Is objectivity all in the mind?
Many will not believe when one says that the statement, “the sky appears blue to the human eye”, will probably not be true in two-thousand-something years. Maybe that's because, by then, we’ve polluted the planet so much that the sky will turn green. Maybe we’ll have developed contact lenses that give us the ability to see the entire light emission spectrum. The reason for skepticism isn’t because these things aren’t possible, it’s because they seem so impossible – and the inversion of that impossibility is what many will take to be “true”. In this essay, I will argue that objectivity is not in the mind at all, but the way we access objectivity and put it to use is through truth.
For this essay, I define “objectivity” as the state or condition of being entirely independent of any perceiver’s context, interpretation, or conceptual framework; the existence and/or occurrence of things as they are, apart from any assignment of meaning or value by a subject. Any objective “object” is both in-and-of-itself and is everything-of-itself: the object and its meaning exists within in its own capacity, while also having all the potentialities of what it can be. This state of containing everything it can be is what I will refer to as absoluteness. In contrast, “truth” is understood as the perceived concept of an object that a perceiver deems correct or agrees with, where the criteria for such an agreement is context-dependent—shaped by culture, language, and shared experience. The relationship between truth and objectivity manifests itself in commonalities, agreements two people can make upon a certain object that are unquestionably so.
This framework, however, faces some significant challenges. Some will argue that making truth entirely context-dependent reduces it to mere opinion, while claiming objectivity is mind-independent raises the problem of how we could ever know or refer to such a reality, since all our access is filtered by perception. To address these challenges, I will first examine the notion of scientific objectivity, drawing primarily on Reiss and Sprenger’s entry on the topic, which states that scientific objectivity is not absolute: scientific facts are always approached through theories, paradigms, and community standards, making science itself a “human” context-dependent practice. I will use this analysis to show how, even in science, what we call “facts” or “truths” are deeply shaped by context, and that the scientific ideal of pure objectivity remains aspirational rather than attainable. I will argue that, while objectivity necessitates the existence of a state of absoluteness about the object, our truths—including scientific ones—are mediated by context. This approach will clarify the relationship between objectivity and truth, and demonstrate why objectivity is not “all in the mind”, even when our only access to it is through the frameworks we construct.
I will also consider how we access and interpret objective reality through language, drawing on how language not only gives us a pre-built structure (based on the experiences that the users/creators of the language have), but also shapes our own realities. Language, much like science, is not a device to convey nor discover a mind-independent reality of absoluteness. Instead, language is another medium of agreement, a device used to establish an agreeable reality that has truthful and context-laden building blocks.
Scientific Objectivity
In Reiss and Sprenger’s entry on “Scientific Objectivity”, we get the first taste of where we derive objectivity from: “The contents of an individual’s experiences vary greatly with his perspective... While the experiences vary, there seems to be something that remains constant” (Reiss & Sprenger, 2020). Clearly, there is some commonality between what person A sees and what I see if we’re looking at the same thing: and in that case, the heart of the problem is why we can see that thing and agree upon its “thing-ness”. To most, science is what scratches the surface of this supposed “objective reality” – if humanity can understand reactions and manipulate particles and atoms at such an intricate level then surely we have (or are at least working towards) the reality? Yet, as Reiss and Sprenger make clear, the very success of scientific manipulation of our world does not guarantee that we are uncovering an absolute, mind-independent reality. While it’s tempting to infer that we are “getting reality right,” this inference overlooks the fact that scientific knowledge is itself context-dependent. Scientific paradigms, as Thomas Kuhn famously argued, are not unbiased windows onto the world but socially structured frameworks that determine what counts as a fact, what questions are meaningful, and even what phenomena are observable: “Where a Ptolemaic astronomer like Tycho Brahe sees a sun setting behind the horizon, a Copernican astronomer like Johannes Kepler sees the horizon moving up to a stationary sun” (Reiss & Sprenger, 2020). When a new paradigm emerges—such as the electron’s quantum mechanical model succeeding Niels Bohr’s simpler one—it does not simply add new facts to an ever-growing, absolute picture of reality. Instead, it often reinterprets or disregards elements of the previous paradigm, exposing their limitations or refocusing their significance. Bohr’s electron model did not carry into the electron cloud model – both have its uses, but our current scientific paradigm simply calls for something more accurate and useful to its endeavors. This process reveals that science is not a positive linear discovery trend of objective reality but a dynamic, evolving practice that shapes the very “reality” it tries to uncover. What we call an objective scientific reality is always governed by context and inextricable from the conceptual and linguistic tools we use to access it, rendering an absolute objective reality undiscoverable as a whole.
Language, Context and Truth
In a similar fashion to science, language also functions as a device to give people communication between each other, a common ground for knowledge. However, we do not view language’s role in society as an “objectivity-seeker”; that is to say, language does not access what we call the “objective world”. Instead, language interacts mostly with truth and the contexts that those truths exist in on a person-by-person basis.
When we “move forward” with a plan, we simply progress through each step of the plan – the plan does not manifest into a physical form and grow legs to walk forward. This application of physical movement to non-physical concepts is part of what is called embodied cognition. Perhaps the most fascinating revelation from intertwinedness between embodied cognition and language is not how a singular person behaves with these spatial frameworks, but how many people interact with different spatial frameworks. These spatial frameworks are what linguist and neuroscientist George Lakoff calls “image schemas”, which shape your perception of action (what and how you see), and also how you act in response. These image schemas are mapped out linguistically in adherence to “conceptual metaphors” – directional metaphors (or paths of motion: “runs along, runs through”) that are applied to non-physical objects. For example, we can say the stock market rises and falls. Across most languages some very common conceptual metaphors will be present. These simple every-day metaphors seem to appear everywhere for us English speakers: “good is up”, “bad is down”, “happy is up”, “sad is down”, “affection is warmth”, “distance is cold”. These metaphors, along with many others, make up an extremely large part of how humans communicate using embodied cognition, making these conceptual metaphors ubiquitous. In time, social psychology as a whole favored these metaphors to be universal – something that would deem the simple statement “affection is warmth” an unchanging universal truth. However, in the abstract of her presentation “How our biology predisposes us to an ‘AFFECTION IS WARMTH’ ‘metaphor’...”, Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm shares her findings that the “affection is warmth” metaphor was not universal: “Australian languages, Hup (Nadahup), Mapudungun (Araucanian), and Ojibwe (Algonquian) basically lack any extended use of temperature terms, while the Oceanic languages in Vanuatu and Nganasan (Uralic) have very few” (Tamm & IJzerman 2015). The absence of this metaphor in these languages denies the idea of an absolute universal truth, implying that the languages mentioned don’t have the cultural elements needed to correlate love or sexual attraction to temperature.
So what causes what seems to be a near-universal distribution of the conceptual metaphor “affection is warmth”? Instead of there being an unchanging universal truth that every human is predisposed to, we are instead exposed to a situation where the language is supplemented by your context. Context can range anywhere from your household conditions all the way to the philosophy of how your ethnic group raises children – all for one factor of how warmly touched you were by your mother when you were little, tying a sense of affection and want to the temperature. Simply put, these conceptual metaphors are very dependent on elements of context that can fall into categories like familial contexts, education, ethnicity, gender, and country of residence. Metaphors are specific and partial to the cultures and practices that they describe – in that way, metaphors can be seen as some of the truths that are embedded into language. Not only do the metaphors you choose to use (or are accustomed to using) convey meaning on the surface level, conceptual metaphors also possess the power to directly shape how you think, providing a context for the things that you deem true.
Truth in Society
The role of truth in society is to bring about a sense of dependency – it supposedly gives people solid and unchanging grounds to make moral, financial, and physical decisions for themselves and others. However, the objective qualities of unchangingness and absoluteness that we attach to truth can bring about conflict. Say, hypothetically, that there was a completely “objective” banana – it was a banana, recognizable to every single person on Earth by name, and had agreeable outcomes of its potentialities. Simply put, everyone on Earth agreed on what that banana could and should be. In this hypothetical, the “objective” banana is both a banana (in-and-of-itself) and is agreed by everybody that this banana has its own potentialities. Therefore, regardless of any perceiver’s context or interpretation, that banana simply is to everyone looking at it. In any sensible and tangible context, people would probably have a lot of things to say about this banana, and there is no one “set” way to look at it. People with a banana allergy would view the banana differently from people without an allergy, and thus the banana’s condition is not objective, but true: and there are many truths surrounding it at the same time. Where society falls out of line in its definitions of “objectivity” and “truth” is that they take some of the qualities from objectivity and slap it onto smaller-scale truths. Namely, the unchangingness and consequent universality of objectivity are tagged onto truth. As a result, some of the things we deem “true” we take to be true to everyone – and against that impossibility, we support that definition of truth by turning to things like science, showing that because these truths can be more closely associated with an objective reality, mine can too! Thus, we’ve misinterpreted the role of truth and its relationship to objectivity simply because we mixed them together and haven’t drawn any clear lines between the two.
Conclusions
The way society accesses objectivity is by defining truths that are dependent on the contexts they are built from. While there is no completely accessible “objective” reality, the qualities of an object that we come to agree upon is an important aspect of that reality. This commonality can manifest itself in many different ways, whether it be through scientific discoveries or through translations between languages. However, when both science and language are both context laden, the ways we interact with the world and each other become inextricable from those contexts – as such, with objectivity and the objective reality being completely out of the mind, the only practical effect of these things is truth through that commonality.
Works Cited
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Koptjevskaja Tamm, Maria, and Hans IJzerman. “How Our Biology Predisposes Us to an ‘Affection Is Warmth’ ‘Metaphor’, and How Our Environment Changes Its Anchor.” DIVA, 19 Mar. 2016, web.archive.org/web/20240915064420/https://su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A913090&dswid=3568.
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