Everything about The Subject-object Problem totally explained
The
subject-object problem is a longstanding
philosophical issue. It arises from the notion that the world consists of
objects (what is observed) which are
perceived or otherwise acted upon by
subjects (observers). This results in multiple questions regarding how subjects relate to objects.
Kant's "
Copernican revolution" was the inversion of the traditional relation between the subject of
knowledge and the object of that knowledge. Instead of the observed objects affecting the observing subject, the subject's constitution affects the way that the objects are observed. Following this
transcendental idealism theory, the possibility of knowledge was thus to be found in the structure of the subject itself, instead of in an
objective reality from which nothing can be said.
The omniscient perspective
By far the most common problem in discourse since
the Enlightenment is the assumption of the existence of a
God's eye view. That is, assuming that society can select a single
perspective and apply it to all events, without needing to take into account the varying
point of view of many
cognitive beings moving through
time and the fusion of this into one, omniscient, unified, perception of what "is".
E Prime is a proposed solution to this problem in the field of
General Semantics. This
objective perspective, as opposed to all others subjective points of view, is also what
Georg Lukacs refers to with the concept of "totality". Writers and critics of narrative prose call this view the
omniscient narrator, who appears to know everything about the story being told, including what all the characters are thinking, and usually speaks in the
third person.
In 19th and 20th Century philosophy
Immanuel Kant and especially his followers
Fichte,
Schelling and
Hegel raised the issue of the relationship between the subject and the object, or what perceives and what is perceived. Fichte reduced the notion of the self to the pure passive self that isn't really an object. This notion was later explored by
Husserl and by
Dilthey in his notion of Das Verstehen.
Karl Marx's philosophy of
dialectical materialism is founded on Hegel's doctrine of dialectics; although Marx, being concerned mostly with
economics and political matters, rejected Hegel's
idealism for
materialism while keeping the Hegelian dialectic.
1960s New Left thinkers like
Herbert Marcuse and the
Frankfurt School, while coming out of a Marxist background, found the
class struggle seemed irrelevant to current political issues. Racial, and later,
sexual politics were important matters of social debate at the time, leading the New Left to use
sex roles,
race, and similar
identity politics divisions as proxies for the
proletariat and the
bourgeois capitalism of orthodox Marxism.
A firm conviction that race and sex were subject to
political manipulation therefore became an article of faith for these Marxist revisionists. This opened the back door for a sort of linguistic, anti-materialist idealism. The doctrine of social construction took centre stage, as does the incorporation of
deconstruction and
critical theory. We are ultimately barred from certain knowledge of an outside world, if it exists, because all we know is in our mind, mediated by
language; and language is a social game and a social convention. Therefore, not only is "the personal political," but indeed, all of
science,
physics, and anything else that's the subject of human discourse can and must be politicized.
The popular names of concepts from physics and mathematics, from
Albert Einstein's
theory of relativity to the Heisenberg
uncertainty principle, were used as
metaphors, with the assurance that difficulty in observing subatomic particles translated into a universal,
epistemological malaise, and that Einstein's relativity somehow lent support to
moral relativism.
Those who accept these premises believe that in
ethics,
social science and
linguistics, the subject-object problem is a confusion resulting from a shifting, inconsistent or vague assignment of observer and observed, active and passive, status in a sentence. Depending on how one views language, and
mathematics as a language, this confusion may extend quite deeply into
philosophy of all kinds including that of
law, science and
mathematics itself.
In science
In physics
There are related concerns in
philosophy of physics where observers are known to affect a result, for example in
quantum mechanics, in a way which defies the conventional assignment of an object role to experimenter, with everything else as a subject. This can lead among other things to
confirmation bias.
In mathematics
Cognitive science of mathematics raises some similar concerns with
philosophy of mathematics. Among them, the assignment of objective status to mathematical objects as in
Platonism, although they're formalisms used in a linguistic fashion for communications between living beings, and thus subject to the same subject-object problems as other forms of such communication. This raises some concerns, dating back as far as
Eugene Wigner's
1960 observations on the matter, that what we call
foundations of mathematics and
cosmology may be not observable or discoverable absolutes, but rather, aspects of humanity and its
cognition.
Nick Bostrom in
2002 addressed this concern with a theory of
anthropic bias.
In clinical trials
One of the purposes of
blinding clinical trials is to avoid the introduction of bias caused by investigators beliefs about the therapy being tested influencing perceptions, measurements, and actions. Making effective decisions and ensuring patient care while investigators remain unaware of what treatment particular patients receive has been a continuing problem in the design of clinical trials.
The phenomenon of
adaptive designs - designs whose characteristics can change mid-trial based on the information obtained so far -- has created further problems in avoiding bias.
Susan Ellenberg,
Thomas Fleming, and
David DeMets expressed concern that using data monitoring committees to alter the parameters of a clinical trial through an adaptive design in a manner known to the investigators could introduce bias into the trial. Increasing the sample size, for example, could signal that the experimental product wasn't as efficacious as originally hoped. The authors expressed concern that participant-observer bias would need to be assessed and addressed in order to ensure the reliability of adaptive designs.
Other approaches
- Analytic philosophy discusses various aspects of the problem of subject and object such as the mind body problem, first-person versus third-person perspective and also issues of non-referential use of I presented by G. E. M. Anscombe.
- Robert M. Pirsig's philosophy of the Metaphysics of Quality is largely concerned with the subject-object problem.
- Sun Myung Moon's philosophy, Unification Thought, treats subject and object in a way different from classical ideas of Hegel and Marx.
- Philosopher Ken Wilber has written extensively on this, calling the omniscient view (or subject-object distinction) the fundamental modernist paradigm, and cataloging its effects on society, and in the way many subjects have been compressed into a "flat" view by this perspective
Further Information
Get more info on 'Subject-object Problem'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://subject-object_problem.totallyexplained.com">Subject-object problem Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
