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Text of the page (random words):
ou probably won t be able to see my picture if you don t first step into a different picture of these two terms mere objectivity what i want to do and the reason most people won t like this is relativise the meanings of objective and subjective however i promise that if you stick around to the end you ll get something else to anchor yourself that you might like better and as i said you can always anchor yourself back to these terms if you don t like what i m going to show you the reason i think you should consider relativising the words objective and subjective is just because they are relative terms i ve even heard that eric voegelin once instructed his students to simply stop using them because they do not correspond to anything in reality i do not think i would go that far because i think they are useful in their place nevertheless i would agree with him that they are generally abused and therefore often unhelpful or downright misleading we usually like to think of rendering something like an objective opinion or judgment or giving objective evidence to mean something like true evidence or an impartial opinion or what have you but i have to use words like true and just and universal and absolute and other such notions and connotations we commonly attach to the word objective precisely because mere objectivity proper cannot render them on it s own surely an opinion is more likely to be just if it is rendered objectively but simply because one is outside a situation and therefore objective to it does not render his opinion just merely objective evidence is often wrong misleading and all the rest otherwise it would be enough to get at the truth simply to be objective objectivity is certainly something but it doesn t in itself render the whole enchilada you need more to the system to get all of that like logic and consistency veracity to actuality etc likewise for subjectivity so at least for the moment let s only use the words objective and subjective to mean basically whether we are viewing something from outside or inside a particular frame at hand and use the other sorts of words we have to mean those other things if we need them for the moment we are only using the words to consider how the situation is framed with that annoying stuff out of the way let s draw a couple of pictures market picture 1 suppose that i took a map of reality a nice 2d picture with you in it and i drew a circle around just you you are inside of this circle subjective frame of reference with everything else outside of it objective frame this as it happens is a pretty common way of thinking about things for hopefully obvious reasons and if you think about markets in these terms you can really go a long ways one interesting thing you may notice and one of the most important discoveries of economics as a science is that value is subjective it emerges from within market actors like you yes okay we ll afford the other market actors their own circles too i m trying to keep it simple here they also impute value subjectively people value goods and this is what renders them valuable in markets likewise you will discover that prices are objective you can look at an ad in the newspaper and you will see there prices that are indifferent to what you think of them you can consider them outrageous you can consider them cheap but whatever they are they just are the numbers on the paper don t change depending on your opinion of them do they emerge out of the physical laws of the universe or some such no they emerge out of the decisions made by marginal actors in markets the ones making immediate decisions to buy or sell at a particular price at a particular moment in time sometimes that marginal actor might be you but most of the time not and even then you really only get half a say it takes two to tango which is to say that despite your very occasional participation and despite being the outcome of the objectively visible actions of many individual actors prices are nevertheless objective phenomena using our frame of reference they are brute facts of your universe as far as you are concerned your say in them reduces to a rounding error you just have to deal with them as they are and hopefully it is equally crystal clear that they are nevertheless nevertheless the product of subjective valuations time for some bold large font price structures are the outcome of value structures via market mechanisms the objective structure of a market is a product of subjective values and that s kinda important especially to the actors who have to navigate those structures what i ve sketched out here is the basics of economic subjectivism one of the most critical insights of the subject of economics it was originally articulated by the austrian school but eventually absorbed by pretty much every modern school of economic thought i m not gonna dwell on any more of the details within this picture much more than this because lots of others already have much better than i could it s pretty conventional and i don t have a lot more to say about it as regards the point of his essay but to be sure this is one doozy of a metaphysical system we have sketched out this way of dividing up reality will get you a lot you can see a long way from this mountaintop an awful lot of what is known of economic systems derives from this treatment of things and i would submit its effectiveness emerges for a very good reason because dividing things this way they way we drew our circle captures a very important truth of the situation individuality is an important aspect of reality so breaking it at this joint gives good results metaphysical skepticism however you knew there was going to be a however didn t you when i have run across systems like this i have come to find it good practice to ask two questions and i would encourage everyone who comes across some new train of reasoning or body of facts evolution it s so amazing it explains everything just like this that is being put to use to make sweeping statements about all of reality therefore obviously there s no god to make use of them question 1 so what as in does this thing really imply all of that are you sure do i have to take it just this way all the way to the ends of reality or are the implications really more limited than all that question 2 what else as in is this all there is the whole story might there be more especially more that might bear a bit more directly on questions that seem further removed from the original issues that led to this train of thought in the case at hand what we learned emerged out of a way of dividing up reality one way among many we could have chosen and the result turned out to be pretty darn good but just what all should we conclude from it i e so what well a lot but maybe not everything we definitely should not conclude that this is it without any further inspection we didn t bother yet to divide it up some other way and see if something useful might shake out is there anything else my tendency is to almost always answer this question one way there is almost always more reality is a big and wondrous place i don t think that needs a lot of elaboration let s see if we can find more how about another picture market picture 2 this time we re going to draw the circle in a different place instead of around individual people around a group of people we ll pick the one that s getting the most attention of late a nation of people you could probably draw a circle around other groups and arrive at useful conclusions but for now we ll stick with this one of interest now a lot of people who support free trade will talk about invisible lines or imaginary lines to ridicule the idea of the meaningfulness of national borders and such and if we had bought in too deeply into the metaphysics from before that our way of dividing up reality was not merely a useful way for yielding truthful insight reflective of truth but in fact necessarily the whole truth of the matter we might be pulled in but hopefully by getting as far as we have in the way that we have it is easy to see that this characterization carries not much weight of course the line is imaginary so was the one that we drew around individuals the whole point of drawing it was to imagine to see if we found any truth in it and the exercise proved very useful indeed if the objections is well of course that s not really what i meant i meant it doesn t correspond to anything real in the way an individual is real well then i will say at least this begins to get to the heart of the matter and honestly i wish the debates on the matter would go this way instead of the way they usually go each side making fun of the other without taking the debate to the actual issue at hand are groups real or not because that is the issue and no other and as with our previous example i would submit that if they are real then we should immediately see that applying this metaphysical divide will yield us some useful insight and since i am not very good at this sort of reasoning and this section is devolving into the sort of writing that i don t like rather than run around and around with this let s finish off the drawing and see what the picture looks like i think it is a very useful picture indeed with the circle drawn around nations the pattern one immediately notices is that the price structure is typically fairly different within one circle as compared to outside of it in fact a lot of things are different if our inferences hold from the previous drawing this is the result of differing value structures that just happen to line up with the circles we drew clearly there appears to be an underlying reality to the circle some would say that well it s the legal sanctions imposed at the border that causes the difference and to a degree this is partially true but even when borders were far looser than today and where they have had much less legal significance there were still differences and further there are price structure differences within borders where there is no substantial legal differentiation between regions think one city versus another in the same state or a city versus the countryside of more significance i think is that in this picture to the degree that prices differ pricing is subjective the differences emerge from within the confines of the circle subjective to our delineation presumably in response to local economic conditions as an expression of local valuations external conditions impinge only so far even in the absence of any sort of purely legal differentiation if we were to modify the large bold statement we made earlier we d have to say further that price and value structures emerge from the subjective valuations of the members of the system in question not purely and abstractly from subjective valuation which is a bit different presumably you care about the values of the people around you that you live with and do business with their opinions are not wholly subjective in the former abused sense and arbitrary to you as the previous formulation might seem to imply so real or not groups at least matter and to the degree they matter well to me at least they would seem to be real and i don t want to run to the clincher just yet but generally there is a rather wise conservative proverb concerning theories that ignore significant realities how about valuations this i think can get either very murky or very trivial or very interesting at first glance they are clearly subjective because they also emerge locally from within the circle or if you want to import more of the previous metaphysics from within the individuals who are within the circle and as you probably intoned from the discussion so far there is a significance to this different groups possess and express different value structures and in turn will produce different price structures and consequently different economic structures how could it be otherwise likewise from within any particular circle both prices and values outside the circle are objective emerging from outside there are your values and structures and ways and then there are the world s you could also have done this from the previous metaphysics and probably seen some truth in a you versus the world perspective but hopefully you don t feel quite that isolated but suppose we ask of our picture this ok so the value structures as expressed in markets come from groups of people but where do the groups and the people get them do they really emerge just from within them and for whatever reason when you ask a question like this almost everyone will default to a materialist perspective and say well of course where else would they come from which i guess is fine if you actually are a materialist but since most people would say that they are not that they belong to some religion or other that believes in spiritual things or otherwise believes in the immaterial this is kind of an inadequate answer and i suspect that even most of the materialists don t really believe what they are saying if they really think about it as i pointed out in another post most people will say that they at least nominally belong to one transcendent religion or another so they probably ought to think that some portion of their beliefs and values are not merely subjective opinions but are given them from outside that as individuals or as a group of faithful believers they give expression to transcendent eternal values which could be said to be objective to the entirety of the material universe coming as they do from beyond it and if you say this is what you believe that it is a part of your metaphysics then why on earth is it not just habitually a part of your picture of things as regards the picture we are presently drawing if we believe these sorts of things then as beings made in the image of god or however this idea is formulated by other religions we can act as metaphysical conduits through whatever circle we choose to draw to that which is truly objective there simply is no adequate firewall to a transcendent god and so in an important sense we could say that the values prices structures etc in our circle are our attempt at the expression of something much higher than our own subjective tastes objective in the sense that really matters the ultimate sense therefore these things must take on something other than being merely subjective at least if we are to take our beliefs and ourselves seriously have i shot through the metaphysical picture well enough anyway the picture that emerges is sets of value structures expressed by individuals and groups of people occasionally and unfortunately sometimes even arrayed against eachother i e in conflict and frankly the way these structures get to maintain their identity and integrity the way that people and groups get to live out their values is through borders period without any reality to the imaginary lines they don t exist anymore and the temporal...