Oh, boy, have I ever stepped into deep water with this one. But let me persevere.

I was thinking the concept I want to communicate would be fairly quick and straightforward to capture in writing, but then I made the mistake of deciding I should start with a quick statement of generally accepted meaning of “objective truth”. Ha! I should have known better.



Anyway, I googled “objective truth” and “definition”. Below are a few clips from different sites thereby located. In lieu of citations, the first phrase from each excerpt is a link to the site from which it came.

objective / subjective

Distinction between propositions or judgments about the way things are and those about how people think or feel about them. The truth of objective claims is presumed to be entirely independent of the merely personal concerns reflected in subjective expressions, even though is difficult to draw the distinction precisely. Thus, for example: “Spinach is green” is objective, while “I like spinach” is subjective. “Seventy-three percent of people in Houston don’t like spinach,” however, seems to be an objective claim about certain subjects.

The legitimacy of this distinction is open to serious question, since it is unclear whether (and how) any knowing subject can achieve genuine objectivity. Nevertheless, . . . objective truth is supposed to carry undeniable persuasive force. . . .

I’m going to come back to that offhand statement that “‘Spinach is green’ is objective” later. But first, a few more excerpts:

Objective reality is whatever remains true whether you believe in it or not.

which has a sort of common-sense ring to it. It begs the question of what is the relationship between reality and truth, but I’ll leave that alone for now.

The next is similar:

“the truth-value of a . . . claim depends (only) upon the object of inquiry, not the subject doing the inquiry”

The next contains the same core distinction, but slips in an additional claim about the nature of objective truth:

. . . we must first ask what “objective truth” really is. By definition, objective truth is absolute truth. The truth of an objective claim is defined to be entirely independent of subjective, or personal, influences. That is, if something is objectively true, then it is true for everyone. A subjective truth, on the other hand, is relative to the person who asserts it.

The additional claim to which I referred is that “objective truth is absolute truth”, and that furthermore this is true by definition. Though I suspect that many people, perhaps most, have that equation between absolute truth and objective truth as part of their concept of objective truth, I maintain that it is neither obvious on the face of it nor a necessary consequence of the agreed-upon core meaning of objective truth.

One more excerpt, and I’ll try to get to my original point:

. . . there are five basic philosophies of truth:



First: The coherence theory states that that which is true is the coherent system of ideas. If I understand that theory rightly, it means that the entire collection of our humanity’s ideas, at least those ideas that have not yet been abandoned, constitute truth.

Second: The pragmatic theory says that whatever is a “workable” or satisfactory solution of a problematic situation is true — that is, whatever makes sense to me and solves my immediate problem is my “truth” for that occasion. “Hey, whatever works!”

Third: The semantic theory states that “assertions about truth are in a meta-language and apply to statements of the base language” — that is, truth is such a metaphysical concept that it cannot even be intelligently expressed in real language.

Fourth: The performative theory states that truth occurs whenever I agree with a given statement — that is, whatever I agree with at a given moment in time is truth for me in that particular time and place.

And Finally: The correspondence theory states that that which corresponds to reality is true.

I wouldn’t necessarily trust these characterizations of the five approaches–I know that pragmatists might/would take/have taken exception to the above characterization of their position, for instance, and the “that is” addendum to the characterization of the semantic theory is completely inaccurate–but their accuracy is not essential to my point. What is important to what I want to say is to notice that all five concepts of truth involve relationships, often relationships between language (statements) and something else–reality, or a person’s belief system, or to other forms of language.

Now, if truth is a relationship between language (statements, propositions) or ideas (concepts) and something else (other language, other ideas, reality), the simple distinction between objective truth and subjective truth breaks down, it seems to me, because you can never remove the person, the cognizing subject, from that relationship. And yet, there’s something important in the distinction. Is truth then to be considered entirely relative? Not at all, I say. Rather, we need to substitute the idea of inter-subjective truth for the idea of objective truth.

For this to make sense, it might help if you take a look at my concept of reality first, noticing that I believe in a variety of kinds of reality.

The concept of inter-subjective truth depends crucially on taking human experience, and the experience of individuals, seriously as avenues to truth, or at least the raw data from which we refine truth.

Let me explain with a couple of examples.

I’ll start with the external, physical reality in which we find ourselves. Let’s consider a rock. Most people experience rocks as hard, and would not quarrel with the idea that hardness is a property of rocks (to varying degrees, of course.) We can achieve pretty clear communication about rocks and hardness because we all experience them very similarly, at least as far as hardness is concerned. We might accept that “rocks are hard” is objectively true in the sense of being true for all subjects (though I could argue the contrary, I’ll try not to, in hopes of eventually finishing this post.) But this “objective” property of rocks has as its basis our experience of rocks and the fact that it is shared ––inter-subjective–– experience.

But now consider color, and the statement quoted above that “Spinach is green” is an objective truth, and that it is “objective” because it is true independently of the observer. What if the observer is color blind, and sees only black and white? What if the observer is blue-green color blind? What if the observer is a dog or a bee (which have quite different color vision from humans)? None of these observers will see the spinach as “green”. We can’t remove the subject–the observer–from the equation when considering color. Color isn’t just a property of the object–it also depends on characteristics of the observer and, if we’re considering color as we see it anyway, several other factors, such as the colors surrounding the spinach. I could go on–there’s a lot of really fascinating research into human color vision–but again I’ll restrain myself. The point is that “spinach is green” is a shade less “objective” than “granite is hard”, and that it is so because there is less inter-subjective universality in our experience of color than our experience of the hardness of granite.

OK, I’m gonna stop here, in the hope that I’ve at least communicated my meaning, whether or not persuasively. I want to build a discussion of abstract and spiritual truth on this basis, but will leave that for a later post, partly just in the interest of getting this blasted thing done and off my to-do list.

(This post is a follow-up to this.)