Sid_16 wrote:
Subjects, objects and units are somewhat interchangeable words. A relation is more than one of these combined together. Subjects have emotional ramifications or bias and they also have components. Objects do not have emotional ramifications but they do have components. Units have neither emotional ramifications or components.


I guess when we believe that everybody has the same measuring rod, the judgment is objective, and / or vice-versa. Sometimes, when making a 'fair' judgment is necessary, we pick up an average rod for cases which do not see all using the same. Roughly, that may be a objective judgement.

correct me if I'm wrong.

Think of a referee of a football game. The referee has an objective point of view because he doesn't care which team wins. His point of view has no emotional ramification, it is objective. The players and the fans though are subjects, their point of view is subjective.

A fetus is a unit if it is being counted. It is an object if it is part of a whole. It is a subject if it has emotional ramifications. All of this is a relativist fallacy if you believe that I think I am right but others do not.


Well, isn't this relative to who is doing the counting? The pregnant woman who wants to abort the fetus may see it as a manifestation of her body. Her body is the unit and she believes it is her right to dispose of or not dispose of parts of it as she sees fit.

Others will disagree. From the moment of conception, some see the zygote, then the embryo, then the fetus as a unique and separate "unit". And, indeed, how "object" and "subject" are differentiated and distinguished here has gone all the way to the Supreme Court and back again any number of times.

And what if my girlfriend is sophisticated enough to know that, with respect to the mind and the matter that "is" her "self", it is often extremely difficult to say for certain where "I" as an object ends and "I" as a subject begins. What is the "unit" here?

For example, in relationship to evolution or cosmology or...or God?

How is "syntax" not also just another promlematic component when trying to distinguish between what we can denote about these [particular] relationships and what we can only connote instead?

Think of a referee of a football game. The referee has an objective point of view because he doesn't care which team wins. His point of view has no emotional ramification, it is objective. The players and the fans though are subjects, their point of view is subjective.

me:

Yes, but a football game reflects human behavior with clearly defined objective rules. The referee is not asked to judge subjectively the morality of play, only whether or not it does in fact follow the objective rules.

But with many other human interactions, objectivity and subjectivity are so hopelessly blurred, differentiating "the empirical facts" from "the moral truth" is not possible at all.

Would you agree with this distinction?

neither/nor wrote:
Think of a referee of a football game. The referee has an objective point of view because he doesn't care which team wins. His point of view has no emotional ramification, it is objective. The players and the fans though are subjects, their point of view is subjective.

me:

Yes, but a football game reflects human behavior with clearly defined objective rules. The referee is not asked to judge subjectively the morality of play, only whether or not it does in fact follow the objective rules.

But with many other human interactions, objectivity and subjectivity are so hopelessly blurred, differentiating "the empirical facts" from "the moral truth" is not possible at all.

Would you agree with this distinction?

Yes, a precise distinction between objectivity and subjectivity is hopeless but only in application. In theory I believe the distinction is precise if we consider the emotional element.

you guys are making this too hard.

i think the world is flat -- subjective

the world is flat -- objective

the relativistic fallacy occurs when one argues as though there is no difference between these.

Nice...works for me!
Funny thing is, it is usually projected
by the deluded party as the objective
party's "relativism". If I add that
little twist, it covers a lot of
political dialog.