Senses of “subjective” and “objective”

We have so far seen that at least some of the judgments we make about wine, some of the words we use to describe it – including certain metaphors and evaluations – and some of our experiences of it, are firmly tethered to properties that we can with confidence say are really in the wine. They are there to be detected, independent of us, and hence have some claim to be “objective”. We also touched on the idea that our judgements about wine may be grounded as much in certain conventions, norms and consensus among experts as in the perceptible properties of the wine. In this and the following chapter we need to look much more closely at the relations between all of these elements, for “subjectivity” and “objectivity” are extremely slippery notions, not merely in everyday usage, but also in philosophical parlance. Many different things can be meant by them, and just what it is that renders a particular realm of discourse and judgement objective or subjective is a matter of deep dispute among philosophers. So we shall need to tread very carefully in this treacherous terrain, and it's therefore important to begin with a brief and relatively simple overview of the territory.

All knowledge of the world that is attained through our sense perception is obviously subjective in the harmless sense that we thereby come to know the world through our subjective experiences of it; harmless because by itself this does not preclude the objectivity of our judgements concerning the external world.