Subjectivity is always implied. This piece started with my thoughts on “biased” reviews, which I have now expanded beyond just reviews to a paradigm I think everyone needs to adopt. The idea is so simple: unless explicitly otherwise mentioned, everything people say can and should be treated as subjective.

Subjectivity is not bad. Subjectivity just means that someone has taken some facts and are using the context of their life and knowledge to purvey an opinion. This opinion is not guaranteed to be based upon the facts, but ideally it is a logical conclusion drawn from the given facts, conditional on someone’s life experience. Think of opinions as weighted averages between veritable facts and unverifiable life experiences. Subjectivity should not be vilified, but it should be analyzed. A person’s opinion is revealing.

There are times when subjectivity must be wholly rejected. This is when the discussion at hand is purely factual–i.e. we are discussing objective truths. In this case, there is no room for subjectivity as we are engaging in a discourse beyond the personal. This is most of science. A canonical example of this is maths, or logic in general. Accept certain axioms, and with them you get theorems which must follow from these axioms. There is no room for subjectivity here–disagreement on theorems can only be postulated as a disagreement on axioms and so you will setup a new axiomatic system in which a theorem doesn’t hold. That disagreement on the assumptions made can be interpreted as subjectivity, but I think doing so would be a misnomer.

However, there are times when subjectivity is exactly what we are looking for. That is the context of “biased” reviews, especially in the context of art. People have different tastes (i.e. derive aesthetic pleasure from differing latent properties of artworks), and so there are hardly any (if not no) objective truths. I’ve seen the use of “bias” on the internet to refer to people who are actually biased (i.e. in the context of reviews, reviewing something with regards to criteria that do not represent the reviewed item in its intended manner of consumption), as well as simply used as pejorative against people who have different tastes. To the latter I say suum cuique. Revel in the subjectivity; it is what makes us human. Accept that subjectivity is the only thing that matters in certain contexts–in those contexts, one should just find reviewers who share their tastes.

There is a middle ground though. There are plenty of things which are neither purely subjective nor objective. However, with these things, bifurcation allows for clear distinctions between parts which are objective (i.e. physical qualities of a product, or observable things. Again, like science) and subjective parts (i.e. opinions of value of the product, aesthetic pleasure, etc.) This middle ground is where most things in the world lie, of course, and so one should learn how to draw this distinction between subjective and objective. Reject vehemently narratives which peddle the former as the latter–facts are unquestionable, no matter how unpleasant. Believe all the sweet lies you wish, but you must believe in science and truth.

Expecting such an explicit dichotomy to be maintained and announced by people (e.g. citing sources for facts and prefacing opinions with a modifier to make their speculative nature clear) is unreasonable and untenable. Thus, one should assume that all things are subjective unless proclaimed otherwise.