Subjectivism: From infantile disease to chronic illness

Abstract

The classical distinction which I was taught in all my undergraduate philosophy courses, equates objectivism with realism with materialism, and contrasts the three with subjectivism which is identified with idealism. I have discussed the distinction between materialism and realism in my book on Faraday who was an anti-materialist realist. Here I wish to discuss the difference between subjectivism and idealism, not an account of Hegel's objectivist idealism, which is justly dismissed as confused, but both to show that idealism is usually objectivist and in an attempt to place on a clear map the modern subjectivist school of induction, the Bayesian school so-called. I shall try to place all subjectivism in the epistemological error of empiricism and verificationism combined. I shall argue that Bayesianism can only gain its vindication from objectivist, not subjectivist, arguments, and that it is bogged down in subjectivism only because the vindication does not deliver the goods. In brief, as a stage in an argument or an intellectual development subjectivism is understandable; fixed subjectivism is simply the outcome of getting stuck early in the game and showing too much inflexibility to extricate oneself.