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Key points
- We know about our dreams and inner experiences via the subjective frame of knowing.
- Math and science epitomize the objective frame of knowing.
- The stories of our culture and the political narratives we hear epitomize the intersubjective frame.
What do you know? How do you know that it is true? In philosophy, these are questions of epistemology, which is the branch of the discipline concerned with understanding how knowledge claims are formed and justified.
Let's reflect on some of what you know. Do you know what you dreamt about last night? Do you know the chemical composition of water? Do you know that the reason that the president of Harvard University came under fire and resigned was because of racism? I ask these three questions because they can be sorted to reveal three major kinds of epistemological frames, which are the subjective, the objective, and the intersubjective.
The first question about your dreams is accessible via the subjective epistemological frame. You achieve knowledge about the world via your subjective, conscious experience of it. In addition, there are domains of your experience, such as your dreams or how you experience the color red, that you have much more direct and immediate access to than anyone else.
The "truth" of subjective knowledge is fascinating to ponder. In some ways, it can be thought of as being the least true in the sense that it is the most vulnerable to bias and preconceived notions and has the most difficulty separating out appearances from the "objective" truth. At the same time, there are ways in which subjective knowledge reveals things that are "more true" than anything else.
Consider, for example, Rene Descartes' most famous line in philosophy: "I think, therefore I am." With it, he is arguing that the most undeniable fact about existence was that he was a thinking being. He could simply see that it was true such that even if he was being controlled and manipulated by some outside force, which would make his conception of the external world completely wrong (think here of the plot of the movie The Matrix), it still was the case that he was an experiencing, thinking entity.
The question about the chemical composition of water is accessible via the objective epistemological frame. The objective epistemological frame is achieved by refined knowledge of logic and evidence. Mathematics and natural science represent our most objective domains of knowledge. Through the science of chemistry, we know that water is made up of collections of molecules that have two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom because of systematic study based on experiments and logic. These experiments and logic are grounded in a third-person empirical approach, such that the perspective and biases of particular subjects are factored out, and what is left behind is a description of behavior that is, to the best of our ability to reason and explore, accurate.
This is not to say that what we call objective knowledge is always true in the deepest sense of the word. For example, before Copernicus, it would have been considered objective knowledge that the sun revolved around the earth. But it is fair to say that objective knowledge is the most defensible and most likely to be true in a general sense.
The last question about what caused the Harvard president to resign is accessible via the intersubjective frame. Intersubjective knowledge is framed by narratives, values, stories, and the way humans justify what should happen in the world and why. Religions and political parties operate via intersubjective knowledge. The relationship to "the truth" when we are in the domain of intersubjective knowledge is especially tricky because it is about weaving together patterns, values, and groups to coordinate activity and generate a shared sense of meaning.
In a nutshell, intersubjective knowledge is knowledge that is socially constructed and value-laden. Of course, this is not to say that intersubjective knowledge cannot be fallacious. Most of us would agree that the Nazis were wrong about lots of things. But, as all the different narratives that are emerging about why the president of Harvard resigned make clear, intersubjective knowledge is very much about spin, values, and justification systems, which galvanize people, rather than facts that can be isolated, separated from the narrative, and determined to be true or false in an objective sense.
To live as a human in the modern world is to constantly be knowing via the subjective, objective, and intersubjective frames for making sense of the world. Although we all do this, we should be aware that philosophers have not developed a way to put these three frames together in a way that makes sense. For example, in his book Subjective, Intersubjective, and Objective (2001), the philosopher Donald Davidson summed up some of the difficulties linking these three ways of knowing together as follows:
I want, first of all, to stress the apparent oddity of the fact that we have three irreducibly different varieties of empirical knowledge [i.e., the subjective, the objective, and the intersubjective]. We need an overall picture which not only accommodates all three modes of knowing, but makes sense of their relations to one another. Without such a general picture we should be deeply puzzled that the same world is known to us in three such different ways.
The bottom line is that you should be aware that there are these three frames of knowing. Some of what you know simply comes to you based on your first-person experience, some of what you know comes from humans working together in the domains of science and math and gives us our most objective knowledge, and some of it is based on stories and shared beliefs and values generated by various cultural groups. And, although you use these kinds of knowing all the time, we are generally lacking in an overarching system of thought that puts these three ways of knowing together in a clear and coherent manner. Until we figure out a way to put them together, perhaps the best thing to do is to be aware of these different frames and to know which frame you are using to justify what you know and how you know it.
