Just wondering everyone's ideas on whether or not anything in the world is Objective, and is there such a thing as Pure Objectivity.

Originally posted by Origen
... and is there such a thing as Pure Objectivity.
Only from me. The rest of you are number two, or lower.

PS: It's partially from the movie "The Mystery Men". :D

I guess I did not explain my question well enough. My questions starts with do people live in their own realities, and does the concept of objectivity truly exist at a universal level?

Of course it does. It would take an extraordinary human to accomplish such a feat, however. I'm not sure I would care to know such a human... or to rephrase, I would say that upon meeting such a human, I would not like them.

Objectivity, to be complete, must contain all subjectivity. The world is objective, we just don't know what it is outside our own context. But we do know that objective reality is that which brings about our subjective reality -- the empirical world being a relation between observer and observed implies that there is something objective called an observer and something objective called the observed. Relativity requires that there be something there to relate.

But if you take the philosophical meaning of objectivity as being that which is not at all dependent on the nature of what you (the observer) are, then of course no one can know objectivity. To know something is to relate yourself to it. Anything you know is one of your own thoughts, and if objectivity must be something not dependent on yourself then none of your thoughts can be called objective. Thus the moment you tried to know something objective it'd become subjective via the fact that it's an object of your knowledge. Everything we know is dependent on the subject/object (knowere/known) distinction, and it's illogical to imagine knowing something independent of that, so there is always that relativity there.

The word subjective presupposes that an objective exists.

If something is subjective it means that everyone views it slightly differently, that we are jaded by our minds (past experiences and nature make-up), that we misinterputed the facts somehow. This means, of course, that there must be "the facts". To say that we all view something differently means that there is something solid to view differently in the first place.

Let me ask you this. If I show you a picture and show another guy a different picture and you describe what you see as a circle and he describes what he sees as a square would you say that it is a matter of subjectivity? No. If I showed each of you a picture and you said it was a circle and he said it was more an oval, would you say it's a matter of subjectivity? Yes. Why? Because there was an objective fact to begin with.