Understanding the Facts Makes All Knowledge Partly Subjective
Understanding the Facts Makes All Knowledge Partly Subjective
Mental maps and the oxymoron of pure objectivity
One source of humanistic pride is our ability to know what we’re talking about.
We assume that knowledge makes us godlike, compared to animals and inanimate things since we can understand what’s real and use the facts to our advantage. But what exactly is it to understand something, and does understanding limit objectivity?
Understanding as the Grasping of Meaning
To understand something is to “perceive its meaning” or to “grasp its implications or importance,” possibly due to thorough familiarity with the thing. There are degrees of understanding. For instance, those who are fluent in English will know what the word “skydiving” means, but unless they’ve been skydiving, which would give them practical experience of jumping out of an airplane, their knowledge will be superficial. They’ll understand the word but not what it’s like to perform the act itself.
The word “understand,” though, is odd. The root idea seems to be the metaphor that you stand under what you’re familiar with in that your concept or experience of it acts like scaffolding that can mentally reconstruct the understood thing in your mind. The word “stand” derives from Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit words meaning “to make stand” or to erect, as in the transitive case of standing up a tent. Just as scaffolding holds up a building, your mind can seem to hold up what it’s representing. Assuming you understand what you’re dealing with, your knowledge can recreate or at least work intelligently with the thing.
This practical aspect of understanding is hinted at in the idiom of “grasping” a meaning. Your conception of “skydiving” might be confused if you think the word refers to rain which seems to dive from the sky. In that case, you’d perceive a meaning, but you wouldn’t grasp the meaning. Your hand, as it were, would slip off the word in any discussion of skydiving, which would reveal your confusion. To grasp a meaning is to have a reliable, tested, productive sense of it. You’d have a firm grasp if you’ve mastered the subject, if you were a skydiving instructor, for example.
The Subjective Use of Mental Maps
All of which counts against a certain naïve notion of objectivity, and thus against an extreme form of humanistic pride. Crucially, semantic meanings are typically partial and selective and are based in the best cases on a mental map that simplifies a phenomenon to fit the conception of it into our projects, methods, cultures, and worldviews.
A squirrel has no sense of what “skydiving” entails. A nonskydiving human would have some minimal sense of the matter. A skydiver would have a deeper understanding of it, while a physicist would have a broader perspective on the mechanics of jumping out of an airplane. An enlightened mystic, a transhuman, or a vastly superior, extraterrestrial intellect might have a profounder understanding of the act’s reality, one that views the act in a cosmic context that most of us can barely fathom.
The meaning of “skydiving” is thus subjective in lots of ways. It’s not that skydiving doesn’t exist or that the word’s meaning is arbitrary or irrelevant to the facts. It’s just that any real event is subject to multiple uses which are facilitated by different interpretations or conceptual maps. Some maps are fine-grained while others are synoptic. Some maps presuppose a certain agenda while others pursue a contrary one.
An environmentalist views politics very differently than does a rapacious capitalist. There’s the reality of politics, and then there’s the matter of understanding politics, of grasping the fact’s meaning and of being able to mentally map it, giving you the ability, as it were, to support the fact with your intelligent representations.
Knowledge, then, is partly objective and partly subjective, which means any naïve notion that we can ever be purely objective is wrongheaded. Roughly speaking, knowledge is justified true belief. Your belief needs to be true but not accidentally so, which means the belief should follow from a mental map. To give your reasons for believing that politics is amoral, for example, is to retrace why you believe as much based on your relevant map of the conceptual territory.
If your map tracks reality, politics tends to be amoral, and there’s broad intersubjective agreement on the matter, which enables you to navigate discussions of politics because your personal map would match the collective one, we’d say your belief is true and that you know what you’re talking about.
Why “Pure Objectivity” Is Oxymoronic
Notice that the appeal to intersubjective agreement is pragmatic rather than strictly logical since it’s possible for the majority to be mistaken, which is why deferring to popular conceptions can be fallacious. The utility of being on the same page as everyone else who speaks your language is taken as an indicator but not as a guarantor of truth.
In Nazi Germany you might have been wise to agree with certain racial prejudices, but that social convention needn’t have had any bearing on reality. In certain countries in the 1930s you’d have been credited with knowing for a fact that some “races” are inherently inferior to others. But eventually, even those countries realized that that so-called racist knowledge was bogus and pseudoscientific. The dictatorial method of instilling nationalist unity pales as a means of acquiring knowledge, compared to the less political, scientific method of ferreting out the real facts of the matter.
Even when a belief is universal rather than a mere cultural product, that too is no guarantor of truth since our entire species develops and can change its mind, as it were. A common belief may be based on universal human experience, but that experience may derive as much from instincts or from our neural hardware, as from the bare facts in question. This was the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s point about what he called “transcendental idealism”: the best we can know is what’s true for our type of knower, given the conditions of possible experience for humans which might differ from those of other species or from future stages of ours.
There are, then, such things as planes, people, and parachutes, and there’s a difference between speaking objectively about the act of jumping out of a plane and speaking subjectively about how that act makes you feel. To say that skydiving is that act itself is objective, whereas saying that skydiving is scary is subjective. But that difference is one of degree, not one of kind.
To speak of your emotional reaction to skydiving is to talk about the act’s impact on you personally, and your reaction may be unique to you, in which case there are billions of grossly subjective interpretations of skydiving.
To speak more neutrally of skydiving as just the act of jumping out of a plane with a parachute is to defer to the conventional — which is to say broader — conceptions on which perhaps everyone in our species may agree. That collective understanding, however, may still depart from the real fact of what skydiving fundamentally is. Kant called this kind of fundamental, essential, purely objective fact “noumenal,” and his point was that the notion that anyone could understand such a fact is oxymoronic. To understand a fact is to apply a mental map or concept and thus necessarily to reduce, simplify, or idealize the subject matter.
For example, the concept of skydiving that would pass for a relatively neutral one in the late-industrial West is that skydiving is recreational, whereas other cultures might regard the act as reckless and arrogant, as a symptom of a disease of consumerism spread by rogue capitalism. Often, presuppositions are hidden in so-called neutral, purely objective conceptions. The more you scrutinize a concept, the more you uncover presuppositions that make the concept at least partly subjective or expressive of a viewpoint that’s independent of the concept’s external content.
Indeed, clarifying concepts in that way is largely the task of analytic philosophy.
Mysticism and Science
Is there such a thing, then, as knowledge without understanding and thus without any substantive subjective framing?
Suppose a mystic has a religious experience of how everything in nature is united in a divine whole. But the mystic has no map of that unity and thus can’t explain exactly how everything’s really one. The epiphany is ineffable.
Her monistic belief therefore won’t count as knowledge because even though her belief might be based on her experience rather than on a mental map, that experience is private and can’t be publicly confirmed. Perhaps if everyone meditated in the same way, we’d all have the same self-transformative experience of oneness, but would we know that that experience reveals the nature of reality rather than a trick of our brains?
Even if we credit the mystic as having practical rather than propositional knowledge, the mystic will lack understanding of the oneness of reality precisely to the extent that she lacks a mental map of the oneness. There can be no such map because a perfectly complete map that encompasses everything in the universe would be as complex as that vast terrain, which would defeat the point of using the terrain by mapping it.
What we come to appreciate, then, is that knowledge itself may have a purpose or a function. A mystic will say that rational knowledge misleads by distracting us from the purity of inner experience, whereas a naturalistic philosopher will say that the purpose of knowledge is to enable our species to flourish by mastering our environment.
Scientists pursue that latter purpose with their method of testing hypotheses with experiments. That method is likely the height of human objectivity since science eliminates personal and cultural biases, allowing the natural facts to speak as much as possible for themselves, as it were. The scientist observes the data in an experiment that’s carefully designed to control the variables.
But perceiving a real, causal pattern isn’t the same as understanding how the pattern came to be or what the pattern ultimately is. Thus, scientists seek to explain the data, and they assess possible explanations based on two main criteria:
Has the explanation survived tests that could have falsified it?
Does the explanation advance the institution of science by excelling in ways that scientists care about? That is, is the explanation simple, fruitful, conservative, and beautiful?
After all, sometimes scientists are faced with multiple hypotheses that can equally well account for the same data. Deciding between them calls, then, for a value judgment, as Thomas Kuhn explained in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Of course, scientific values are supposed to help indicate the truth, but they also testify to the character of the scientific institution, and to the humanistic mindset that’s antagonistic towards nature. In short, the best scientific explanations are also the most empowering ones, and whether such useful explanations are those that have the deepest contact with reality isn’t self-evident.
Thus, even scientific knowledge isn’t perfectly objective because science is an institution that aims to understand nature in a way that increases human advantages. Rational, humanistic values help shape the best scientific map of nature, which is to say that scientists work with the ideology of secular humanism. Thus, to understand the world scientifically is to adopt that Promethean, Faustian, and even Luciferian standpoint. That makes science partly subjective rather than perfectly neutral.
We can conclude, then, that understanding the facts does indeed constrain objectivity. There is a difference between objectivity and subjectivity, but it’s one of degree. We’re objective when we maximize our cognitive aperture to allow the data to enter our thinking. But possessing a data set isn’t the same as understanding what the data mean. For that you need to understand the facts, which calls for a subjective (personal, cultural, historical, or species-wide) imposition on what the outer world brings to bear.