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Mon 21 Aug, 2006 12:39 pm
Subjective Judgments
What do we mean when we consider one judgment to be subjective while another is objective?
I think that when a person, an agent, makes a judgment about an object we must take into account the stability of the agent and the stability of the object. When the object is another agent the stability is different than when the object is an inanimate thing with an essence that changes only under rare or substantial forces.
The agent has many forces working on her or him when a judgment is made. Depending upon the ability of the agent in dealing with those forces determines to some extent the variability of the agent.
In making a judgment regarding a matter of physics the agent can be considered to be very stable because the physicist is trained to disregard subjective forces plus the paradigm of that particular natural science places tremendous controls on the agent. Also inanimate objects are unlikely to disturb the agent to nearly the degree as does political and social thoughts.
The agent making judgments about political or social thought has tremendous internal forces pulling in an irrational direction plus the object of consideration is almost always one or more agents with tremendous irrational forces at work also. I guess that there are seldom if ever paradigms involved in political and social domains of knowledge.