Is subjectivity just a matter of context?

[Confused Ape]

A shrimp might percieve a chair differently, but with the correct context (the species of animal doing the speaking), that can be translated into an objective statement, so we can still investigate its accuracy.

Let me know when you find a talking shrimp. Anyway, back to your opening post.

The dichotomy of subjectivity versus objectivity doesn't apply to real objects. Anything that is real is objectively real. Nothing can be subjectively real. That's nonsense. Am I right to say that this dichotomy only applies to statements? I think subjectivity versus objectivity is just a manifestation of the way language works. If the meaning of a statement depends on who is saying it, then it is subjective. Of course we translate the subjective into objective all the time, and we use context to do so.

1: Did subjectivity versus objectivity exist before some humans came up with the concepts of subjective and objective?

2: The way we talk about it does seem to depend on context but that's the way the language we're communicating in works. How far is language influenced by a group's world view and experience?

There Really Are 50 Eskimo words for ‘snow’

Krupnik and others charted the vocabulary of about 10 Inuit and Yupik dialects and concluded that they indeed have many more words for snow than English does.

Central Siberian Yupik has 40 such terms, while the Inuit dialect spoken in Canada’s Nunavik region has at least 53, including “matsaaruti,” for wet snow that can be used to ice a sleigh’s runners, and “pukak,” for the crystalline powder snow that looks like salt.

For many of these dialects, the vocabulary associated with sea ice is even richer. In the Inupiaq dialect of Wales, Alaska, Krupnik documented about 70 terms for ice that mark such distinctions as: “utuqaq,” ice that lasts year after year; “siguliaksraq,” the patchwork layer of crystals that forms as the sea begins to freeze; and “auniq,” ice that is filled with holes, like Swiss cheese.

It is not just the Eskimo languages that have colorful terms to describe their frosty surroundings: The Sami people, who live in the northern tips of Scandinavia and Russia, use at least 180 words related to snow and ice, according to Ole Henrik Magga, a linguist in Norway.

What is the true objective reality of snow and ice? An Innuit probably regards wet snow that can be used to ice a sleigh's runners as being objective reality but the English language doesn't have a word for it.

This kind of linguistic exuberance should come as no surprise, experts say, since languages evolve to suit the ideas and needs that are most crucial to the lives of their speakers. “These people need to know whether ice is fit to walk on or whether you will sink through it,” says linguist Willem de Reuse at the University of North Texas. “It’s a matter of life or death.”

“All languages find a way to say what they need to say,” says Matthew Sturm, a geophysicist with the Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska. For Sturm, it is the expertise these words contain that is of most interest, rather than the squabble about the number of terms. “These are real words that mean real things,” he says.

We couldn't be having this discussion about objectivity versus subjectivity if the language we're using hadn't evolved to make it possible.