Yes, Things Can Be Subjective and Objective at the Same Time

Subjectivity and objectivity are opposites, right?

Subjective: personal, emotional, biased.

Objective: factual, neutral, reliable.

Wrong.

This split never really holds. Not in conversation, experience or even in science. And a while back, the philosopher John Searle pointed out why.

Searle’s trick: two kinds of subjectivity

Searle noticed that when people say something is “subjective,” they might mean one of two very different things:

• It is an experience, or

• It’s about someone’s experience

Similarly, “objective” can mean:

• It is independent of experience, or

• It’s about something independent of experience

So instead of just subjective vs objective, Searle gives us four types:

• An experience =

  Ontologically subjective (e.g. pain, sense data)

• About an experience =

  Epistemically subjective (e.g. opinion on a movie you saw)

• Independent of an experience = Ontologically objective (e.g. a chair)

• About things independent of on experience =

  Epistemically objective (e.g. an impartial news report without the writer’s bias )

So a headache is ontologically subjective. If no one feels it, it’s not there.

A film review is epistemically subjective. It’s about an experience, but the review itself is a public claim — something you can agree or disagree with.

A tree is ontologically objective. It’s still a tree even if you close your eyes.

A news article, if done properly, aims for epistemic objectivity — it’s a public-facing account of something that happened, but the writer’s experience is nowhere to be found.

This should already clear up stacks of confusion. But it also leaves room for a deeper point.

Why not both?

Due to the fact there are two types, subjectivity and objectivity are NOT mutually exclusive.

It can be an objectively true fact to say that someone is having a subjective feeling like a headache.

How so? Because the objective bit refers to the idea that someone ELSE’s headache does not depend on MY experience.

There’s all manner of unbiased and objective things we can say about people’s subjective states.

Rewind that if that seems odd. Because I see people get this wrong all day long.

For instance, it is objectively the case that my subjective experience is not identical to a cat’s. It is objectively true that at time of writing I’m experiencing the subjective feeling of typing on my fingers. I could go on.

That’s objectivity and subjectivity in perfect union, due to one use as ontological and one epistemic.

People writing on morality need to be especially careful to get this right. If they don’t invoke Searle, then one ought to be very slow to follow their takes on whether morality is objective and subjective. They may themselves not realise there’s two versions in play.

This isn’t just a philosophical trick. It’s a practical tool for not going crazy.

So next time someone uses ‘subjective’ or ‘objective’ in a sentence — tell them there’s two versions of each.

Working out which one is which is your ticket to sanity.