Topics Truth

Question Is all truth subjective? A subjective truth is a truth based off of a person's perspective, feelings, or opinions. Everything we know is based off of our input - our senses, our perception. Thus, everything we know is subjective. All truths are subjective. Do you think all truths are subjective? If not, what is wrong with the above argument?

Accepted:
September 29, 2011

Comments

I suppose the worry your thesis and argument raises has to do with the meaning of "subjective" and the move that a given person's beliefs are based on the senses to the conclusion that "All truths are subjective."

On subjectivity: I share the view that persons do indeed have feelings, perspectives, opinions, senses, and perception. We might also add reason, memory, emotions and passion, interests, drives, and so on. When we do know things based on such states or processes (for example, I know I am awake and writing to you), is my knowledge itself something we would call subjective? I suggest we would want to say that it is objectively true or the case that I am writing to you, and not subjective in the sense that it is only true from my point of view or because I think it is true. So, paradoxically, I think that if we do want to claim that there are subjective states that they really exist then we are in effect committed to holding that the existence of subjective states is an objective fact about the world. The world or reality includes subjects who have subjective states.

On "All truths are subjective": While I think it is true that no person can assert that something is true without being in some mental state and thus in some state of subjectivity (e.g. Skippy believes that there are no people on the sun), it is not clear what it would mean to assert that "All truths are subjective." Presumably the truth that 'There are no people on the sun" does not depend upon anyone's subjective states.

Your argument is:

(1) Our senses and perception are subjective.

(2) Everything we know is based on on our senses and perceptions.

Therefore

(3) Everything we know is subjective.

There is a well-known difficulty with this argument. It equivocates on "subjective". In the first premise "subjective" means something like the innocuous "possessed by a subject", but in the conclusion it is presumably taken to mean the toxic "not having any objective truth". There is also a doubt about the second premise. Many philosophers accept the idea of "a priori" truths, that is, truths that hold independently of experience, including mathematical truth and perhaps ethical truths, if there are any.