Subjectivity/Subjectivism

A concept that is commonly discussed in social science research together with objectivity. Subjectivity is the idea that experiences are characterized by individual perception, standpoint, and social position. Objectivity, instead, is based on the notion that truth can be discovered once individuals move beyond their personal views and perceptions and aim for absolute and universal explanations. Modernist and positivist philosophers and scholars believe that an objective truth can be discovered through a systematic method of gathering and measuring empirical data and by allowing scientific inquiry to move beyond the idiosyncrasies of context. This view has been challenged by philosophers and scholars who assert that the notion of an objective reality is illusory because all knowledge is based on experience and embodied perception and is inseparable from context.

The latter view has its detractors as well. In fact, a radical view of subjectivity and subjectivism is offered by some postmodernist scholars, who argue that language predates experience and thus determines how we know, what we know, and who we are. Their subjectivism is radical because it rejects the need to gather empirical data based on either experience or objective reality. Such radical subjectivism advances the idea that all we can aim for, at best, is an appreciation of our condition as structured by the language-like form of consciousness and/or by the historical discursive traces that make up our knowledge, our ways of knowing, and our very idea of being.