving the truths of the outer world into its inner world, minding is about forming embodied and adaptive points of view. Mindfulness is the larger thing of that relation in action. — apokrisis

This still doesn't dissolve the distinction. It just redifines objective and subjective into adaptive points of view versus the world itself. Unless you want to espouse some form of anti-realism where there is no world independent of adaptive points of view.

Which would be hard to believe, given what science tells us about the universe.

Why? Without some conceptual motivation to which the distinction responds to, it's just an arbitrary excercise. — StreetlightX

Warding off epistemological concerns would be one motivation. Wasn't Wittgenstein trying to dissolve issues like solipsism by arguing for the necessary public nature of language?

Wasn't Wittgenstein trying to dissolve issues like solipsism by arguing for the necessary public nature of language? — Marchesk

Yes, but in a way far removed from this kind of arbitrariness. And 'warding off epistemological concerns' is meaningless. What concerns? And why are you concerned to begin with?

and an archetype of a subjective statement:
Fred believes that common salt is composed of chlorine and sodium. — Banno

Or, Fred feels like it's hot in the car, Jill thinks it's cold, but Raymond feels just right.

Or, Fred believes the salt is poison from his partner, who is an alien doppleganger.

Or, Fred dreams the salt is a bunch of tiny elves cranking his taste buds.

Or, Fred is convinced that salt is no more than how it appears to him.

What concerns? And why are you concerned to begin with? — StreetlightX

Same concerns humanity has had since the ancient schools of philosophy in India, China and Greece, if not earlier.

What concerns? And why are you concerned to begin with? — StreetlightX

To answer this more specifically, the difference between appearance and reality. Thinks aren't always as they seem. The naive view of things is often misleading.

Same concerns humanity has had since the ancient schools of philosophy in India, China and Greece, if not earlier. — Marchesk

The subjective/objective distinction didn't even exist until the 18th century or so, so even if one were to try and employ it to address 'the distinction between reality and appearance', there's a great deal of conceptual work needed to articulate the junction between these ideas. There's nothing more philosophically naive than thinking that the terms in which problems are posed are obvious, clear, and well-founded. Most of the time, the problems themselves are rubbish.

The subjective/objective distinction didn't even exist until the 18th century or so, — StreetlightX

I could have sworn the Cyrenaics made that distinction. There's also the modes of the Pyrrhonian skeptics.

Agrippa's Third Mode:

5-3 Pros ti:
Arguments from relativity. X only ever appears such-and-such in relation to the subject judging and to the things observed together with it. Suspension on how X really is follows. — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-ancient/#SkeIdeEarClaGre

Skepticism and idealism of various sorts predates the 18th century. Hinduism has the concept of Maya where the world is an illusion from the mind of God. Then there's the Butterfly Dream from China.

Early Christianity had the gnostics, with their beliefs in personal gnosis. Some of them believed the material world was an illusion.

I don't doubt any of that. I'm just saying that these problems were not articulated in terms of subject and object. Any translation of ancient Greek which uses the word 'subject' in the modern sense is trash. It's a Latin word that has no correlate in classical Greek, the closest of which is the word hypokeimenon, which has very different resonances.

SEP agrees with you, but then goes on to say that ancient philosophers do discus matters relevant to our modern notions of subjective and objective.

Sextus describes the skeptic’s states of ‘being-appeared-to’ as affections of the mind. A skeptic can report these states in their utterances. Illustrating this point, Sextus uses expressions associated with the Cyrenaics, a Socratic school of thought. These expressions literally mean something like ‘I am being heated’ or ‘I am being whitened.’ They aim to record affections without claiming anything about the world.

You asked what motivates warding off epistemological concerns, and my response is that these sorts of concerns arose a long time ago, have evolved but have never gone away, so it's natural for those discussing philosophy to want to address them. My understanding is this is what is motivating Sam and what motivated Wittgenstein.

Again, the question is what any of this has to do with subject and object. I'm not saying no answer can be given. I'm just saying that one needs a specific set of articulated conceptual motivations. The idea of just arbitrarily coming up with 'working definitions' out of the blue is a useless exercise in philosophical triviality.

As for Witty, he had the acuity to realize that most so-called 'epistemological concerns' were just stupid uses of language taken much too seriously.

Why? Without some conceptual motivation to which the distinction responds to, it's just an arbitrary excercise. Kant, Scotus, and Poinsot all had a set of conceptual motivations which made their employment of the terms non-arbitrary. In the absence of this, its just a trivial bit of language wringing. Linguistic engines on idle. — StreetlightX

This is just so much nonsense. It's an arbitrary exercise, it's arbitrary because you think it's arbitrary. Concepts like subjective and objective aren't arbitrary concepts. And your last sentence, which refers to something Wittgenstein would say, kills me, because your about as far from understanding Wittgenstein as you can get. Stupid philosophy has turned concepts like these into arbitrary notions.

The fact that people are having such a difficult time understanding what should be fairly simple concepts to understand generally, tells me just how philosophically confused people are.

One of the reasons I wanted to stick to coming up with a working definition for these words, is that I knew people couldn't even agree on this. If there is any "language wringing" it's in these kinds of statements.

Concepts like subjective and objective aren't arbitrary concepts. — Sam26

I didn't say they were. I said attempts to give them substance in the absence of any conceptual motivation would make them so. The OP is one such attempt. It is preferable that people disagree on the use of terms when motivated by different problematics, than trivially agree on such uses without being productively constrained by a need to address a well-founded set of issues.

and an archetype of a subjective statement:
Fred believes that common salt is composed of chlorine and sodium. — Banno
Or, Fred feels like it's hot in the car, Jill thinks it's cold, but Raymond feels just right.

Or, Fred believes the salt is poison from his partner, who is an alien doppleganger.

Or, Fred dreams the salt is a bunch of tiny elves cranking his taste buds.

Or, Fred is convinced that salt is no more than how it appears to him. — Marchesk

These are all objectively true or false. They're all claims about an individuals belief's (their brain states) and can all be determined (in principle) as true or false

Sam’s problematic revolves around objective validation of something which can only ever be known first-person, that being the reality or otherwise of NDE’s. In the thread on that topic this lead to a discussion about the nature of justification and of whether personal testimony could be regarded as ‘objective evidence’.

One of the definitions I use when referencing what's an objective fact, for example, is that which is mind-independent. This definition doesn't cover every use of the word, but generally covers a large swath of uses. — Sam26

Is the synthetic a priory proposition 7 + 5 = 12 mind-independent?

This still doesn't dissolve the distinction. It just redifines objective and subjective into adaptive points of view versus the world itself. — Marchesk

But I wasn't trying to dissolve the distinction necessarily. I was responding by trying to make the best sense of it in my lights.

So what I reacted to was @Sam26's simple acceptance of a dualistic ontology where the subjective would be "facts of the mind" and objective would be "facts of the world".

One part of my reply was that all facts are "facts of the mind". This is the semiotic view where "facts" are the signs that form our experiential Umwelt - the world as we construct it, and so the "world with us in it" as its interpreters.

So facticity is generally on the side of the "mental", or informational. And objective vs subjective simply become two opposing extremes of how we regard these facts or signs. We assign some experiences to our "self" as being highly personal, voluntary, variable, unsharable, etc. And other experiences as being "objective facts of the world" as they are highly invariant, recalcitrant, sharable, involuntary, etc.

On closer inspection, this isn't a very good distinction. Is the yellowness of the marigold a fact of the world or a fact of the mind? Is your yellow, my yellow? Why does physics say nothing is actually yellow and that it is all just some kind of information processing trick in your brain?

Semiosis cleans that up. Yellow is a sign that we construct to interpret the facts of the world. It doesn't represent the reality, but it does do the job of mediating an embodied modelling relation with the world as we then can act in a purpose-serving way which has predictable material consequences. I know when the banana is ripe enough eat just at a quick glance.

So that is part of the answer. Objective vs subjective is not that robust a dichotomy principally because it is the jargon favoured by the tradition of dualism and AP theories of truth. Bad philosophy. Semiotics says it is really just a way we categorise experience. We split facticity into that which is, overall, highly personal - "on the side of the controlling self" - and highly impersonal, or "on the side of the resisting world".

And then, the other part of the answer was about a general attempt to shift from a passive to an active understanding of "mind".

Dualism has its cultural force because people find it easy to think about mind as a kind of conscious substance. It is a psychic stuff that feels, thinks and senses. Semiotics paves the way for seeing mind as an action of interpretance, a constantly adapting modelling relation. Every moment of consciousness is some other possible state of attentional focus - some actualised point of view - quickly to be replaced by whatever viewpoint strikes the best adapted state in the next.

So there is no stuff that is conscious, as if consciousness were the property of a substance. There just is a flow of viewpoints that have a coherent past and an orientated future. This is what neuroscience tells us. It is how brains work. The emphasis is put on the relating rather than the existing, where it belongs in a process view.

This model of mindfulness as a semiotic process can then be applied to the subjective~objective distinction. At one extreme is the absolute locatedness of whatever it is that I'm experiencing at this place and moment in space and time. That is the subjective pole. Then at the other extreme would be what I - or any reasoning person - would believe to be the general case at the end of a process of exhaustive inquiry. The most disembodied view we could imagine arriving at - the one as if we stood outside everything. This is of course the Pragmatic theory of truth offered by CS Peirce. He defined objectivity in these terms.

So I was giving my grounds for rejecting the standard dualistic distinction of subjective vs objective, and offering the alternative triadic metaphysics of semiotics or the pragmatism of modelling relations.

Sam’s problematic revolves around objective validation of something which can only ever be known first-person — Wayfarer

This is a misinterpretation, first, in my argument, if you would have read it carefully, you would see that there is much more to the testimony on NDEs than subjective experiences. They are experiences that can be corroborated by the objective observations of those who were there, but I don't want to start that argument in here.

I didn't say they were. I said attempts to give them substance in the absence of any conceptual motivation would make them so. The OP is one such attempt. It is preferable that people disagree on the use of terms when motivated by different problematics, than trivially agree on such uses without being productively constrained by a need to address a well-founded set of issues. — StreetlightX

But it's not conceptual motivation that gives these concepts substance or meaning, and I would say that conceptual motivation plays little to no part in the meanings of these words. If the primary factor is conceptual motivation, then it is purely subjective and arbitrary. Unless your saying that part of the way one expresses certain meanings or concepts within a particular argument, is that we choose particular uses of those concepts. However, you seem to imply that conceptual motivation gives them substance.

Another way to interpret what you said is that unless we are talking about a certain context of use, which would involve the use of particular concepts in certain ways based on goals, then we are just fishing for a definition which may or may not work in the context of the problem at hand.

However, my problem is that we shouldn't just arbitrarily pick meanings out of thin air, that there is a general consensus of correct use among concepts. I shouldn't just pick my own meaning based on some conceptual motivation, that's part of the confusion of doing philosophy.

Finally, even outside of a particular theoretical problems words generally have meanings, or at least guides that suggest possible uses. So we might list a variety of definitions of the word game for example, and those definitions have uses that fit within certain language-games. My goal was to come up with certain generalized definitions that would be starting points for pointing out the objective nature of language.

These are all objectively true or false. They're all claims about an individuals belief's (their brain states) and can all be determined (in principle) as true or false — ChrisH

Assuming beliefs can be identified with brain states.

But okay, how about this one?

Sally: "Casablanca is the best movie ever made".
Fred, "Nope, it's clearly the Godfather."
Peter: "I did not like the Godfather. It insists upon itself."
Millenial: "Second and third Matrix movies were better than the first."

Could you examine their brain states to determine the relative merits of the movies mentioned?

However, my problem is that we shouldn't just arbitrarily pick meanings out of thin air, that there is a general consensus of correct use among concepts. — Sam26

Arbitrariness by consensus is still arbitrariness.

Arbitrariness by consensus is still arbitrariness. — StreetlightX

All languages are based on rules of use, so in that sense one doesn't just get to arbitrarily choose one's own meaning, no more that you would choose to move a piece in chess one way when the rules dictate another. The rules when set up may be arbitrary, but once set, like the rules of chess, you don't get to arbitrarily suspend the rules to suit your own particular view of the game. If you did you wouldn't be playing chess.

The same is true of language, if you just arbitrarily decided to use your own definition, you would not be playing the language-game by the rules. There are rules of use, i.e., the logic behind the uses of concepts. By the way, the following of those rules is what's objective about language. I can observe your actions to know if you're following the rules of the game. When I say "Slab," did you in fact bring the slab, objective observation.