Frank Kogan

Accidentally revisiting a bunch of old lj threads as I clean up today's batch of lj spam, and alighted here.

I personally think "objective" is a perfectly reasonable word to use as a comparative, but not as its own class: one can be more objective than another, but can't be "objective" where another person is "subjective."

But what does this mean? That "objective"-"subjective" is a continuum like "loud"-"soft rather than either/or like a light switch? But I'm objecting to it as continuum too, objecting to the contention that more of one means less of the other, that the more you're talking about yourself the less you're talking about the object, and vice versa, which I think is just plain wrong. What makes people call "H1tler was a scumbag" subjective and "H1tler had a mustache" objective isn't that the first is about the speaker while the second is about H1tler - which is ridiculous, they're both about H1tler, and they both tell us something about the speaker - but that we can imagine disagreement about the former among people who are neither insane nor incompetent in the language, even if we no longer get much disagreement on the issue of H1tler; whereas we can't imagine any disagreement about the latter statement that doesn't entail that the person disagreeing is incompetent. In actual usage, "objective" jumps around in its usage, sometimes meaning "disinterested" or "unbiased," other times meaning "true" or "it's been proven," other times meaning "real," and so forth. The first usage is relatively benign - "he thought the performance was utterly beautiful, but since it was by his own daughter, he went to his friend Roderick for a more objective judgment," a sentence that makes sense even though if we were to ask people whether beauty was objective or subjective, almost all would answer "subjective" (which should apply to Roderick just as much as to anyone else).