Imagine some variety of art for which it happens that all humans agree on the merits of any given instance. Is this picture more beautiful than that one? Everyone gives the same answer. No one knows exactly what it is about the art that they’re assessing, though.
Would you consider judgements about these artworks to be just the same as ones about physics? I don’t think I would. For instance, suppose we learned that we were soon to be visited by intelligent aliens. I would be much more willing to bet that the aliens would agree with me about the answer to “what will happen when I put these magnets and little iron balls in such-and-such a configuration?” than about the answer to “how beautiful is this picture?”. Even if literally all human beings agree about the latter.
I don’t know whether Gordon would take the same view. But for me this seems to point to a sense in which physics is “more objective” than artistic judgement, in a way that doesn’t just come down to how reliable the intersubjective agreement is.
Gordon does say
That’s the point of physics: to model reality. [...] the art functions are loosely constrained while the physics functions are highly constrained.
and it seems to me that this (and not the degree of intersubjective agreement) is what makes physics “objective” where art is “subjective”. Whereas Gordon seems to be claiming that actually “objective” just means “very high intersubjective agreement” and the only way in which “the point of physics” and the degree of constraint matter is by affecting how much intersubjective agreement there is. And I think this is just plain wrong.
(A family of counterexamples in the other direction, less clear-cut but not requiring a counterfactual about an actually-nonexistent art form: pick any scientific topic that has become highly politicized. How effective are masks, or vaccines, or ivermectin, against COVID-19? How safe is it to give puberty-blocking drugs to gender-dysphoric preadolescents? What should we expect to happen to termperatures across the world over the next 50 years, for any given pattern of industrial activity? I claim that these questions are more like physics than art, in terms of how “objective” their answers are; more like art than physics, in terms of intersubjective agreement. Again, the point is that my notion of “objectivity”, which may or may not match Gordon’s but I am pretty confident is a reasonable one, plainly diverges in these cases from intersubjective agreement, and I think this is good reason to think that objectivity and intersubjective agreement are different things.)
Imagine some variety of art for which it happens that all humans agree on the merits of any given instance. Is this picture more beautiful than that one? Everyone gives the same answer. No one knows exactly what it is about the art that they’re assessing, though.
Would you consider judgements about these artworks to be just the same as ones about physics?
In what sense? Clearly they aren’t the same because they’re judgements about different things grounded in different assessment functions. In this scenario everyone thinking some art is good is still grounded in what people like. That’s still different from being grounded in a function based on what best describes what we observe. That your hypothetical work of art produces high intersubjective agreement doesn’t suddenly make it the same as the situation with physics, just makes it more like it in one respect.
Whereas Gordon seems to be claiming that actually “objective” just means “very high intersubjective agreement” and the only way in which “the point of physics” and the degree of constraint matter is by affecting how much intersubjective agreement there is. And I think this is just plain wrong.
You’ve misunderstood me. The point of physics, as I say, is to have a model of the world that explains and predicts reality. High intersubjective agreement is the phenomenon that gives the illusion of objectivity.
I agree that my hypothetical artform is not the same as physics. That was rather my point: it seems (maybe I have misunderstood?) that you’re saying either that when we say “X is objective” what we really mean is “X has extremely high intersubjective agreement”, or else that what causes us to say “X is objective” is extremely high intersubjective agreement; and I think both of those are just wrong, and so I gave (what seems to me to be) a hypothetical example in which there is extremely high intersubjective agreement but I would not be at all inclined to call it objective.
You say “You’ve misunderstood me” but if there is a specific thing where you think I think you said X but actually you meant Y, I haven’t been able to work out what that thing is, what X is, and what Y is.
… Oh, maybe you think I’m accusing you of saying that physics being about trying to model the world matters literally only because that leads to high intersubjective agreement; of course I don’t think you think that and I apologize if I gave that impression. What I think (perhaps wrongly?) is that the only way that feature of physics matters for determining how “objective” physics is is by making there be strong intersubjective agreement.
It would help me (and maybe others? I don’t know) if you could clarify a few specific things.
There’s (at least potentially) a distinction between what something means and what actually makes people say it. I think you are saying that what makes people call things objective is the presence of good intersubjective agreement, and that actually e.g. physics is not more “objective” than art but merely seems so because it has good intersubjective agreement. Is that right?
If so: what exactly do you mean by “objective”? Like some other commenters here (tailcalled, TekhneMakre) I am concerned that you’re defining “objective” in a way that makes it (fairly uncontroversially) not apply to anything, and it seems to me that there are plausible ways to understand “objective” that make it apply more to things commonly thought of as objective and less to things commonly thought of as subjective, in which case I think that might be a better way to use the word. But I’m not sure, because I don’t know quite what you mean by “objective”. (It seems like you mean something with the property that “theories of physics are in our heads” implies “physics is not objective”, for instance. But that doesn’t really nail it down.)
When I say “physics is objective” (actually I would generally not use those words, but they’ll do for now) what I think I mean is something to do with physics being grounded in the external world, and something to do with my opinion that if aliens with very different mental architecture turned up they would none the less have quite similar physics, at least to the extent that it would make similar predictions and quite likely in its actual conceptual structure, and really not very much to do with intersubjective agreement. Do you think I am just deluding myself about what’s going on in my head when I say that physics is more objective than art, and that actually all I’m doing is comparing levels of intersubjective agreement? Or what?
(I do think that intersubjective agreement is relevant. The way it’s relevant is that what-I’m-calling-objectivity is one possible explanation for intersubjective agreement, so strong intersubjective agreement is evidence of what-I’m-calling-objectivity. But it’s not the only possible explanation, and it’s far from being proof of objectivity, and it certainly isn’t what “objectivity” means.)
1. There’s (at least potentially) a distinction between what something means and what actually makes people say it. I think you are saying that what makes people call things objective is the presence of good intersubjective agreement, and that actually e.g. physics is not more “objective” than art but merely seems so because it has good intersubjective agreement. Is that right?
Yes, for reasons that might seem obvious after I answer the next question.
2. If so: what exactly do you mean by “objective”? Like some other commenters here (tailcalled, TekhneMakre) I am concerned that you’re defining “objective” in a way that makes it (fairly uncontroversially) not apply to anything, and it seems to me that there are plausible ways to understand “objective” that make it apply more to things commonly thought of as objective and less to things commonly thought of as subjective, in which case I think that might be a better way to use the word. But I’m not sure, because I don’t know quite what you mean by “objective”. (It seems like you mean something with the property that “theories of physics are in our heads” implies “physics is not objective”, for instance. But that doesn’t really nail it down.)
I generally think we should taboo objective because I don’t think there’s agreement on the definition. I have two definitions in mind, and I think there’s a motte and bailey situation going on with them.
Definition 1: not dependent on a mind/observer for existence
Definition 2: stuff that seems to be the same for all known observers
Definition 1 is something like the strong version of “objective”. Definition 2 is a weak version that’s equivalent to a definition for “intersubjective consensus”.
Definition 2 is the thing that’s defensible, but Definition 1 is what some people want to mean by “objective”, yet nothing exists independent of minds because existence is a property of ontology (the map) not reality (the territory). I say more about this fine distinction between existence and being here.
3. When I say “physics is objective” (actually I would generally not use those words, but they’ll do for now) what I think I mean is something to do with physics being grounded in the external world, and something to do with my opinion that if aliens with very different mental architecture turned up they would none the less have quite similar physics, at least to the extent that it would make similar predictions and quite likely in its actual conceptual structure, and really not very much to do with intersubjective agreement. Do you think I am just deluding myself about what’s going on in my head when I say that physics is more objective than art, and that actually all I’m doing is comparing levels of intersubjective agreement? Or what?
(I do think that intersubjective agreement is relevant. The way it’s relevant is that what-I’m-calling-objectivity is one possible explanation for intersubjective agreement, so strong intersubjective agreement is evidence of what-I’m-calling-objectivity. But it’s not the only possible explanation, and it’s far from being proof of objectivity, and it certainly isn’t what “objectivity” means.)
I think somehow you’ve come to believe there is evidence to suggest there’s an external reality and you’re drawing conclusions about other things based on having assumed there’s an external reality independent of you as an observer.
For comparison I would use reality/”the world” to point directly to experience. Anything else we think we know is known only through that experience, and that includes any claims we might make to the existence of external reality. But in an important sense external reality, however real it seems, is not real because we only know about it indirectly as mediated by our experience and thus its existence is a claim not an assumption.
Your distinction between “existence” and “being” seems … idiosyncratic, and it seems to me that you should probably split your “definition 1” into definitions 1a (not dependent on a mind/observer for existence) and 1b (not dependent on a mind/observer for being). In so far as I understand the distinction you are making (which may not be far enough) it seems to me that nothing is objective-1a by definition (because you take “existence” to be a property of people’s ideas) but some things might be objective-1b. I don’t think anyone means objective-2 when they say “objective”, and I think your insistence that they do is just a mistake.
I think the way the mistake arises is that, given other assumptions you make, what other people mean by “objective” is crazy, and so it feels to you as if saying they mean objective-2 is being charitable, replacing a crazy notion with one that’s wrong but at least makes sense. Whereas, to those who make different assumptions, what you’re doing looks highly uncharitable, replacing a perfectly reasonable notion with one that’s wrong. (This is a very common phenomenon.)
Specifically, of course the assumption you make and they don’t is something along the lines of “all talk of ‘reality’ and ‘the external world’ as something separate from our experience is nonsense”. I’m sure it’s true that nothing is objective given solipsism, but I find it difficult to care because I find solipsism unconvincing, your version (sorry!) as much so as any other.
(I expect you don’t like having your position called solipsism. I’m going to call it that anyway. Sorry.)
Also, even given solipsism, I think your definition of “objective” makes it a useless word: by definition, nothing is “objective”. I—like you—generally prefer to avoid the word, precisely because different people mean different things by it and it causes confusion; but I do think there’s a useful concept somewhere in its vicinity; there really is a useful distinction between physics and (hypothetical) highly-intersubjectively-consistent art, and that distinction has something to do with what people commonly mean by “objective”. An analogy (borrowing on a nice little essay by David Chalmers from when “The Matrix” first came out): suppose it turns out that we are all brains in vats, living in a painstakingly constructed simulated world; then it is still true, in a useful sense, that black swans are real and unicorns aren’t, even though in another sense “nothing inside the simulation is real”. If we-in-the-Matrix explore our world very thoroughly, we will find black swans but we will never find unicorns. Similarly: it’s not just that physics is agreed on by (in some sense) everyone; it’s also that it seems clear that it would be agreed on by aliens, AIs, archangels, etc., whereas we should expect those beings to have quite different taste in art from ours, and this points to an important difference between physics and art, and the word “objective” isn’t such a bad word for it, even if in some sense “nothing is objective”.
(Relatedly: even though we only know about “reality” via our experiences, I claim that there is a useful distinction between the things I am seeing right now and the things I might see if I were on a large dose of hallucinogens, and words like “real” and “objective” are useful ways to point at that distinction. This isn’t really any different from e.g. saying “the monster is behind the building” when talking about a computer game, even though “really” the monster and building are both being displayed on the same flat surface.)
I think, based on this reply, you basically get my point, we’re just quibbling about some details.
I take this sort of hard line stance on “objective” because surprisingly many people, when pressed, turn out to be naive realists, including a whole bunch of rationalists I’ve interacted with over the years. So if I seem maximally uncharitable it’s because there’s a bunch of folks out there who are failing to grasp the point I make in this point under any terms.
Imagine some variety of art for which it happens that all humans agree on the merits of any given instance. Is this picture more beautiful than that one? Everyone gives the same answer. No one knows exactly what it is about the art that they’re assessing, though.
Would you consider judgements about these artworks to be just the same as ones about physics? I don’t think I would. For instance, suppose we learned that we were soon to be visited by intelligent aliens. I would be much more willing to bet that the aliens would agree with me about the answer to “what will happen when I put these magnets and little iron balls in such-and-such a configuration?” than about the answer to “how beautiful is this picture?”. Even if literally all human beings agree about the latter.
I don’t know whether Gordon would take the same view. But for me this seems to point to a sense in which physics is “more objective” than artistic judgement, in a way that doesn’t just come down to how reliable the intersubjective agreement is.
Gordon does say
and it seems to me that this (and not the degree of intersubjective agreement) is what makes physics “objective” where art is “subjective”. Whereas Gordon seems to be claiming that actually “objective” just means “very high intersubjective agreement” and the only way in which “the point of physics” and the degree of constraint matter is by affecting how much intersubjective agreement there is. And I think this is just plain wrong.
(A family of counterexamples in the other direction, less clear-cut but not requiring a counterfactual about an actually-nonexistent art form: pick any scientific topic that has become highly politicized. How effective are masks, or vaccines, or ivermectin, against COVID-19? How safe is it to give puberty-blocking drugs to gender-dysphoric preadolescents? What should we expect to happen to termperatures across the world over the next 50 years, for any given pattern of industrial activity? I claim that these questions are more like physics than art, in terms of how “objective” their answers are; more like art than physics, in terms of intersubjective agreement. Again, the point is that my notion of “objectivity”, which may or may not match Gordon’s but I am pretty confident is a reasonable one, plainly diverges in these cases from intersubjective agreement, and I think this is good reason to think that objectivity and intersubjective agreement are different things.)
In what sense? Clearly they aren’t the same because they’re judgements about different things grounded in different assessment functions. In this scenario everyone thinking some art is good is still grounded in what people like. That’s still different from being grounded in a function based on what best describes what we observe. That your hypothetical work of art produces high intersubjective agreement doesn’t suddenly make it the same as the situation with physics, just makes it more like it in one respect.
You’ve misunderstood me. The point of physics, as I say, is to have a model of the world that explains and predicts reality. High intersubjective agreement is the phenomenon that gives the illusion of objectivity.
I agree that my hypothetical artform is not the same as physics. That was rather my point: it seems (maybe I have misunderstood?) that you’re saying either that when we say “X is objective” what we really mean is “X has extremely high intersubjective agreement”, or else that what causes us to say “X is objective” is extremely high intersubjective agreement; and I think both of those are just wrong, and so I gave (what seems to me to be) a hypothetical example in which there is extremely high intersubjective agreement but I would not be at all inclined to call it objective.
You say “You’ve misunderstood me” but if there is a specific thing where you think I think you said X but actually you meant Y, I haven’t been able to work out what that thing is, what X is, and what Y is.
… Oh, maybe you think I’m accusing you of saying that physics being about trying to model the world matters literally only because that leads to high intersubjective agreement; of course I don’t think you think that and I apologize if I gave that impression. What I think (perhaps wrongly?) is that the only way that feature of physics matters for determining how “objective” physics is is by making there be strong intersubjective agreement.
It would help me (and maybe others? I don’t know) if you could clarify a few specific things.
There’s (at least potentially) a distinction between what something means and what actually makes people say it. I think you are saying that what makes people call things objective is the presence of good intersubjective agreement, and that actually e.g. physics is not more “objective” than art but merely seems so because it has good intersubjective agreement. Is that right?
If so: what exactly do you mean by “objective”? Like some other commenters here (tailcalled, TekhneMakre) I am concerned that you’re defining “objective” in a way that makes it (fairly uncontroversially) not apply to anything, and it seems to me that there are plausible ways to understand “objective” that make it apply more to things commonly thought of as objective and less to things commonly thought of as subjective, in which case I think that might be a better way to use the word. But I’m not sure, because I don’t know quite what you mean by “objective”. (It seems like you mean something with the property that “theories of physics are in our heads” implies “physics is not objective”, for instance. But that doesn’t really nail it down.)
When I say “physics is objective” (actually I would generally not use those words, but they’ll do for now) what I think I mean is something to do with physics being grounded in the external world, and something to do with my opinion that if aliens with very different mental architecture turned up they would none the less have quite similar physics, at least to the extent that it would make similar predictions and quite likely in its actual conceptual structure, and really not very much to do with intersubjective agreement. Do you think I am just deluding myself about what’s going on in my head when I say that physics is more objective than art, and that actually all I’m doing is comparing levels of intersubjective agreement? Or what?
(I do think that intersubjective agreement is relevant. The way it’s relevant is that what-I’m-calling-objectivity is one possible explanation for intersubjective agreement, so strong intersubjective agreement is evidence of what-I’m-calling-objectivity. But it’s not the only possible explanation, and it’s far from being proof of objectivity, and it certainly isn’t what “objectivity” means.)
Yes, for reasons that might seem obvious after I answer the next question.
I generally think we should taboo objective because I don’t think there’s agreement on the definition. I have two definitions in mind, and I think there’s a motte and bailey situation going on with them.
Definition 1: not dependent on a mind/observer for existence
Definition 2: stuff that seems to be the same for all known observers
Definition 1 is something like the strong version of “objective”. Definition 2 is a weak version that’s equivalent to a definition for “intersubjective consensus”.
Definition 2 is the thing that’s defensible, but Definition 1 is what some people want to mean by “objective”, yet nothing exists independent of minds because existence is a property of ontology (the map) not reality (the territory). I say more about this fine distinction between existence and being here.
I think somehow you’ve come to believe there is evidence to suggest there’s an external reality and you’re drawing conclusions about other things based on having assumed there’s an external reality independent of you as an observer.
For comparison I would use reality/”the world” to point directly to experience. Anything else we think we know is known only through that experience, and that includes any claims we might make to the existence of external reality. But in an important sense external reality, however real it seems, is not real because we only know about it indirectly as mediated by our experience and thus its existence is a claim not an assumption.
Your distinction between “existence” and “being” seems … idiosyncratic, and it seems to me that you should probably split your “definition 1” into definitions 1a (not dependent on a mind/observer for existence) and 1b (not dependent on a mind/observer for being). In so far as I understand the distinction you are making (which may not be far enough) it seems to me that nothing is objective-1a by definition (because you take “existence” to be a property of people’s ideas) but some things might be objective-1b. I don’t think anyone means objective-2 when they say “objective”, and I think your insistence that they do is just a mistake.
I think the way the mistake arises is that, given other assumptions you make, what other people mean by “objective” is crazy, and so it feels to you as if saying they mean objective-2 is being charitable, replacing a crazy notion with one that’s wrong but at least makes sense. Whereas, to those who make different assumptions, what you’re doing looks highly uncharitable, replacing a perfectly reasonable notion with one that’s wrong. (This is a very common phenomenon.)
Specifically, of course the assumption you make and they don’t is something along the lines of “all talk of ‘reality’ and ‘the external world’ as something separate from our experience is nonsense”. I’m sure it’s true that nothing is objective given solipsism, but I find it difficult to care because I find solipsism unconvincing, your version (sorry!) as much so as any other.
(I expect you don’t like having your position called solipsism. I’m going to call it that anyway. Sorry.)
Also, even given solipsism, I think your definition of “objective” makes it a useless word: by definition, nothing is “objective”. I—like you—generally prefer to avoid the word, precisely because different people mean different things by it and it causes confusion; but I do think there’s a useful concept somewhere in its vicinity; there really is a useful distinction between physics and (hypothetical) highly-intersubjectively-consistent art, and that distinction has something to do with what people commonly mean by “objective”. An analogy (borrowing on a nice little essay by David Chalmers from when “The Matrix” first came out): suppose it turns out that we are all brains in vats, living in a painstakingly constructed simulated world; then it is still true, in a useful sense, that black swans are real and unicorns aren’t, even though in another sense “nothing inside the simulation is real”. If we-in-the-Matrix explore our world very thoroughly, we will find black swans but we will never find unicorns. Similarly: it’s not just that physics is agreed on by (in some sense) everyone; it’s also that it seems clear that it would be agreed on by aliens, AIs, archangels, etc., whereas we should expect those beings to have quite different taste in art from ours, and this points to an important difference between physics and art, and the word “objective” isn’t such a bad word for it, even if in some sense “nothing is objective”.
(Relatedly: even though we only know about “reality” via our experiences, I claim that there is a useful distinction between the things I am seeing right now and the things I might see if I were on a large dose of hallucinogens, and words like “real” and “objective” are useful ways to point at that distinction. This isn’t really any different from e.g. saying “the monster is behind the building” when talking about a computer game, even though “really” the monster and building are both being displayed on the same flat surface.)
I think, based on this reply, you basically get my point, we’re just quibbling about some details.
I take this sort of hard line stance on “objective” because surprisingly many people, when pressed, turn out to be naive realists, including a whole bunch of rationalists I’ve interacted with over the years. So if I seem maximally uncharitable it’s because there’s a bunch of folks out there who are failing to grasp the point I make in this point under any terms.
If “objective” means ” less subjective than art”, that argument works, but if it means “not subjective at all”, it doesn’t.