(January 11, 2016 at 7:14 pm)Evie Wrote: Are we talking about epistemic or ontological objectivity?
From page 25 of The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris:
Sam Harris Wrote:Many people are also confused about what it means to speak with scientific
“objectivity” about the human condition. As the philosopher John Searle once pointed
out, there are two very different senses of the terms “objective” and “subjective.”
The first sense relates to how we know (i.e., epistemology), the second to what there is to
know (i.e., ontology). When we say that we are reasoning or speaking “objectively,” we
generally mean that we are free of obvious bias, open to counterarguments, cognizant of
the relevant facts, and so on. This is to make a claim about how we are thinking. In this
sense, there is no impediment to our studying subjective (i.e., first-person) facts
“objectively.”