How Subjectivity Works

1. Introduction: Why Subjectivity Matters

I don’t know why, but I have always been attracted most by writers who do not disguise themselves in their writings. The idea is simple: there is an honesty in it. As such I have always enjoyed writers on architecture such as Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Paul Shepheard, Ivor Smith, Peter Zumthor and the architects Sergison Bates, who are open about the subjective nature of their experience of spaces, situations, events and objects. They help you become precise about your own experiences, either through recognition of theirs by way of their engaging descriptions, or by the example of their unaffected thinking‑through‑writing that makes it possible to emulate their approach to appreciative thinking without too much fuss.

After I read David Watkins’ Morality in Architecture, and its rather devastating exposure of the nonsense some architects say and act upon, I developed a bit of an allergy to all forms of nonsense, but particularly pseudo‑objective nonsense—including my own lamentable youthful proclivity towards such things.

The worst thing, and the most common, is coming across good and even great analysis but then finding to one’s surprise that completely unnecessary and stupid conclusions are drawn from from that analysis in crossing the bridge to how to respond to that analysis. (see the relevant section) Within architecture the worst are the writings of Tafuri, Jencks, Eisenman (brrrr.) and Rem Koolhaas and his circle. But very disappointingly, it also concerns books like Robert Sapolsky’s otherwise brilliant Determined: Life Without Free Will. Good analysis is one thing, good critique quite another. Good, and properly subjectified critique whereby an good understanding of something leads to good response is a rare art.

Whatever other questions all this might raise, it certainly raises the question of the value of so‑called subjective knowledge. To set that value for myself it might be worth analyzing it carefully.

2. Defining Subjectivity and Objectivity

So how do we usefully characterize the subjective and the objective? I think it must be done by translating subjectivity into the activity that subjects perform in order to become or maintain themselves as subjects. Then we must perform the same operation for objectivity.

Subjects do things. Objects have things done to them. Thinking about their relationship can become very confusing very quickly if one does not maintain that simple distinction rigorously and at all times.

Grammatically it is possible to have unconscious subjects doing stuff in a sentence. An example of such a sentence is “The stone is lying there.” Stones do things. But when that doing becomes subject to thought and expression in image, word and number, the doing is characterized by us conscious beings who are the real subjects of the sentence. In thought, stones can only be subjects by proxy: we observe the stones lying there. Sure, the stones do the lying there, but it is us who draws that fact into our world of deliberations. Stones do not do that.

All actions that I, a conscious subject, perform unconsciously can be said to overcome me, making me no longer the subject but the object of that action. A feeling of indigestion overcomes me even though it is my body reacting to my eating habits that causes the indigestion. The same is certainly true of actions of which I am not the agent. When the stone hits me, I am the unwitting object being hit. The moment I feel pain and wonder what happened, I flip to become the hurting and inquiring subject.

3. Knowledge as Subjective and Objective

Here lies the linguistic basis of thinking about subjectivity and objectivity. Subjectivity, in that it does the thinking, must encompass consciousness and therefore intentionality. Thinking just is playing the game of giving and asking for reasons after having declared, proposed or wondered about something being the case.

All knowledge and processes which look like the processing of knowledge belong to the doing subject. In that sense all knowledge is exclusively subjective: it must be held by the knowing subject. To say that knowledge is held by an object is problematic. Objects may be said to hold information. Information becomes knowledge only when a knowing or learning subject engages with it within logical space and its space of implications shaped by that knowers peculiar frame of reference in order to perform some action.

Trees may be said to “know” when to shed their leaves, and we could call that a form of biological knowing. It is not quite the same as embodied knowing which is that my legs may be said to know how to walk. This is something I have learnt to do and done so often that it has become an automatic response to some wish or need. Rocket scientists “know” how to plot a course to Mars—that is conscious knowing.

4. Popper’s Framework

Karl Popper tried to set apart a certain kind of knowledge as special. He divided knowledge into three “worlds”:

World 1: physical objects and states
World 2: subjective mental states (beliefs, experiences, perceptions)
World 3: objective knowledge—the contents of books, scientific theories, mathematical proofs, arguments, and other products of the human mind once expressed in objective form

Popper describes his world 1 in a rather static way: it contains “Physical objects and states.” My approach is more Spinozan: I speak of the world behaving. Behaviour embodies movement, such that states are more like snapshots of that movement and objects momentary stabilizations of that movement. Moreover behaviour, as I argue elsewhere, may be differentiated but is always of the universe. It remains one. Also I understand why he wishes to distinguish his world 2 from world 1 and that may even be useful as long as we realize that world 2 is very much a subset of his world 1. Thought itself is just as much behaviour as everything else, it is the “physical” product of the behaviour of stuff; it is a product, expressed in movements, visible or aural, of neural activity which has a biochemical and bio-electrical basis. The same is true for world 3.

Popper’s world 3 is where he locates objective knowledge: once a theory, argument, or problem is formulated, it becomes “objectively criticizable.” But how is that not also the case with a poem by Rilke? A poem published, a painting finished, transfers its ownership to anyone who reads the poem or sees the painting, and that experience may have consequences the author did not foresee.

Precision seems to be the distinguishing factor. Mathematics, as long as one rigorously keeps to the legitimate procedures using well defined concepts, allows only one interpretation. Technical drawing too has tightly defined codes. If these are used, procedures and their products are independently verifiable and verifiability increases the reliability of knowledge.

But ordinary language, though capable of expressing precise thoughts if properly disciplined can do that and a lot more. We spend our learning life enriching the concepts we have a grasp of, as well as acquiring more concepts to structure our frame of reference and thereby change the shae of our space of implications, making it capable of achieving more and better inferences. Ordinary language is far better than mathematics at capturing complex situations in reasonably simple if reductive descriptions. Also it can utter propositions that are not yet possible using mathematical descriptions. How would mathematics cope with the proposition “I love tea.”

Both mathematics and ordinary language can explore their logical spaces, mathematics by exploring procedures that have as yet no application in the world we know, ordinary language by imagining futures or weird and wonderful possible worlds. Both are of value.

So, yes philosophy could discipline its use of language to precise procedures (called formal reasoning) and it could define its concepts in a strict way. These would allow the arguments of a philosopher to be verified. But whether that increases their reliability is a moot point. Strictly defined concepts in ordinary language can become restrictive and reductive so that a perfectly logical argument under the set of concepts assigned certain properties, might well no longer give the same outcomes if we discover those properties to be slightly different. This very process describes a significant aspect of the history of philosophy in fact.

If we call Wittgenstein’s Tractatus “Objective” then how do we cope with the fact that its interpretation has changed over time? Why did he himself rejects aspects of it later in his own development? Indeed frames of reference differ between people, they evolve in each individual, language evolves, both within a community but also within an individual. I understand the Tractatus differently now than when I was young. It is a very different document to me holding very different information. The words holding the information in the book have not changed, but my capacity for processing that information into knowledge that I can do something with has, most radically in fact. I think that this is an important objection against trying to remove knowledge from the subject and get it to inhere in the object. That is just a misguided tactic.

The value of nonsense poetry is no less great. Mathematical equations, philosophical arguments and nonsense poetry can all be analyzed with rigour. I find the word ‘objective’ to set apart and privilege a certain class of knowledge misleading. All knowledge is held subjectively and all knowledge concerns the object studied. To say that knowledge inheres in an object is to perform a swap trick. Nor can it be true, properly speaking. Let’s keep to the notion that objects may contain information. It is subjects who make that information into knowledge to do something with.

5. Limits of Objectivity

Proper science is difficult. Its mathematics is forbidding, accessible only to specialists. Even properly trained scientists have trouble understanding disciplines adjacent to their own. Those who cannot follow the reasoning must invest their trust in experts.

But trust reintroduces what we tend to call subjectivity. I cannot test the theory of relativity myself; I must believe those clever enough to do so for me. And here integrity becomes crucial, just as it is in what Popper would call “subjective knowledge”.

This would not be a problem if all scientists would follow the advice of Lord Chesterfield, who wrote to his son that “Manners must adorn knowledge, and smooth its way through the world.” At least if this lovely quote means that he advised his son to respect the rules of scientific integrity: openness about one’s limits, transparency concerning the results of an experiment, honesty in reporting one’s findings and use of sources etc. The point is that if everyone followed those rules, even the most “subjective” statements would be reliable so that the whole point of distinguishing between so-called “objective” knowledge and “subjective” knowledge would be lost. After all, instead of saying God exists, as if I knew I would have to say things like well I believe God exists and these are my sources.

The problem is that scientific integrity, indeed all integrity, is under pressure where doings are not intrinsically motivated. Being a scientist or academic has become a socially enviable thing. There are people doing something that looks like science and scholarship, and might well be, but which in any case is not motivated by any desire to delight and understand but by the lure of status, fame and even wealth. Science has become “important” for “society,” “progress,” “the economy,” “solving the climate crisis” (which, irony of irony, science and its offshoot technology inflicted upon the world!). All those things are extrinsic motivations and therefore serve a different purpose than the desire to understand does.

6. The Danger of Fatalism

Two conclusions emerge:

The category of objective knowledge can in fact include all forms of knowledge, but its purpose is simply to distinguish reliable from less reliable through independent verifiability. The word objective should be scrapped.
The hermetic requirements of science are so exacting that they require a special class of initiates, forcing all others to trust them. Which means that subjectivity is all we really have.

The danger is fatalism: “Science is no better than anything else, so why bother?” Many have lost trust in science. That is not a good thing.

My advice is to muddle on and learn. Learning is the way to what freedom there is. It allows you greater reach in your ability to judge the reliability of things. Also it allows you greater reach and rigour in your reasoning. Rigour can be had in any game of analysis or critique, whether mathematical or poetic. Popper’s criterion of intersubjective criticizability is true for anything, but reliability depends on honesty, integrity, openness and transparency. It always has, and that will never change.

7. Final Reflections

I can insist on the full and verifiable reasoning of properly so-called “objective” knowledge. But much of it is beyond my paygrade. I cannot insist on this when it concerns unverifiable “subjective” knowledge. Although I can compare it to my own experience and other people’s experience. I can recognize something felt, as something I might feel under similar circumstances. In other words I verify thorugh comparison.

The honest description of feelings and opinions, beliefs and ideas arouses a sense of responsibility to take them seriously. It is not their objectivity which is at issue but their reliability. And that reliability can only be established by establishing the sincerity and honesty of the person holding the feeling, belief or opinion. There lies the rub. Someone stating that God exists is just simply not being completely sincere. There is no problem with believing that to be the case but then put it in those terms. The same is true for complex objectifiable knowledge. I cannot say that the theory of relativity is true. I would know what it is that I am giving that status to. So, if I am sincere I say, well, scientists believe that it is true. We simply cannot do without justifying our beliefs.

Well, as when I began, I enjoy honest writers. I cannot verify their honesty but the way they write they appear not to dissemble. They appear open about their likes and dislikes, about their feelings and beliefs. I can compare my own feelings and beliefs to theirs, and perhaps adopt their insights, especially if they give me compelling reasons to do so. That is how subjectivity works, it works by fitting the ideas other communicate to you as information, to your own ideas that you hold as knowledge, in that you can do something with it.

© jacob voorthuis, 2025. 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.