Stephen Downes

I enjoyed this light treatment of subjectivism but as a refutation of the idea it fails utterly. The author traces its origin to the horrors of World War I, where people could quite rightly be justified in rejecting the idea of 'absolute truth' (one sees a similar response to the horrors of the Thirty Years War). But Arthur Krystal's association of subjectivism in philosophers with their emotional responses fails to justify the distinction between a trauma-free world of facts and trauma-fill world of emotions. You can't just say "the findings or conclusions of scholars and scientists existed independently of those who formulated them and those who interpreted them" and leave it hanging. Even if there is a 'reality' independent of our perception of it, there is an infinity of ways to understand that reality, and none of them has any a priori claim to being 'true'.