Subjectivity and Reference

Abstract

The problem of subjectivity is an explanatory problem, and the problem is not merely that we do not yet have the explanation. We don’t seem to have even the framework for an explanation. In Thomas Metzinger’s phrase, subjectivity has not been “turned into an explanandum for the hard sciences” (2004, p. 36). We don’t know what an explanation would look like, or what sort of explanation might be given. This is because subjectivity seems sui generis. There are no explanations of other, relevantly similar phenomena that might serve as paradigms. In part, the difficulty lies in knowing what needs to be explained. Subjectivity is a bit like an “unknown unknown.” When confronted with a known unknown, there is some known variable x, such that discovering the value of x will fit some model or solve some equation. But here the variable itself is undefined, an unknown. Although it is indeed known that we don’t have the explanation (as in the case of a “known unknown”), this doesn’t help because scientists have little more than the word itself to work with. Like Meno, we don’t know what we are looking for. In seeking an explanation of subjectivity, what do we want to know? What is subjectivity? How will we know if we’ve explained it? The task of the first three chapters of this book is to consider these questions and to clarify what needs an explanation and what does not.