§ 14 Objectification

Talk of objectification is risky.¹

On the one hand, the objective is by many seen as the gold standard of knowledge value, which is fine, except that it works in a slightly more complicated way than I ever realised.

On the other hand, people object to being treated as objects. Which is also fine, except that we cannot help doing so in trying to understand human behaviour and making good use of our knowledge.

But we shall get to all that.

Let’s ask two questions:

1. To what extent can things be properly objectified?

And 2. How should that which has been objectified be used?

Let’s look at the first question first.

Is the colour red properly objectifiable? Is the stone really red? Well, yes and no. Yes, because excluding the blind and colour-blind, we all give evidence of the same experience of redness when looking at a red stone. We all call red things red.

But this communal experience does not yet make the colour red an objective fact as such.

It does make the experience of redness largely universal (excluding the blind and the colour-blind at the very least).

Is there a difference between objective and universal? Most definitely.

The quality of being objective is a property that may be said to pertain to the object independent of any viewing subject.

A universal experience is an experience shared by all observing subjects of a certain sort under certain conditions.

To which category does the red stone belong?

How exactly does the common experience of red come about? And is it strictly speaking common? Well, we already had to exclude the blind and the colour-blind, who have a different experience of redness from most of us, but even then, redness is, whatever else it is and might be, also a cultural event.

All fathers and mothers around the world point their children’s attention to the same thing when the colour red comes up in parenting.

That we all point at the same colour when the colour red comes up is at least in part determined by cultural conditioning: all people point at the same thing, regardless of their experience of it. Whatever their experience, they learn to call it “redness”. And that is a historical fact: generations of people all pointing at the same thing and calling it red.

The congenitally blind will learn that tomatoes are red, even though they cannot know what that means to us.

The colourblind may learn to sidestep their colour blindness, knowing where the traps lie.

The non-blind and non-colourblind blindly assume that everyone sees the same thing when they see the colour red. And that may well be so, and probably is, but it cannot be empirically tested.

It is unlikely, but perfectly possible, that I experience something more akin to purple when looking at something red, whilst you see something more akin to orange.

Is red properly objective then, as a property of things? Does colour inhere in the object or does it pertain to the object through its interaction with an observing subject within a specifically conditioned environment?

In investigating that question, something very interesting happens. Colour turns out to be a product of our brain interacting with a small section of the electromagnetic spectrum and the differentially absorbing surfaces from which some waves are reflected, while others are absorbed.

The colour experience is definitely a product of every individual’s brain. Still, the mechanism that produces that experience is a system of working parts, each with its own properties that give rise to that colour in our brain.

To say that the stone is red is to say something about us in our environment, of which the stone is only a small part in a much greater whole that must include our cognitive apparatus as well as the physics of light and the mechanics of surfaces at a certain scale.

Being red is therefore a complex activity that involves much more than the stone by itself and certainly cannot do without us, the viewers.

What then is objective about the colour red? Colour, like sound, smell, the senses of touch and taste, is produced in our brain in interaction with our environment. Our perception of shape is similarly a construct of our senses and cognition working together with other processes in our environment.

But the final product ‘redness’is a property of our brain, and to ask what something would look like ‘physically’, that is, without our senses working upon it, turns out, rather surprisingly, to be an absurd question.

The world does not visualise itself without visualizers.

They are a necessary and active ingredient in the production of sensations and their conceptual placement.

Without ‘lookers’, the world does not ‘look’.

Without conceivers, the world does not divide up into things.

Now what does that mean? It means that the look of the world is dependent upon lookers with a cognitive apparatus that ‘fills in’ or produces what a particular vibration of air molecules should sound like, what a wavelength of light should look like, what a molecular configuration should smell or taste like, and even how a shape should manifest itself to us in terms of texture. We produce our sensations in interaction. Without our cognitive apparatus, the light wave can wave, shimmer and scintillate all it wants, but it will not produce the colour red.

So, what is the colour of a tomato?

Have we completely lost the thread now? Not really. It is quite safe, and very useful to ascribe red to the object so coloured by our brain in interaction with its environment.

The reason for this is that colour under normal daylight circumstances is quite stable for ordinary everyday miracles like tomatoes and cox’s orange pippins, and that stability, helping the intelligibility of our communications, is ensured by our cultural habits of teaching our children to point, so that whatever it is they actually see, they shall call it red because mum and dad told them to do so.

The colour is affirmed in their normal interactions with others. Anything called red by mum and dad is red for all of us, and that applies to more or less to all perceptual properties we can universally ascribe to things under stable conditions.

Here, we have a more accurate description of how colour comes about. We can say things about the colouring of stones, red about which even the most authoritative in the field will quietly nod in qualified approval.

The description is believed to be true in that it now harmonises with the latest knowledge available and appears reasonably accurate for what it is.

More knowledge will show that this model, too, can be improved, but it will do for us, for now.

There, the stone’s redness appears to have been satisfactorily objectified as a product of a complex interaction. Still, it is no less objective for that, except that the property does not inhere in the object by itself but pertains to the behaviour of an interacting manifold that must include light and a universe in which it behaves the way it does, a subject in the form of a human body with a fully operational brain connected to their eyes and a stone with physical properties that behave in a certain way when light strikes it.

The redness is a doing of things in complex interaction, not a being of one thing all by itself. If one of the variables is removed or altered, the redness will fall away. As such, the non-redness of the stone for blind people is equally ‘objective’. All blind people share the stone’s lack of redness.

This description will hold in situations where these conditions are present and active. So we can say that the sentence ‘the stone is red’ is broadly true and can, under normal circumstances, be properly objectified.

But how then is a semantic value (such as redness) and its alethic affirmation (‘ah, yes, I see it now, the stone is indeed red’) part of the set of use values?

That realisation comes the moment we start reflecting on why we are producing these descriptions. The inevitable answer is, ‘because they are or may be useful in some way’.

Descriptions and their alethic qualification do not tie them to a specific use; instead, they make their properties explicit and prepare them to participate in a space of implications and inferential possibilities. That is useful. As such, truth as a semantic value has a use value.

What does this mean for the sentence ‘the stone is red’ when compared to the sentence ‘the stone is useful for building’?

Their difference is not so easy to untangle. Both are given in the form of S = p.

We now know that redness is a property not of the stone by itself, but of its interaction with us, the daylight and other stuff.

We know that the stone’s usefulness comes about from the properties exhibited in the stone’s behaviour as a material and the concordance of those properties with a generically specified purpose, such as building a wall.

We know that both properties, their usefulness to build with and their redness, can, by and large, both be universalised when the right conditions obtain. And yet we would say that ‘being useful for building’ is a different kind of property than ‘being red’. Perhaps we can see a difference when we describe the activity of being red and being useful for building.

Being red is an activity of mine in perceiving and conceiving the light shimmering and travelling, and the stone reflecting and selectively absorbing, and my eyes and brain doing their thing.

Being useful for building makes us look for properties implicit in the sentence ‘this stone is useful for building’, such as solidity, strength, and practicability in terms of size, weight, and shape. And that is where we see the difference.

In the sentence ‘the stone is useful for building’, its properties, however they come about, are particularised with reference to a specified purpose.

In contrast, in the sentence ‘the stone is red’, the property is held up for auction as it were to any purpose or use.

A semantic value given to a subject in the form of a predicate opens up a space of implications, inviting us to seek out possible affordances.

We now need to find a purpose for the stone’s future role as a working part of a house; its redness may well help play that role from the point of view of the house’s appearance.

The distinction between analysis and critique and their use of alethic, ethical and aesthetic considerations to arrive at judgments rests upon a wafer-thin boundary.

The one looks at a thing in terms of properties making of it a whole with working parts, or a working part in a greater whole generating an understanding of the behaviour of the thing in some context, giving a thing semantic value in which generic usefulness is offered and particularized uses lie implicit as affordances.

The other judges the thing as good or bad for a specified use or purpose, thereby imbuing it with a closed-use value made explicit.

For this to be done well, we need to know how the thing works and its properties.

With analysis, we arrive at a thing’s affordances by understanding how the thing works; with critique, we measure any set of those affordances in terms of their functioning with respect to a selected purpose or use.

The objectifying move in the game helps denote a thing’s properties, allowing inferences that will eventually afford a specific use or purpose because of our understanding of it. The subjectifying move in the game is to wield those inferential possibilities with respect to some use or purpose and its virtue.

© Jacob Voorthuis, 2026. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.

1. A slightly older version of this paragraph was first published in Jacob Voorthuis, Theoria, use, intention & design, a philosophical reckoning; Analysis & Critique: Gardening in the metaphysics of the beautiful, the true, and the good, AHT, Tu/e (2024)  ↩︎