In philosophy, the subject-object problem arises out of the metaphysics of Hegel. Hegel's metaphysics distinguishes between subjects, roughly, observers; and objects, what is observed. Hegel attached deep significance to these statuses; subjects were active, internal, socially participant, gifted with cognition and will. Objects were passive, external, acted upon but never really internalized by the subjects. According to Hegel, the original philosopher of dialectics, the subject and object become thesis and antithesis, which according to his views unite in a new synthesis. The term philosophy derives from a combination of the Greek words philos meaning love and sophia meaning wisdom. ... // Metaphysics (Greek words meta = after/beyond and physics = nature) is a branch of philosophy concerned with the study of first principles and being (ontology). ... G.W.F. Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 - November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher born in Stuttgart, Württemberg, in present-day southwest Germany. ... Look up Cognition in Wiktionary, the free dictionary The term cognition is used in several different loosely related ways. ... The grammar in this article needs to be checked. ... Broadly speaking, a dialectic (Greek: διαλεκτική) is an exchange of propositions (theses) and counter-propositions (antitheses) resulting in a disagreement. ... A thesis (literally: position from the Greek θέσις) is an intellectual proposition. ... Antithesis (from the Greek anti = against and thesis = position) is a figure of speech involving a seeming contradiction of ideas, words, clauses, or sentences within a balanced grammatical structure. ... Synthesis (from the Greek words syn = plus and thesis = position) is commonly understood to be an integration of two or more pre-existing elements which results in a new creation. ...

The omniscient perspective

By far the most common problem in discourse since the Enlightenment is the assumption of the existence of a God's eye view. That is, assuming that society can select a single perspective and apply it to all events, without needing to take into account the varying point of view of many cognitive beings moving through time and the fusion of this into one, omniscient, unified, perception of what "is" (see E Prime for a proposed solution to this problem in General Semantics). Writers and critics of narrative prose call this view the omniscient narrator, who appears to know everything about the story being told, including what all the characters are thinking, and usually speaks in the third person. ... Perspective is the choice of a single point of view from which to sense, categorize, measure or codify experience, typically for comparing with another. ... A point of view, viewpoint or POV, is the following: On a given topic, a point of view is a cognitive perspective. ... Look up Cognition in Wiktionary, the free dictionary The term cognition is used in several different loosely related ways. ... 8:17 am, August 6, 1945, Japanese time. ... E-Prime, short for English Prime, is a modification of the English language that prohibits the use of the verb to be. The term was coined by Dr. David Bourland, a student of Alfred Korzybskis, in the 1965 work A Linguistic Note: Writing in E-Prime. ... General Semantics is a school of thought founded by Alfred Korzybski in about 1933 in response to his observations that most people had difficulty defining human and social discussions and problems and could almost never predictably resolve them into elements that were responsive to successful intervention or correction. ... In literature, an omniscient narrator is a narrator who appears to know everything about the story being told, including what all the characters are thinking. ... Grammatical person, in linguistics, is used for the grammatical categories a language uses to describe the relationship between the speaker and the persons or things she is talking about. ...

In law and ethics

In an ethical sentence as often formed in law, a subject-object problem is particularly serious, as someone's actual fate may depend on the impression people get from the communication.

For example, the concept of guilt in the sentence "You are guilty" is not the same as the sentence "I am guilty", since guilt can be admitted (by the guilty) very directly, but cannot be assigned by another so directly, as this is a power relationship (see also hierarchy). So if in a single paragraph one were to confuse the two quite different concepts of guilt, treating them as equivalents and drawing inferences on that assumption, then that paragraph would have a serious subject-object problem, even if the sentences themselves taken individually did not. Philosophy of law is especially concerned with details of such issues . Guilt is a concept used in various ways in various contexts. ... A hierarchy (in Greek hieros, sacred, and arkho, rule) is a system of ranking and organizing things. ... Philosophy of law is a branch of philosophy and jurisprudence which studies basic questions about law and legal systems, such as what is the law?, what are the criteria for legal validity?, what is the relationship between law and morality?, and many other similar questions. ...

In 20th Century philosophy

Karl Marx's philosophy of dialectical materialism is founded on Hegel's doctrine of dialectics; although Marx, being concerned mostly with economics and political matters, rejected Hegel's idealism for materialism while keeping the Hegelian dialectic. 1960s New Left thinkers like Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, while coming out of a Marxist background, found the class struggle seemed irrelevant to current political issues. Racial, and later, sexual politics were important matters of social debate at the time, leading the New Left to use sex roles, race, and similar identity politics divisions as proxies for the proletariat and the bourgeois capitalism of orthodox Marxism. Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883 London, UK) was an influential German philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary organizer of the International Workingmens Association, whose two books in particular, Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto (the latter with Friedrich Engels), laid the foundations... Dialectical materialism is the philosophical basis of Marxism as defined by later Communists and their Parties (sometimes called orthodox Marxism). ... Economics (from the Greek οίκος [oikos], house, and νέμω [nemo], rules, hence household management) is the social science that studies the production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods and services in the context of the competing alternative allocations of goods and courses of action. ... In general parlance, idealism or idealist is also used to describe a person having high ideals, sometimes with the connotation that those ideals are unrealisable or at odds with practical life. ... Materialism is the philosophical view that the only thing that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, all things are comprised of material. The view is perhaps best understood in its opposition to the doctrines of immaterial substance applied to the mind historically, and most famously by... The 1960s, or The Sixties, in its most obvious sense refers to the decade between 1960 and 1969, but the expression has taken on a wider meaning over the past twenty years. ... The New Left is a term used in political discourse to refer to radical movements from the 1960s onwards. ... Herbert Marcuse Herbert Marcuse (July 19, 1898 – July 29, 1979) was a prominent German-American philosopher and sociologist of Jewish descent, member of the Frankfurt School. ... The Frankfurt School is a school of neo-Marxist social theory, social research, and philosophy. ... Class struggle is class conflict looked at from a Marxist, libertarian socialist, or anarchist perspective. ... A bagpiper in Scottish military uniform. ... A race is a population of humans distinguished in some way from other humans. ... Identity politics is the politics of group-based movements representing the interests and identity of a particular oppressed group within a society, rather than policy issues relating to the society as a whole. ... The proletariat (from Latin proles, offspring) is a term used to identify a lower social class; a member of such a class is called a proletarian. ... Bourgeois at the end of the thirteenth century Bourgeoisie (boorzhwäz-ee´) in modern use refers to the wealthy or propertied classes in a capitalist society. ... In economics, a capitalist is someone who owns capital, presumably within the economic system of capitalism. ...

A firm conviction that race and sex were subject to political manipulation therefore became an article of faith for these Marxist revisionists. This opened the back door for a sort of linguistic, anti-materialist idealism. The doctrine of social construction took centre stage, as does the incorporation of deconstructionism and critical theory. We are ultimately barred from certain knowledge of an outside world, if it exists, because all we know is in our mind, mediated by language; and language is a social game and a social convention. Therefore, not only is "the personal political," but indeed, all of science, physics, and anything else that is the subject of human discourse can and must be politicized. The Elections and Parties Series Democracy Representative democracy History of democracy Referenda Liberal democracy Representation Voting Voting systems Ideology Elections Elections by country Elections by calender Electoral systems Politics Politics by country Political campaigns Political science Political philosophy Related topics Political parties Parties by country Parties by name Parties by... The term deconstruction is often used in a loose way as a synonym of critical analysis, especially the kind of uncooperative critical analysis that subjects a work or a text to close scrutiny in order to expose contradictions, poor logic or unwelcome affinities with other works or cultural objects. ... In the humanities and social sciences, critical theory is a general term for new theoretical developments (roughly since the 1960s) in a variety of fields, informed by structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, Marxist theory, and several other areas of thought. ... // What is science? There are different theories of what science is. ... The willingness to question previously held truths and search for new answers resulted in a period of major scientific advancements, now known as the Scientific Revolution. ...

The popular names of concepts from physics and mathematics, from Albert Einstein's theory of relativity to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, were used as metaphors, with the assurance that difficulty in observing subatomic particles translated into a universal, epistemological malaise, and that Einstein's relativity somehow lent support to moral relativism. Albert Einstein, by Yousuf Karsh Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist of Swiss and American citizenship, who is widely regarded as the greatest scientist of the 20th century. ... Albert Einsteins theory of relativity is a set of two scientific theories in physics: special relativity and general relativity. ... In quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, sometimes called the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle (a title prefered by Niels Bohr - see quantum indeterminacy), expresses a limitation on accuracy of (nearly) simultaneous measurement of observables such as the position and the momentum of a particle. ... In language, a metaphor is a rhetorical trope where a comparison is made between two seemingly unrelated subjects. ... Epistemology, from the Greek words episteme (knowledge) and logos (word/speech) is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature, origin and scope of knowledge. ... Moral relativism is the position that moral propositions do not reflect absolute or universal truths. ...

Those who accept these premises believe that in ethics, social science and linguistics, the subject-object problem is a confusion resulting from a shifting, inconsistent or vague assignment of observer and observed, active and passive, status in a sentence. Depending on how one views language, and mathematics as a language, this confusion may extend quite deeply into philosophy of all kinds including that of law, science and mathematics itself. Ethics is a general term for what is often described as the science (study) of morality. In philosophy, ethical behavior is that which is good or right. ... Terms like SOSE (Studies of Society & the Environment) not only refer to social sciences but also studies of the environment. ... Broadly conceived, linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. ... The central question involved in discussing mathematics as a language can be stated as follows : What do we mean when we talk about the language of mathematics ? To what extent does mathematics meet generally accepted criteria of being a language ? A secondary question is : If it is valid to consider... The term philosophy derives from a combination of the Greek words philos meaning love and sophia meaning wisdom. ... Corruption Jurisprudence Philosophy of law Law (principle) List of legal abbreviations Legal code Intent Letter versus Spirit Natural Justice Natural law Religious law Witness intimidation Legal research External links Wikibooks Wikiversity has more about this subject: School of Law Look up law in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Law, Legal Definitions... Main article: History of mathematics The evolution of mathematics can be seen to be an ever increasing series of abstractions. ...

In language

In languages generally, one's choice of pronoun chooses a particular subject or subjects to address a particular object or objects. For instance, the always-capitalized "He" refers in English to God, and to say "we..." is always to imply that there is more than one, seeking to state something that has been decided by them, to some other. The range of pronouns available in a language is a key influence on how the subjects and objects are perceived by any native speaker of that language as a mother tongue. For instance, the English language has only the one word for "we", ambiguously implying all levels of consensus from "me and my invisible friend" to "me and the whole Royal Navy". The listener must guess the degree of force that is backing the statement. In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes a noun or noun phrase with or without a determiner, such as you and they in English. ... We is the nominative case of the first-person plural pronoun in English. ... First language (native language, mother tongue) is the language a person learns first. ... First language (native language, mother tongue, or vernacular) is the language a person learns first. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Consensus has two common meanings. ...

Other languages, such as that of the Penan, an aboriginal people of Borneo, may use several words for varying degrees of commitment and consensus among different groups - the Penan have six words for varying levels of "we" - but yet have no word to describe the status of a domestic animal. The idea of taking in an animal, caring for it, and then killing it, is abhorrent to them. Living things are either in the family, and thus cannot be hunted, or not. Power is thus reflected in the language directly. To the Penan, all discourse in English probably has a serious subject-object problem, as who's we is never quite clear - it requires cultural context to actually understand who "we" might be, when. The Penan are, a nomadic aboriginal people living in Borneo. ... This is a list of animals that have been domesticated by humans. ...

As it relates to language and power

A closely related power issue in ethics, sociology and philosophy of science is that of "the other", that being, an entity or group-entity which is always treated as an object, assuming oneself or "those like oneself" as the subject. In making such a universal assignment of object status, a group such as slaves, psychiatric patients, workers, or debtors can be assigned some subordinate status by use of language. The master, clinician, employer, creditor, respectively, can legally (using force) assume some power for the other, and speak for them in the same manner as the fictional literary omniscient narrator. Sociologists usually define power as the ability to impose ones will on others, even if those others resist in some way. ... Ethics is a general term for what is often described as the science (study) of morality. In philosophy, ethical behavior is that which is good or right. ... Social interactions of people and their consequences are the subject of sociology studies. ... The philosophy of science is the branch of philosophy which studies the philosophical foundations, assumptions, and implications of science, including the natural sciences such as physics and biology, and the social sciences, such as psychology and economics. ... The Other is a 1972 chiller directed by Robert Mulligan and written by Tom Tryon, who was also the author of the novel. ... In anarchist discourse, a group-entity is usually distinguished from an individual hominid, or animal groups from a single living being of any sexual species. ...

Marxism, feminism and Queer studies are particularly concerned with these problems as they relate to work, women, and gender and sex roles respectively. However they are a general concern of meta-ethics which increasingly is concerned with body as the housing and the motive for the mind. See also philosophy of action, ethical relationship, perspective. Marxism is the political practice and social theory based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century German philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. ... Feminism is a diverse collection of social theories, political movements, and moral philosophies, which focus on limiting gender inequality and promoting womens rights, interests, and issues in society. ... Queer studies is the study of issues relating to sexual orientation and gender identity. ... In philosophy, Meta-ethics is that branch of ethics which seeks to understand the nature of ethical evaluations. ... Philosophy of action is chiefly concerned with human action, intending to distinguish between activity and passivity, voluntary, intentional, culpable and involuntary actions, and related questions. ... An ethical relationship, in most theories of ethics that employ the term, is a basic and trustworthy relationship that one has to another human being, that cannot necessarily be characterized in terms of any abstraction other than trust and common protection of each others body. ... Perspective is the choice of a single point of view from which to sense, categorize, measure or codify experience, typically for comparing with another. ...

When feminists speak of "sexual objectification", they knowingly or unknowingly refer to the Hegelian metaphysic, without which "objectification" seems an odd choice of word. The ethical postulate of egalitarianism remains as the one remaining moral absolute, unchecked by social constructionism, or the notion that all discourse is about power. Thus, a concern that no one be treated as a Hegelian object becomes a paramount concern of neo-Hegelian idealists. Moreover, by accepting a strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, issues of language and usage were seen as important political foci. Sexual objectification is the act of treating and judging a person with values generally appreciated in animals or objects (eg. ... Egalitarianism is the moral doctrine that equality ought to prevail throughout society. ... Moral absolutism is the belief or theory that there are absolute standards against which moral questions can be judged and suggests that morals are not determined by societal or situational influences. ... In semantics, discourses are linguistic units composed of several sentences - in other words, conversations, arguments or speeches. ... In linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (SWH) states that there is a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it. ...

In Science

In Physics

There are related concerns in philosophy of physics where observers are known to affect a result, e.g. in quantum mechanics, in a way which defies the conventional assignment of a subject role to experimenter, with everything else as an object. This can lead among other things to confirmation bias. Physics is the study of matter and energy and how it interacts. ... Fig. ... In inductive inference, confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study. ...

In Mathematics

Cognitive science of mathematics raises some similar concerns with philosophy of mathematics. Among them, the assignment of objective status to mathematical objects as in Platonism, although they are formalisms used in a linguistic fashion for communications between living beings, and thus subject to the same subject-object problems as other forms of such communication. This raises some concerns, dating back as far as Eugene Wigner's 1960 observations on the matter, that what we call foundations of mathematics and cosmology may be not observable or discoverable absolutes, but rather, aspects of humanity and its cognition. Nick Bostrom in 2002 addressed this concern with a theory of anthropic bias. The cognitive science of mathematics is the study of mathematical ideas using the techniques of cognitive science. ... Philosophy of mathematics is that branch of philosophy which attempts to answer questions such as: why is mathematics useful in describing nature?, in which sense(s), if any, do mathematical entities such as numbers exist? and why and how are mathematical statements true?. Various approaches to answering these questions will... Platonic idealism is the theory that the substantive reality around us is only a reflection of a higher truth. ... Eugene Wigner (left) and Alvin Weinberg Eugene Paul Wigner (Hungarian Wigner Pál Jenő) (November 17, 1902 – January 1, 1995) was a Hungarian physicist and mathematician. ... 1960 was a leap year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ... The term foundations of mathematics is sometimes used for certain fields of mathematics itself, namely for mathematical logic, axiomatic set theory, proof theory, model theory, and recursion theory. ... Look up Cosmology in Wiktionary, the free dictionary For the jazz band, see: Cosmology (band) Cosmology, from the Greek: κοσμολογία (cosmologia, κόσμος (cosmos) world + λογια (logia) discourse) is the study of the universe in its totality and by extension mans place in it. ... Look up Cognition in Wiktionary, the free dictionary The term cognition is used in several different loosely related ways. ... Nick Bostrom (Boström in the original Swedish) is a philosopher at the University of Oxford, and known for his work on the anthropic principle. ... 2002 is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Anthropic bias is the bias arising when your evidence is biased by observation selection effects, according to philosopher Nick Bostrom. ...

Other approaches

• Robert M. Pirsig's philosophy of the Metaphysics of Quality is largely concerned with the subject-object problem.
• Sun Myung Moon's philosophy, Unification Thought, treats subject and object in a way different from classical ideas of Hegel and Marx.

Robert Maynard Pirsig (born September 6, 1928) is a popular American writer, famous for his first book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974). ... The Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ) is a theory of reality put forth by Robert M. Pirsig (1928 onwards) in his philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance published in 1974 and expanded in Lila: An Inquiry into Morals published in 1991. ... ‹The template below has been proposed for deletion. ... Unification Thought is the philosophical system of the Unification Church and is based on the Divine Principle. ... For subject and object in linguistics, see Morphosyntactic alignment. ...

See also

• Point of view
• Mind-body problem

A point of view, viewpoint or POV, is the following: On a given topic, a point of view is a cognitive perspective. ... The mind-body problem is the problem of determining the relationship between the human body and the human mind. ...

External links

• Subject-object problem and double hermeneutic