Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Not-Quite-Science Forum What is relative and what is objective?

Yes.

The dichotomy of "observer-observed" was questioned by the phenomenologists such as Husserl who saw no need to speculate on "outer" and "inner" or Kant's distinction of "noumena" from "phenomena". This non-duality was developed by Heidegger (Being and Time)whose human living essence (or Dasein) was something akin to a travelling energy node on a network of inter-relationships. The later Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations) argued there could be no "private language" and that meaning was always "contextual use" not referential to an "external world". In short "objectivity" merely implies self referential "contextual agreement".

Interestingly, the biologist Maturana independentaly analysed the praxis of "living" as something close to Heidegger's view, and that there was no requirement for a seperate ontological "reality". For Maturana, "observer status" was merely one social activity of homo sapiens involving linguistic reporting and the "processing of sense data" was a paradigmatic game played by so-called "cognitive scientists" speculating on reductionist models for cognition.