Proving What We Already "Know"

[The Grand Nudger]

Okay, so let's say there's an objective-world-out-there.  It is not the world as we see it, and probably cannot be, but there is some kind of relationship between the world as we see it and something real-- for example, lions are real enough that there's utility in avoiding them, and whatever physics underlies them is consistent enough that this utility persists across time.

The objective and the subjective are both real....factual statements can be made from either set.  Our preferences in ice cream are subjective, but no less present than a lion, for example.   

Would you be comfortable defining objectivity ONLY in terms of persistence of utility?

That would seem to cut out objective facts that don't have much, if any, utility.  Say...... knowing my middle name.  There's a whole mound of this type of stuff that we still love to pour over - trivia.  Our gathering brain at work, I suppose. I don't know that it would fit the subjective, either. A useful tool can still do or discover a useless fact. I sometimes discover where there are hidden knots in wood with my hammer and brain - and this irritates me - but it's not necessarily useful information..nor does my irritation at that fact, as a fact, make the work go quicker.

It sounds goofy, but I'd say that science is the science of identifying and working with those parameters which have the property of persistence across time, space, and perspective-- i.e. those things that we expect to be true for all tomorrows and for all observers.

What's wrong with "the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment"?  I think it's pretty clear that a thing true today may not be true tomorrow, that a thing true of one location in space may not be true of another, and that the apprehensions of all observers are not uniform.