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Subjectivity emphasizes an individual's having not just a passive relationship to the world and the sense impressions it causes, but also agency, an active engagement with that material. Agency might be thought to occur simply in the act of interpretation of sense data, making choices about how to allocate meanings to those data. Or it might be thought to occur in a stronger sense, acting upon the world and changing its organization to suit the subject's goals. In the latter case, a feedback loop of modified world - new sense data - new modification might be established, with open-ended consequences. Baldwinian evolution may be a candidate instance of such a feedback system



Social sciences




The following are examples of subjective experiences (all examples of qualia):

  • What the color red looks like to me;
  • What a musical tone sounds like to me;
  • What pleasure and pain feel like to me.

And their corresponding objective analogues:

  • The red surface;
  • The musical instrument producing oscillations in air;
  • The things that induce pleasure or pain.

The object is the thing perceived; the subject is the one who perceives.

Marx, Nietzsche and Freud are three 19th century philosophers who questionned the groundworks of the notion of a conscious subject, basement of the liberal theory of the social contract. In critical theory and psychology, subjectivity is also the actions or discourses that produce individuals or 'I'; the 'I' is the subject -- the observer.

Some theorists treat privileged access as a defining feature of subjectivity. One has privileged access to one's own qualia, as with the examples above, i.e. one and only one person has first-hand knowledge of that person's pain, experience of a musical tone, etc.

Epistemic subjectivity

The word subjectivity is also used to refer to the antithesis of objectivity as an epistemic virtue: one who judges according to personal feelings or intuitions, rather than according to objective observation, reasoning, and judgment, is judging subjectively.


Subjectivism is a philosophical tenet that accords primacy to subjective experiences. In an extreme form, it may hold that the nature and existence of every object depends only on someone's subjective awareness of it. One may consider the qualified empiricism of George Berkeley in this context, given his reliance on God as the prime mover of human perception.

Metaphysical subjectivism

Metaphysical subjectivism is the theory that perception creates reality, and that there is no underlying, true reality that exists independent of perception. One can also hold that it is consciousness rather than perception that creates reality. This is in contrast to metaphysical objectivism, which asserts that there is an objective reality which is perceived in different ways.

This holding should not be confused with the stance that "all is illusion" or that "there is no such thing as reality." Metaphysical subjectivists hold that reality is real enough, and that physical objects do exist. They conceive, however, that the nature of reality as related to a given consciousness unit is created and governed by that consciousness.

Subjectivism and panpsychism


In this way, though, subjectivism morphs into a related doctrine, panpsychism, the view that every objective fact has an inward or subjective aspect.


The invention of machines that can "see", "hear", or otherwise observe and record events provoked a thought experiment (offered by Winston Churchill, who is not otherwise known as a philosopher) that has created difficulties for subjectivists. Let us set up an automatic camera to record events in a place that no human (or other creature reasonably considered "conscious") can observe. Say that it is set inside a volcano, for example. The camera is later retrieved and its photographs, with date markings, are observed. Did the events recorded in the photographs really happen even though no one consciously observed them? Did the conscious observation of the photographs themselves somehow suddenly cause them to depict events that apparently happened at an earlier time?

One explanation of this scenario from a subjectivist perspective is that the events in the photographs didn't really happen at all. Only the photographs came into existence as the observer went to collect the results of their test.

This explanation fails to explain why the pictures would exist to be collected if they were not objectively present to be collected in the first place.

Ethical subjectivism

Ethical subjectivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences reduce to factual statements about the attitudes and/or conventions of individual people. An ethical subjectivist might propose, for example, that what it means for something to be morally right is just for it to be approved of. (This can lead to the view that different things are right according to each idiosyncratic moral outlook.) Another kind of ethical subjectivist might define "good" as "that which I desire".

A related view is that of conventionalism, which considers ethical sentences to be representations of the attitudes of a number of persons in a culture or society.

One implication of these views is that, unlike the moral skeptic or the non-cognitivist, the subjectivist thinks that ethical sentences, while relative or subjective, are nonetheless the kind of thing that can be true or false.

Subjectivism in probability

In probability, a subjectivism stands for the view that probabilities are simply degrees-of-belief by rational agents in a certain proposition, and which have no objective reality in and of themselves. For this kind of subjectivist, a phrase having to do with probability simply asserts the degree to which the subjective actor believes their assertion is true or false. As a consequence, a subjectivist has no problem with differing people giving different probabilities to an uncertain proposition, and all being correct. See Bayesianism.


Nietzsche's critique of the subject

Nietzsche has criticized the groundworks of the subject, rejecting the notion of substance (Heidegger later showed how subject came from the Greek "substance"). Self-identity is assured by conscience, as did John Locke show, which is, according to Nietzsche, a hypostasis of the body and the multiples forces composing it [1]. Nietzsche stated that the subject was a "grammatical fiction"; "there is no doer behind the doing". Later, Heidegger thought the Dasein as "Being-there", which must not be mistaken with a personal subject. These thinkers opened up the way for the deconstruction of the subject as a core-concept of metaphysics. Thinkers such as Althusser, Foucault or Bourdieu would diagnosticize the subject as a social construction. According to Althusser, the "subject" is an ideological construction (more exactly, constructed by the "Ideological State Apparatuses"). It is constituted through the process of interpellation; according to Foucault, it is the "effect" of power and "disciplines" (See Discipline and Punish: construction of the subject as student, soldier, "criminal", etc.).

See also





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