I will have another go at this. Apologies for the facetious previous reply if it annoyed you. But I was rather hoping to establish a baseline claim for what would be acceptable as objective fact. The boiling point of water was one example picked at random but of course there are innummerable other examples that could have been chosen. But first of all, can you explain why you don’t think that this does constitute an example of an objective fact, or what you think is the problem with the term ‘objective’?
If I were Richard Rorty, I might say that it is an objective fact, but not a fact that demonstrates realism. The boiling point of water shows that we can make stable, reliable and objectively testable claims about the world. It doesn’t demonstrate that those claims correspond to reality independently of our descriptions of it. That’s the extra metaphysical step Rorty would reject. Thoughts?
Well, I have some, but I’m trying to establish some parameters with NoAxioms, so I’ll wait and see what he has to say.
Any wikipedia page on chemical substances lists their properties. No mention of any philosopher is made except historically, as an alchemist in search of the philosopher’s stone. 
These properties are critical to (say) separating mixtures. For example, water and alcohol can be unmixed based on their different boiling points.
Just my 2 cents
I have a hard time thinking of any examples that don’t come from mathematics, but one can get into weird self-referential statements such as ‘statement X is not an objective fact’, a statement that is worded as objective fact.
Point is, most statements we commonly make such as the one about water carry an implied assumption that it is this world that is being referenced, that it is true here. That implied reference being often forgotten, it becomes easy to confuse such statements as being objective, which they’re not if you think about it.
We can start with that, since perhaps we’re talking past each other. By objective, I mean not relative to any context. I cannot think of a context where the integers 2 and 3 do not add up to 5. It doesn’t seem conditional. Maybe I’m just not imaginative enough. But I can very much think of contexts (like a world with 2 spatial dimensions) where water does not have that boiling point, or where water is meaningful at all for that matter.
Wayfarer was kind enough to quote the original exchange, which yes, includes a pressure reference. The issue under contention is whether or not that fact is an objective one or not.
I think you’re using ‘objective’ differently here, since ‘about the world’ is a conditional reference. By objective, you might mean that any entity anywhere in this universe might measure that property of water, that it isn’t just something that works for me, such as my subjective experience of something.
I’m talking more objective vs relative, as opposed to say objective vs subjective, as is possibly being used by either of you.
Hey, thanks for taking the time to respond! I see more clearly now what you mean by “objective”, but I think you’re demanding rather more of objectivity than I would.
I agree that empirical objectivity isn’t absolute in the way you describe mathematical truth. The boiling point of water is conditional on pressure, temperature scale, etc. But I don’t think that prevents it from being an objective fact. Objectivity doesn’t require a proposition to be true independently of all possible contexts; it can mean that, given specified conditions, the result is independent of the particular observer or perspective.
In other words, “water boils at 100°C at 101.325 kPa” isn’t claiming that water boils at 100°C in every conceivable world or circumstance. It’s saying that under those conditions, this is what happens — and that it doesn’t depend on whether I, you, or anyone else performs the experiment.
There is a huge philosophical literature dealing with precisely the complications you’re pointing to. Philosophy of science has spent a great deal of time discussing the contextual, paradigmatic and theory-laden character of scientific knowledge — Kuhn, Polanyi and Feyerabend being some obvious examples. But I don’t think the conclusion is that we therefore have to abandon objectivity. Rather, it suggests that objectivity comes in degrees and operates within conditions of inquiry.
So perhaps we’re looking for something like a calibration of objectivity: what degree of context-dependence is compatible with calling something objectively true? My concern is that if “objective” means “true in every possible context”, then we’ve effectively defined empirical objectivity out of existence and left the term applicable almost exclusively to mathematics and logic.
It doesn’t have to be “turtles all the way down” for objectivity to be meaningful.
Fair. And there’s a school of thought that understands objectivity in terms of shared subjectivity, or intersubjective agreement.
I think someone like Rorty would say that objectivity isn’t agreement with reality as it exists in itself, but that which survives intersubjective criticism and justification. He probably wouldn’t like the term “shared subjectivity,” since that can imply a deeper distinction between subjective experience and an objective world waiting to be discovered a distinction his version of pragmatism seems to resist.
What about “Here is a hand”? Or “This post is in English”?
The word “objective” in “objective fact” is an odd obstruction, causing otherwise quote reasonable and sane folk to suddenly start to doubt themselves.
The magic of philosophy done poorly.
After your mention yesterday, I looked at the SEP on Rorty, although I don’t think I’ll pursue him.
My attitude has been shaped by Kant’s conviction that empirical realism and transcendental idealism are not in conflict. Kant’s empiricial realism maintained that sense objects are non-delusively real. They are not mere dreams, illusions, or subjective mental artifacts. You can bump into them, measure them, and verify their public, spatial-temporal existence. At the same time, his transcendental idealism is about the conditions of knowledge and the formative role of the mind in constitution of experience.
I think a lot of the confusion and controversy about these claims comes from the inability to handle the idea of degrees of reality. Modern philosophy tends to treat reality and existence as if they were synonymous, and consequently tends to force us into a binary: either something exists objectively, or it is merely subjective. Whereas classical phlosophy allowed for the idea that some things could be more or less real. (See recent medium essay Real but not Existent.)
I’m no Rorty expert and he’s a little too “poststructuralist” for some. I think Rorty shares some ground with Kant: the idea that we don’t simply perceive the world as it is in itself, independently of human cognition. But he doesn’t follow Kant in thinking there are universal, a priori structures of reason that determine how experience is organised. Rorty takes the Kantian insight but seems to take it further, rejecting the idea that there is some fixed framework underneath our different ways of describing the world. This itself is a complex area that would need some separate exploration and leads into contested space (like everything else).
Yes. I’m still a traditionalist compared to the likes of Rorty. I notice that he’s discussed in the beginning of Gerson’s Platonism and Naturalism, as being representative of how naturalism and Platonism are irreconciliable.
Yep. I guess Rorty’s almost the apotheosis of anti-essentialism.
A more nuanced understanding is always better. Yes the boiling point is relative to pressure and possibly other factors like presence of impurities e.g. ice melts at less than 0 degrees celsius when it has impurities. I recall reading about the definition of 1 meter - it’s the length of a metal rod kept somewhere im France and the temperature is specified since metals contract in the cold and expand in the heat. So when we speak of properties of substances we have to specify the setting.
Nevertheless properties like the valency of a substance remain constant across all environments. Valency being how reactive a substance is e.g. Hydrogen had a valency of 1 i.e. it forms a covalent bomd with (say) Oxygen by sharing 1 electron. Other propertiee like the mass of 1 molecule of a substance also remains constant (if we ignore isotopes).
Somehere in this particular discussion someone has missed the point.
@noAxioms I think the BP of a substance is objective because it is of the object. So water may boil at a different temperature on Mt. Everest but that’s water’s objective property in that setting.
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There is a complicating factor underlying many of these discussions about objectivity and truth. It is that we are in the postmodern period of history. Leaving aside whether you or I or anyone else here is actually arguing for postmodern philosophy, the fact is that the modern period (before the 1920s) tended to assume that objectivity was absolute, in some basic sense. Newton’s conception of space and time was a reailst conception — which was of course challenged by the publication of the Theory of Relativity and the notion of reference frames. And then Heisenberg et al come along in 1927 with the Uncertainty Principle, which was a fatal blow to scientific realism and the idea of the ‘mind-independence’ of the objects of scientific analysis. Things fell apart, the centre couldn’t hold.
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Oh! You’re referring to the paradigm shift in science: absolute \to relative, objective \to subjective. I can only agree with the experts and their experiments here. That’s why we have standards i.e. specifed settings for properties of substances. In my high school days we did kinematics where we completely ignored air friction. Life was simple.
I am also partial to the mind playing a bigger role in reality than classical science credits it for. Our fondness for objectivity cancels half of reality, subjectivity. Tempered of course by the realization that only a tiny fraction of the universe is matter, only a tiny fraction of matter is life, and only a tiny fraction of life has a mind.
although the spectacular lack of consensus amongst such experts also should be noted. The three best books I read on it - mainstream books all - have titles like ‘struggle for the soul of science’ and ‘what is real’ etc. I think it’s underestimated just how deep the non-understanding goes.
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That confusion arises when science meets philosophy. Philosophy, according to Wittgenstein, is the study of those assumptions that science takes for granted (metaphysics). Science is only interested in what works - this principle extends to philosophically relevant aspects of science I suppose. For example we can work with the boiling point of water in a particular setting to achieve many practical targets without worrying about whether the boiling point is objective or not.
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I did notice that we seemed to be talking past each other, so yes, definitions first. My usage of ‘objective’ seems to be a cumulation of my attempt to find a mind-independent definition of existence or reality. Both have always been relations to me, and that can be mind independent enough, but I wanted existence/realism independent of a relation, and failed, with the exception of mathematics and funny self-referential statements like ‘there are no objective truths’.
So I partly use ‘objective’ fact to mean ‘absolute’ (context free), but also mind-independent fact, and restricting the context to the one we see is a very mind-dependent move.
Semi-independent. ‘recent earthquake in Indonesia’ may be a case of intersubjective agreement. But only if the subjects in question also relate to each other. So somebody else with whom neither of us can interact might not agree on that fact.
First of all, performing the experiment is not why water boils at that temp. It’s epistemological is all. Secondly, I disagree with ‘anyone else’ since somebody in a world where the fine structure constant is slightly different would disagree. So sure, agreement among subjects that can interact. That’s how you’re using ‘objective’.
What does science really care? They want to know how this world works, how to predict and maybe explain (if it helps) what we see. Science cares very little about subjects with whom we cannot interact.
Agree with that, especially when it comes to science. The term has more pragmatic utility the way you define it. So maybe I need a stronger term to indicate what I’m interested in, which is mind independence (our science is only independent of any particular mind, but not independent of observers altogether) and non-relational ontology.
Never thought it was turtles. In an absolute sense, I find the set of ‘all there is, absolutely’ to be meaningless (and thus not really deservant of its own term). The whole point of my view is that if it’s meaningless, it’s pointless to posit it.
As for mind-independence, that gets asserted a lot, but it always seems to be ‘the apple exists to somebody else if not to me’.
It’s a matter of fact not opinion. To deny that there has been an earthquake is to be mistaken. (This is the kind of thing that @Banno thinks that I have been saying, but which I don’t actually say.)
Scientific analysis has shown that were the fundamental constants of the universe to vary slightly, matter could never have formed.
I think I can see what you’re saying, but I don’t believe that you’ve thought it through. You seem to be advocating a kind of collective solipsism — that objectivity is obtained by consensus, but without any basis in reality.
But when I said that, you disagreed with me!
So — on the one hand, you say that science is ‘not independent of observers altogether’ but then you also say you’ve given examples of ‘imagined things completely sans a point of view’. So I’m confused.
Question: are there any philosophers or philosophical works which you think articulate the general understanding that you’re trying to express? Because right now, I’m having trouble finding you on a map.
Well, you do say tings such as:
Might we agree that there is no perspective from which the eclipse did not occur?