Paradigmatic said: @Fvlminatvs The anime community as a whole actually in some shape or form on objectivity in this medium(if it isn't obvious with the responses in this thread and the thread you searched). Of course the people holding the opposite view (no matter how valid their reasons for having it) will be outspoken. It's actually generating discourse on this subject instead of just thinking that objectivity is a given. I get what you're saying. I do. I'm just frustrated because I don't think discourse happens because I think the majority of the community approaches the whole thing as a zero-sum argument. I've said elsewhere how none of my colleagues in the art or literature departments at my college even thing subjectivity-vs-objectivity is even worth talking about. When I asked them about this last Spring semester, they were like, "What the f---? Really? These kids are arguing about that? WHY?" I mean, for me, this is a non-argument. The most vocal factions of this debate are being reductionist, too. I believe some things, SOME things, can be objectively measured. Frames per second, whether or not frames are doubled, the number of key frames, overall animation quality, artistic quality, how on-model (or not) characters are... these things can be objectively measured. Personal taste is mostly subjective. You like what you like, you dislike what you dislike. Taste, however, is different from your ability to appreciate something. You can be a BIT more objective by listening to people who have different taste. Thinking about why you have your taste, what things appeal to you, and dig at your own psychology a bit, you can start being a teeny bit more objective. This whole thing is a spectrum. You can reduce how subjective you are. There's always going to be a subjective element to art that cannot be quantified. There will always be an emotional dimension and that dimension has a degree of subjectivity. But there are ways to measure things, to tell how often certain techniques work well, and measure and compare these techniques across the medium and against other media. The problem I see is that the most vocal people are partisan. They are either 100% "you can be objective, totally," or "everything is subjective 100% of the time." Neither is true. Neither. And these hardliners making these arguments are so rigid and solid in their thinking, unwilling to learn or consider alternatives. They demonstrate ignorance everywhere. They may have a little bit of knowledge about art in general and anime/storytelling/etc. in specific, but they've never sat down and read anything substantial about writing stories, making anime, elements of narratives, etc. This is demonstrated by the communities utter ignorance of the intersubjective, which is unsurprising because no one actually understands the actual definitions of "objective" or "subjective," in the first place. I've already pounded out a long diatribe about the specific definitions six months ago. I won't repeat myself here. I doubt you or anyone else is interested in a wall of text that cites Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, or David Hume. I'm not asking for graduate-level discourse. But it would be nice if there was discourse at all instead of people just throwing their opinions out there and not listening to what anyone else has to say. Anyway, sorry for the wall of text. I wish this argument would die because I think it is holding up more beneficial and more edifying discussion. |
Josh said: Basically this, and yea this is what I generally say in every thread. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯Someone probably said this already, but I think it's more a confusion of terms than anything else. At the level of final judgement, you can't objectively proclaim that something is good/bad/an 8 out of 10/etc. However, at the level of analysis and within the framework of art theories, you can make relatively objective statements about art -- that's what art criticism is. katsucats said: First of all, apologies, I was on vacation so excuse me for not feeling like checking MAL. If you don't want to continue this train of thought feel free to not respond.You have obviously studied literature and I'm not trying to take that away from you. However, there's some logical flaws in your reasoning. Since it is possible, at all, to dispassionately analyze anime, it proves -- not my opinion, it's completely factual -- that passion (i.e. liking) of a work is distinct from structural analysis. If they were necessarily correlated, then you must be passionate during analysis. Understanding what the author tries to convey through structural analysis is, first of all partial because a machine arguably does math without "understanding" the significance of the result, not at all the same as liking, or having one's own thoughts about a work. I haven't studied literature in a particularly academic environment, but I can see where people get this impression. I'll take it as a complement. In reality, I just like reading books. Anyway, to suggest that structural analysis as distinct from liking something doesn't preclude the possibility that the two can be related. I think we're fundamentally agreeing on the same principle, that we can be dispassionate in our analysis, but all you've stated is that they're separate, which is what I agree with. After all, it's not like you have to love whatever it is you read in high school when your teacher told you to analyze it. You just did that shit to get a good grade. But I think the mistake here is you're just assuming an absolute scenario where the two must always be found together in order to be considered related, when I don't think that's true; I think it's just evidence that it is possible for us to appreciate without liking something or enjoying it. That someone can use their knowledge to analyze something they dislike doesn't mean they can analyze something with great fervor when they're caught up in something they love. Correlation isn't binary and I think you're just extrapolating from the fact that analysis is not always a personification of our passion for art as a means to argue that these two aren't related, but that's not how correlation works. There's a reason why we have statistical terms for weak and strong correlations. Besides, why do post-grads in lit continue to study narratology and do work in whatever medieval, modern, what have you field? It's certainly not because they want to grade papers and talk with students. I think the common impression you'll find is that they love literature and deeper studies enhances their appreciation for it. Again, this seems obvious and almost insulting to deny. katsucats said: I gave examples in some of my previous posts, but:How does it? You've admitted that it is possible to dispassionately analyze a piece. There are many other philosophical problems with believing there is some kind of natural or supernatural representation of emotions as an objective property of some thing, even just from an epistemological standpoint. 1. Understanding that Goethe utilizes classical Greek poetry and transitions to Germanic poetic traditions in order to tell a sort of literary history in part two of Faust is one of many reasons why I love Faust. I don't think I'd adore Faust given its immense obscurity and impenetrable nature if I didn't actually understand poetry to the level that I do. 2. Understanding that Anthony Burgess's Napoleon Symphony is a symphony in prose form is what makes the book such an enjoyable experience. If I didn't know that it was Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, I don't think I would've liked it nearly as much, but because I can tell that the structure of the novel is fashioned in this specific fashion, it lends itself to enjoyment. I think you're conflating this into an argument about objectivity, when my sole point is that because I know things about art, or criticism, or whatever, it helps me to enjoy things a lot more when I come across them. katsucats said: I don't think I'm making any absolute statement of the sort. I don't really insist that appreciation must be achieved from a structural standpoint. I'm just saying in various circumstances, plenty of works I've come across are much more difficult to comprehend and appreciate if you don't have a sort of prerequisite knowledge. To use anime as an example for a moment, I think it's safe to say that knowing Japanese riichi mahjong helps one better understand what's going on in Legend of Koizumi, Saki, or Akagi. I don't doubt that people can't enjoy those anime for other various things, but I would contend that the fact that they don't know mahjong and are watching anime that are largely composed of mahjong-related features is robbing them of some part of the experience. Maybe people disagree, but I mean, this is obviously not an inflexible rule. I don't think people need to read philosophy to enjoy Ergo Proxy, but hey, maybe some edgy 14 year old thinks so.You are making dual points here and I'm not sure they're compatible. If you insist that appreciation must be achieved from a structural standpoint, such that the only method of appreciation is to see the work as how the author created it, then you are absolutely not seeing the work for what it is, in the final product. This is why contemporary art moved away from modernist traditions in the first place. Pollack absolutely did want you to achieve subliminal experience through the art by understanding the shape, size, and color of those lines, which probably acts as a proxy, so to speak, into his own emotions. However, contemporary art recognized that authentic experience is one's own and not what the author wanted you to feel. In your case, it's strangely neither, since you lack any feeling about it but still want to assert that you do. You could probably spend a long time expressing the difficulties in creating a Pollack piece, but if anyone asks you if you like it, what rating would you give it, you'd be like "..." Because you're not even answering the question. In a sense, your perspective is exactly what a big data algorithm tries to do: suck out all the humanity of a subject and just pay attention to procedural data. As to your second part, I'm pretty sure I don't really need to respond to it. I think your claim that I'm just sucking humanity out of art is a ridiculous notion and doesn't really warrant a response. Art is a personal experience as much as any other, but I've already expressed that I don't like Pollack, so I'm not sure where you get this impression that I'm not answering a question of whether I like him or what rating I'd give him. I'd obviously rate him low, because I don't like him, but that doesn't mean I don't "get" what he's doing. katsucats said: Again, I don't think you really understood what I was writing, but I'm not asserting that the technical aspects of Mozart is what makes him interesting. Far from it. I'm just saying knowing why Mozart composed music the way he did lends itself to greater appreciation of his music. This isn't to say that you can't appreciate Mozart in that absence, or that you have to learn theory. It's just that knowing how the "form works to some effect" is worthwhile and should not be so easily dismissed for the sake of some vague notion or sensibility of "listening to music." No, you're mistaking knowledge for appreciation. Theories were developed to explain why people appreciate things. By insisting that the technical aspects of Mozart or Pollack is what's interesting, I can tell that you must hate Mozart of Pollack (even if you don't think so yourself). You think those theories were developed arbitrarily, as if the authors just had some intellectual inspiration devoid of emotion, like it came to them in a dream, and they built this entire form around it, and not because the form works to some effect. I don't think this is particularly controversial, and, if anything, I find the opposing view that literary professors are just "different" in their appreciation of fiction simply because they know and understand a particular approach to be extremely presumptuous. Art is a holistic experience, and I find that people who understand aesthetics in a rounded manner are by far the most open minded and able to appreciate its qualities. Further, it's not like people who take to studying art in some capacity are confined to one mode of "thinking" about their fiction. Why else do guilty pleasures, or binging on Netflix shows, or laughing at bad movies with friends exist as activities? katsucats said: What? I mean...somehow who can more accurately recognize musical forms is probably more capable in describing how they feel.Attractive in what sense? Would you like to describe how that makes you feel, or is being human too much of a thing to admit? "Wow, I really loved the cadenza in Rachmaninoff's third piano concerto. The pianist played with great virtuosity and spirit without having to resort to senseless rubato, and to top it off, the orchestration of the piece was superbly balanced for an orchestra that featured less brass than normal." I can't see how the above statement makes the person commenting any less of a human. It just shows some semblance of clarity and recognition for music. katsucats said: You should read more literary analysis before making this kind of statement, because it's not accurate. There's this impression that if we can analyze something, we're making a sort of value judgment on it, which has become kind of implicit but definitely isn't the case. But if I just write a paper on say, iono, how Revolutionary Girl Utena follows in the literary footsteps of Herman Hesse's Demian, or that Texhnolyze features numerous parallels with Dante's Purgatorio, those statements aren't making value judgments on whether Utena is good/bad, or whether Texhnolyze good/bad for featuring these sort of things. They just seek to explore how they exist as features of interpretation within an anime or show or movie or whatever. Literary analysis doesn't make something look good or bad, it explains why something looks good or bad. katsucats said: Big data is different depending on what industry or space your'e in, to be honest, but I'm certain I've read more on digital humanities than anyone on this board, and even the biggest proponents have had to scale back their initial findings on literary studies using data simply because of how inconclusive it was (see Franco Moretti).We've learned a lot from big data that perhaps you're unaware of, but what's more important is that if processing literature as data is bland to you, then one wonders what makes one kind of processing bland, and the other processing the only way to be articulate? The answer to the question is simple to me. The first is you feed a bunch of books for machine learning algos to process, and the literature on the process thus far has been inconclusive in saying things we don't really already know about literature. The second is you actually read and pay attention, and we still get great literary criticism from it. Just my two cents. |
YudinaJan 7, 2018 10:41 PM
katsucats said: You are making dual points here and I'm not sure they're compatible. If you insist that appreciation must be achieved from a structural standpoint, such that the only method of appreciation is to see the work as how the author created it, then you are absolutely not seeing the work for what it is, in the final product. I've already explained why this is wrong. If you care to address my post, I'm interested. |
Clebardman said: If you actually skimmed through the thread (or skimmed through a very basic article on philosophy), you'd understand how moronic of a straw man this is. Let me help you out since you don't have a mouse. Google takes two seconds, and I'm in a charitable mood.@MarthPryde That "everything is subjective" stance is more a defense mechanism to avoid Learning about the medium, as far as I'm concerned. Better make these threads and spout that nonsense than spending time doing the microscopic amount of research needed to understand stuff like the difference between animation and art style (I swear half the community can't, and will never be able to because "lol it's subjective") http://www.iep.utm.edu/objectiv/ www.oapen.org/download?type=document&docid=341319 (PDF book called "Aesthetics and Subjectivity") https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-judgment/ (The following are satire, for those of you who "don't get it".) http://www.objectivegamereviews.com/ https://www.destructoid.com/100-objective-review-final-fantasy-xiii-179178.phtml (This isn't satire.) https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/09/10/the-pointless-pursuit-of-an-objective-video-game-press/#274e21bb4e41 https://medium.com/@a_man_in_black/the-myth-of-objective-game-journalism-c2d04d2e7a33 (Read the commenters rip this idiot apart.) https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2008/jul/03/ronaldberganblog |
| My subjective reviews: katsureview.wordpress.com THE CHAT CLUB. |
MarthePryde said: Wittgenstein was not talking about aesthetics, he was talking about ontology. You can describe what RGB value a frame of an anime show has, but that's irrelevant to our central interest -- judging. Is that RGB value good, or is it bad?katsucats said: You have obviously studied literature and I'm not trying to take that away from you. However, there's some logical flaws in your reasoning. Since it is possible, at all, to dispassionately analyze anime, it proves -- not my opinion, it's completely factual -- that passion (i.e. liking) of a work is distinct from structural analysis. If they were necessarily correlated, then you must be passionate during analysis. Understanding what the author tries to convey through structural analysis is, first of all partial because a machine arguably does math without "understanding" the significance of the result, not at all the same as liking, or having one's own thoughts about a work. Wittgenstein educated us of the law of projection. 4.014 The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world. To all of them the logical structure is common. 4.0141 In the fact that there is a general rule by which the musician is able to read the symphony out of the score, and that there is a rule by which one could reconstruct the symphony from the line on a gramophone record and from this again—by means of the first rule—construct the score, herein lies the internal similarity between these things which at first sight seem to be entirely different. And the rule is the law of projection which projects the symphony into the language of the musical score. It is the rule of translation of this language into the language of the gramophone record. When we do not understand a sentence that makes perfect logical sense or cannot play from a valid musical score, the problem is not that incorrect notation was used, but that we either do not understand the language or are suffering a deficiency from our usual understanding of it. Now, human beings, unless deaf, can hear and make sense out of audio naturally; as can we see a visual picture and distinguish different features. We have an inborn predisposition to understand these languages. Assuming our functioning in these areas is not deficient, and assuming we are able to essentially understand the verbal language used, we will understand the aesthetic communication as it is conveyed to us by the author. The potential for varied understandings of art comes with the associations we make with our existing ideas, and the thoughts that are inspired by considering the essential ideas conveyed to us. Hereof lies the confusion. Our understanding of this essential form will inspire varied emotions in us relative to who we are as individuals. If we are to dispassionately analyse the anime - that is to say, with a realistically minimal degree of emotion involved - then we should also aim to keep tangent thoughts to a realistically minimal amount as well. If a true essential understanding of the anime's complete language can be discerned, then we can make a value judgement of it with regards to how its structural finesse balances with its conceptual implications relative to the wider collection of anime. What concerns me is how one would then value judge an anime, as in such a way, with another aesthetic medium such as a piece of literature. To clarify: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem Or perhaps you believe in one objective way in which we all interpret narrative devices such as to effective eliminate the ego, and all analyses that differs from this ideal analysis would be considered flawed. It begs the question by whose authority do you determine the ideal analysis. Is there some kind of scientific study you propose that would help us devise a proof toward this task? After all, if it's objective, there would be some way, even in theory, for everyone to infer the same perfect analysis if they followed the rules, and it would be independent of their upbringing, culture, aesthetic sensibilities, ethical values, spoken language, age, etc. |
katsucatsJan 8, 2018 4:14 AM
| My subjective reviews: katsureview.wordpress.com THE CHAT CLUB. |
| @katsucats eeeew, grumpy. Obviously you're educated enough to defend your stance, but you can't deny most people aren't and it is overall hurting the quality of discussions on MAL. Thks for the links I didn't read, I guess (^: |
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| anyways, i loled when people bring classic case to explaining how can it be objective reasoning, except we already argue for millenium about them.... not to mention huge dichotomy gap in it.... especially if we apply japan animation in here which alwasy has been for commoner people since it creation.... i mean, man used to use high heels because it aesthetic during it's time, so if art objective, objectively, it should be also aesthetic too now...  oh man, fabulous.... |
 "If taking responsibility for a mistake that cannot be undone means death, it's not that hard to die. At least, not as hard as to live on." |
| Yudina brings up a separate point, for which the discussion will have to be put on hold, perhaps indefinitely (school is starting again), but 99% of the objectivity/subjectivity confusion lies in a confusion of semantics. The problems are as follows: 1. The word "objective" has two primary definitions of use here. Objectivity meaning sensed, not perceived, without the mind, is opposite of subjectivity. Objectivity meaning impartial, balanced, is opposite of biased. Problem: People do not understand that you can't just conflate two definitions of a word and treat them as interchangeable within a sentence. Just because objectivity is opposite to both subjectivity and bias doesn't mean that subjectivity is equivalent to bias. It doesn't help that subjectivity, in some contexts, imply bias, but impartial is not a meaningful substitute for "without the mind". The question is impartial to what? A judge, impartial between two legal parties, still makes his subjective interpretation to the law in the end. His ruling is not the last word. It can be overturned. 2. The word bias has multiple definitions as well. Bias meaning leaning toward one side, playing favorites. Bias (colloquial, extreme) meaning unfair, incomplete, ranting. Problem: Here it is more subtle, but still reveals a fatal misunderstanding in language. The two differ by shades, but they are not the same. For instance, it is inescapable that, if you wish to describe an ice cream you've just eaten, you would be leaning toward one side, or playing favorites, unless you have absolutely no opinion. However, that doesn't mean you are being unfair (by our perception of the word), incomplete, or ranting. You could like it without liking all of it, and report it as such, but you still like it. In Problem 1, you are switching one sense of a word for another. In Problem 2, you are taking the extreme form of the word to mean the only form of the word. When people exhibit both problems, they confuse "without mind" objective descriptions (e.g. keyframes, type of soundtrack) for being unbiased, and miss the point of a review altogether since they are not judging the anime in a way that we want to know -- what they actually thought about the narrative structure, pacing, plot development, dramatic tension, consistency, etc., all of which are necessarily subjective, but still possible to analyze. 3. There are more suitable words. Articulate means that you are expressing your thoughts eloquently and coherently, you have the ability to make nuanced distinctions. Vague means that your description lacks detail. Incoherent means that your description lacks sufficient detail for people to understand how your thoughts connect. Incomplete ranters are often vague and incoherent, and not articulate. Complete would obviously mean that they touched all bases. Problem: Either because objective is such a commonly used word that it becomes a cliche that people feel like they are forced to use even if they don't understand it, or just that people lack a vocabulary to describe things in a meaningful way, or both... But to be honest, when people can't communicate well, and refuse to learn how to, they probably write shit reviews anyways. |
| My subjective reviews: katsureview.wordpress.com THE CHAT CLUB. |
Reviews are not objective. https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/09/10/the-pointless-pursuit-of-an-objective-video-game-press/#1a9a3d814e41 But it's important to remember that a movie review is subjective;it only gives you one person's opinion. http://www.classzone.com/books/lnetwork_gr08/page_build.cfm?content=analyz_media&ch=30  https://www.diffen.com/difference/Objective_vs_Subjective Seems like people outside anime community agree judgement of quality are subjective. |
VyzassJan 8, 2018 6:54 AM
| 'America is a stolen country' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM8WZ0ztMuc Zapredon said: It doesn't matter if you like LoGH,Monster etc.If you are a jobless or college/school dropout living in your mom basement, you are still an unintelligent loser. Taste in anime does not make you a better person. Totally agree! |
katsucats said: Wow, you surely put a lot of effort on this. I completely agreeYudina brings up a separate point, for which the discussion will have to be put on hold, perhaps indefinitely (school is starting again), but 99% of the objectivity/subjectivity confusion lies in a confusion of semantics. The problems are as follows: 1. The word "objective" has two primary definitions of use here. Objectivity meaning sensed, not perceived, without the mind, is opposite of subjectivity. Objectivity meaning impartial, balanced, is opposite of biased. Problem: People do not understand that you can't just conflate two definitions of a word and treat them as interchangeable within a sentence. Just because objectivity is opposite to both subjectivity and bias doesn't mean that subjectivity is equivalent to bias. It doesn't help that subjectivity, in some contexts, imply bias, but impartial is not a meaningful substitute for "without the mind". The question is impartial to what? A judge, impartial between two legal parties, still makes his subjective interpretation to the law in the end. His ruling is not the last word. It can be overturned. 2. The word bias has multiple definitions as well. Bias meaning leaning toward one side, playing favorites. Bias (colloquial, extreme) meaning unfair, incomplete, ranting. Problem: Here it is more subtle, but still reveals a fatal misunderstanding in language. The two differ by shades, but they are not the same. For instance, it is inescapable that, if you wish to describe an ice cream you've just eaten, you would be leaning toward one side, or playing favorites, unless you have absolutely no opinion. However, that doesn't mean you are being unfair (by our perception of the word), incomplete, or ranting. You could like it without liking all of it, and report it as such, but you still like it. In Problem 1, you are switching one sense of a word for another. In Problem 2, you are taking the extreme form of the word to mean the only form of the word. When people exhibit both problems, they confuse "without mind" objective descriptions (e.g. keyframes, type of soundtrack) for being unbiased, and miss the point of a review altogether since they are not judging the anime in a way that we want to know -- what they actually thought about the narrative structure, pacing, plot development, dramatic tension, consistency, etc., all of which are necessarily subjective, but still possible to analyze. 3. There are more suitable words. Articulate means that you are expressing your thoughts eloquently and coherently, you have the ability to make nuanced distinctions. Vague means that your description lacks detail. Incoherent means that your description lacks sufficient detail for people to understand how your thoughts connect. Incomplete ranters are often vague and incoherent, and not articulate. Complete would obviously mean that they touched all bases. Problem: Either because objective is such a commonly used word that it becomes a cliche that people feel like they are forced to use even if they don't understand it, or just that people lack a vocabulary to describe things in a meaningful way, or both... But to be honest, when people can't communicate well, and refuse to learn how to, they probably write shit reviews anyways. |
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Clebardman said: @katsucats eeeew, grumpy. Obviously you're educated enough to defend your stance, but you can't deny most people aren't and it is overall hurting the quality of discussions on MAL. I think the lack of people willing to listen to the educated is what hurts the discussions. A lot of people here are posting without reading what guys like @Yudina and @katsucats are saying--they frankly don't give a flying f--- through a rolling donut about what guys like Yudina and katsucats have learned. Which brings me to... @Vyzass, you posted your links up to what? Prove that 100% non-biased criticism is unachievable? I don't think ANYONE with two brain cells would disagree with that, rendering this a straw man. I mean this in general, not to just Vyzass but anyone on the whole "subjectivity" bandwagon. What is your endgame? What do you want discussion about anime to look like? Because I'm gonna warn you--it doesn't look much different from half the threads on MAL. Like this one. Everybody's posting their own opinions but, despite the title, almost no one is actually engaging one another in discussion. A small minority actually is, but the bulk of people just throw their own opinions into the aether. If everything is "subjective" (as people tend to erroneously define it), there is absolutely zero reason to ask someone else their opinion. Their experience and taste is different from yours. Unless you subscribe to there being any sort of objective world outside of yourself and any sort of intersubjective consciousness between individuals, you effectively live in this nihilistic, solipsistic headspace where your experience of a piece of media is utterly and completely in a vacuum. Wanting to know what others think is an exercise in futility if everything is "subjective." That's why the "everything is subjective" argument disgusts me. People have no concept of where this line of thinking logically concludes. I don't see many people saying "you can be 100% unbiased." Anyone who does is wrong. However, I have been seeing tons and tons of people coming out of the woodwork ever since some college dropout anime YouTuber who's never worked a day in his life said, "objectivity doesn't exist" and "everything is subjective." EDIT: The great irony of all this is how people claiming that "everything is subjective" don't realize that the statement they're making is categorically objective, and thus paradoxical. |
FvlminatvsJan 8, 2018 9:58 AM
SuzuMine-chan said: katsucats said: Wow, you surely put a lot of effort on this. I completely agreeYudina brings up a separate point, for which the discussion will have to be put on hold, perhaps indefinitely (school is starting again), but 99% of the objectivity/subjectivity confusion lies in a confusion of semantics. The problems are as follows: 1. The word "objective" has two primary definitions of use here. Objectivity meaning sensed, not perceived, without the mind, is opposite of subjectivity. Objectivity meaning impartial, balanced, is opposite of biased. Problem: People do not understand that you can't just conflate two definitions of a word and treat them as interchangeable within a sentence. Just because objectivity is opposite to both subjectivity and bias doesn't mean that subjectivity is equivalent to bias. It doesn't help that subjectivity, in some contexts, imply bias, but impartial is not a meaningful substitute for "without the mind". The question is impartial to what? A judge, impartial between two legal parties, still makes his subjective interpretation to the law in the end. His ruling is not the last word. It can be overturned. 2. The word bias has multiple definitions as well. Bias meaning leaning toward one side, playing favorites. Bias (colloquial, extreme) meaning unfair, incomplete, ranting. Problem: Here it is more subtle, but still reveals a fatal misunderstanding in language. The two differ by shades, but they are not the same. For instance, it is inescapable that, if you wish to describe an ice cream you've just eaten, you would be leaning toward one side, or playing favorites, unless you have absolutely no opinion. However, that doesn't mean you are being unfair (by our perception of the word), incomplete, or ranting. You could like it without liking all of it, and report it as such, but you still like it. In Problem 1, you are switching one sense of a word for another. In Problem 2, you are taking the extreme form of the word to mean the only form of the word. When people exhibit both problems, they confuse "without mind" objective descriptions (e.g. keyframes, type of soundtrack) for being unbiased, and miss the point of a review altogether since they are not judging the anime in a way that we want to know -- what they actually thought about the narrative structure, pacing, plot development, dramatic tension, consistency, etc., all of which are necessarily subjective, but still possible to analyze. 3. There are more suitable words. Articulate means that you are expressing your thoughts eloquently and coherently, you have the ability to make nuanced distinctions. Vague means that your description lacks detail. Incoherent means that your description lacks sufficient detail for people to understand how your thoughts connect. Incomplete ranters are often vague and incoherent, and not articulate. Complete would obviously mean that they touched all bases. Problem: Either because objective is such a commonly used word that it becomes a cliche that people feel like they are forced to use even if they don't understand it, or just that people lack a vocabulary to describe things in a meaningful way, or both... But to be honest, when people can't communicate well, and refuse to learn how to, they probably write shit reviews anyways. Seconded. It was well put and essential for taking this thread forward. I wanted to double quote this just so it has less chance of being missed by Joe Bloggs scrolling down and going to post. katsucats said: Wittgenstein was not talking about aesthetics, he was talking about ontology. You can describe what RGB value a frame of an anime show has, but that's irrelevant to our central interest -- judging. Is that RGB value good, or is it bad? To clarify: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem Or perhaps you believe in one objective way in which we all interpret narrative devices such as to effective eliminate the ego, and all analyses that differs from this ideal analysis would be considered flawed. It begs the question by whose authority do you determine the ideal analysis. Is there some kind of scientific study you propose that would help us devise a proof toward this task? After all, if it's objective, there would be some way, even in theory, for everyone to infer the same perfect analysis if they followed the rules, and it would be independent of their upbringing, culture, aesthetic sensibilities, ethical values, spoken language, age, etc. His ontological understanding, here, can be applied to aesthetics: taking aesthetic communication as linguistic communication of a composition of different language mediums. A certain RGB value a frame of an anime has is like a letter in visual notation. To be clear, I suppose the anime as a whole - as an essential aesthetic communication - to be one compound language. The sum of its parts: visual notation, audio notation and verbal notation form this seemingly distinct and opaque language we call aesthetics. Break it down and it can be objectively analysed. We haven't yet elucidated audio or visual notation as complete communicable languages - thereof lies the problem. Elucidate their objective properties, understand the essential communication, and see a common ground in aesthetics. People are, of course, free to interpret and add to things in their own way. This view does not take away aesthetic freedom: it organises it; it does not remove the beauty and experience of interpretation: it elucidates the relevant objectivity and allows for parametric sense in discussing subjective wisdom. |
Clebardman said: This is my main statement to go against it. If subjectivity is the only thing that exist, they're making this a fact, but it can't be a fact since nothing is objective. How contradictory of them.EDIT: The great irony of all this is how people claiming that "everything is subjective" don't realize that the statement they're making is categorically objective, and thus paradoxical. |
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MarthePryde said: His ontological understanding, here, can be applied to aesthetics: taking aesthetic communication as linguistic communication of a composition of different language mediums. A certain RGB value a frame of an anime has is like a letter in visual notation. To be clear, I suppose the anime as a whole - as an essential aesthetic communication - to be one compound language. The sum of its parts: visual notation, audio notation and verbal notation form this seemingly distinct and opaque language we call aesthetics. Break it down and it can be objectively analysed. We haven't yet elucidated audio or visual notation as complete communicable languages - thereof lies the problem. Elucidate their objective properties, understand the essential communication, and see a common ground in aesthetics. People are, of course, free to interpret and add to things in their own way. This view does not take away aesthetic freedom: it organises it; it does not remove the beauty and experience of interpretation: it elucidates the relevant objectivity and allows for parametric sense in discussing subjective wisdom. Emphasis added by me. This, 100%, sums up a lot of what I think people are missing about trying to codify methods of measuring art in an objective sense. It does not eliminate one's subjective experience of that art. It will, however, enable people to understand the components of the art and how they work together to form a gestalt phenomenon. A young man on MAL PM'ed me a few days ago and asked me to look over a blog entry about character development. I talked a bit about what he wrote and while I didn't disagree with what he was saying, I felt it necessary to explain some things he hadn't yet learned about the creation of compelling characters in a narrative. Those qualities of a compelling character are the sort of thing we can break down and measure. There is still plenty of room for individual interpretation, however. What one of us may consider a perfectly serviceable character may still be a bit flat and uninteresting to another one of us, even if we're trying to use the same metrics to judge. SuzuMine-chan said: This is my main statement to go against it. If subjectivity is the only thing that exist, they're making this a fact, but it can't be a fact since nothing is objective. How contradictory of them. I don't want to be personally accusatory toward those with whom I disagree, but it seems you and I are in accord on this particular point about how contradictory they are. Frankly, I'm just tired of seeing this getting hashed out repeatedly, and the OP has by-and-large abandoned the thread, it seems. Nothing was achieved. Nobody here has really learned anything. The intellectuals (i.e. the "elitists") with fancy book-learnin' have had a nice talk but aside from a few nuances, we all seem to agree on this stuff. Nobody else gives a damn and they're uninterested in learning anything. Sorry if I sound pessimistic. I'm just frustrated by how often these threads spring up. |
FvlminatvsJan 8, 2018 10:42 AM
Fvlminatvs said: I think the same. This kind of threads would be interesting if people actually discussed. But since they don't do it, the conflict goes "unresolved" and it repeats again in another thread. It seems like this don't give anything of profit now, since everything people do here is rant their "opinions" without really talking about it.SuzuMine-chan said: This is my main statement to go against it. If subjectivity is the only thing that exist, they're making this a fact, but it can't be a fact since nothing is objective. How contradictory of them. I don't want to be personally accusatory here but it seems we are in accord on this particular point. Frankly, I'm just tired of seeing this getting hashed out repeatedly, and the OP has by-and-large abandoned the thread, it seems. Nothing was achieved. Nobody here has really learned anything. The intellectuals (i.e. the "elitists") with fancy book-learnin' have had a nice talk but aside from a few nuances, we all seem to agree on this stuff. Nobody else gives a damn and they're uninterested in learning anything. Sorry if I sound pessimistic. I'm just frustrated by how often these threads spring up. Sorry if I was rude, but this kind of people piss me off a bit. |
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SuzuMine-chan said: I think the same. This kind of threads would be interesting if people actually discussed. But since they don't do it, the conflict goes "unresolved" and it repeats again in another thread. It seems like this don't give anything of profit now, since everything people do here is rant their "opinions" without really talking about it. My thoughts exactly. Sorry if I was rude, but this kind of people piss me off a bit. Hahahaha! Rude to whom? Me? Hahaha! Dude, I'm from New Jersey. You're being too polite if anything. As an aside, I'm starting to wonder if some of us shouldn't just make a big long FAQ about this whole thing and every single time somebody starts up one of these stupid "objectivity vs. subjectivity" threads, we spam links to the FAQ until they shut up or the mods close the threads. |
Fvlminatvs said: Lol XD Seems like I apologized for nothing I guess XD I always do that since it's so easy to offend people here on intenet (people get offended to easily -_-).Sorry if I was rude, but this kind of people piss me off a bit. Hahahaha! Rude to whom? Me? Hahaha! Dude, I'm from New Jersey. You're being too polite if anything. Fvlminatvs said: That would be great XD If it could be possible I would add a rule about not making stupid threads countinuously, since many threads recently are very stupid.As an aside, I'm starting to wonder if some of us shouldn't just make a big long FAQ about this whole thing and every single time somebody starts up one of these stupid "objectivity vs. subjectivity" threads, we spam links to the FAQ until they shut up or the mods close the threads. |
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| Sorry for my english. IMO, subjectivity plays a big role on the perception and enjoyment of whatever is being watched, read, listened or played. It is impossible, even if you think that you are out of it, to escape from the quicksands of subjectivity, but it is not impossible to put a hand or two outside of it. Everything that we have learned, experienced, grown up with, what has influenced us, who has influenced us, etc, makes us who we are, and who we are right now won't be the same the next year. We are constantly learning new things, and some people -for example, those whom are fond on stories, writing and stuff like that- apply these new things to their judgement and criteria over the art they experience. They look into these stories, these characters, they read about narrative, tropes, visual storytelling...and as a result not only they keep increasing their background but their knowledge about how these great entertainment works too. This can be achieved being passive and absorbing similarities and tendencies of stories and characters, visual narrative, framing, and so on. But reading and studying about this certainly increases your analytic capacities to an extend impossible to achieve from just sitting and enjoying what's in front of you. May it be music, may it be anime, this works for every art medium. And that's what I call objectivity: having the knowledge to judge something based in it's machinery, in the formal or emotional elements that makes that movie, that book, that anime, work. Obviously the more you learn and experience, the better for your capacity of looking at something in a somewhat detached way. Objectivity may not be 100% achievable but it is a subject that can be sharpened. And by no means trying to be critical removes enjoyment. The opposite, it enhances it because you appreciate a good work more than you could imagine. To finish with this, I want to say something: trying to be TOTALLY objective (something I feel is impossible, because that would mean leaving your ego behind, the way in which you see things) doesn't interest me at all. Basically because art for me is about emotions and expressing thought provoking questions or statements. In the many discussions I've listened to and read, people that act holier than thou are usually the ones who carry the banner of objectivity, and to me those opinions are boring. It is not bad to have your own voice and express your feelings about something, aplying your own criteria. Shit, that means you are a person, not a machine that has experienced a work of art and evaluates it with numbers and in a procedural way. But this doesn't mean that the existence of a great picture or song is something subjective. Greatness exists whether you recognise it or not, it is there, waiting to be discovered and noted, even if not to be liked by a particular individual. |
Fvlminatvs said: The most disgusting part of this oft parroted straw man is that it's such a transparently inaccurate portrayal of anyone's actual argument that one would have to be an ostrich with its head in the sand not to see it. People arguing that aesthetics are essentially subjective are not suggesting that everything is subjective. Skepticism in aesthetics is not nihilism for the same reason that ice in a refrigerator does not mean Hell has frozen over in the Pacific. Furthermore, one must question what exactly behaviors of people on MAL has to do with the subjectivity of judgment, which was argued not empirically, but from analytic first principles. The truth is true regardless of the consequences. Perhaps a more straightforward view would be to accept that people avoid conflict, rather than establishing some flawed metaphysical assumption based on loosely examined behaviors. This is the perfect opportunity for the razor. In fact, people have the ability to relate to the personal experiences of other people, unlike in the pessimistic, robotic world view of Fvlminatvs where people are social because feelings are objective.Everybody's posting their own opinions but, despite the title, almost no one is actually engaging one another in discussion. A small minority actually is, but the bulk of people just throw their own opinions into the aether. If everything is "subjective" (as people tend to erroneously define it), there is absolutely zero reason to ask someone else their opinion. Their experience and taste is different from yours. Unless you subscribe to there being any sort of objective world outside of yourself and any sort of intersubjective consciousness between individuals, you effectively live in this nihilistic, solipsistic headspace where your experience of a piece of media is utterly and completely in a vacuum. Wanting to know what others think is an exercise in futility if everything is "subjective." That's why the "everything is subjective" argument disgusts me. People have no concept of where this line of thinking logically concludes. Fvlminatvs said: Let's keep in mind the context of aesthetic judgment. That aesthetic judgment is 100% subjective does not mean rocks do not exist.I don't see many people saying "you can be 100% unbiased." Anyone who does is wrong. However, I have been seeing tons and tons of people coming out of the woodwork ever since some college dropout anime YouTuber who's never worked a day in his life said, "objectivity doesn't exist" and "everything is subjective." Fvlminatvs said: There is no irony here.EDIT: The great irony of all this is how people claiming that "everything is subjective" don't realize that the statement they're making is categorically objective, and thus paradoxical. MarthePryde said: I would disagree that aesthetics can be reduced to the object itself. It is in some component psychology. For instance, two people upon seeing a lone flower growing out of concrete can feel profound sadness and profound hope. Neither of these feelings are fake, yet both of them are properties of the subject, and not the flower itself. The same applies to anime. While there is some interest in technical indications of quality (note that the judgment of which indicators are valuable is still 100% subjective), what we are mostly interested is not the actual words on the page but the narrative structure, plot consistency, characters, dramatic tension, pacing, voice, etc. "A man" is but four letters on a page, but in conjunction with other words, conjure up a complete scene derived from our imagination. Nothing about the physicality of these letters have any inherent relation with what is being conjured. No two imagined scenes, if we could contrast them between different people, would be the same.His ontological understanding, here, can be applied to aesthetics: taking aesthetic communication as linguistic communication of a composition of different language mediums. A certain RGB value a frame of an anime has is like a letter in visual notation. To be clear, I suppose the anime as a whole - as an essential aesthetic communication - to be one compound language. The sum of its parts: visual notation, audio notation and verbal notation form this seemingly distinct and opaque language we call aesthetics. One would be forced to contend with some pretty strange metaphysical conclusions in vein of Plato's Forms or something similar if they imagined narrative to actually have physical existence, such that a sentence upon being written is imbued with some magic power to reproduce some movie, in which people perceive. Yet there is no reason to make such a religious conclusion in this day and age when our knowledge of psychology suffices. MarthePryde said: There is a distinct boundary between what is observed, and what is imagined. We see pixels that reflect light of certain frequencies and imagine what it portrays. If it's in likeness of a human with long hair, we might conclude that it's a female based on our cultural understandings of the common traits of a female. But in an alternate reality where men have long hair and women short, it would be perceived as a man. The acceptance of this hypothetical proves that the gender, or any aspect of a character, is not a physical property.Break it down and it can be objectively analysed. We haven't yet elucidated audio or visual notation as complete communicable languages - thereof lies the problem. Elucidate their objective properties, understand the essential communication, and see a common ground in aesthetics. You can deem observation to be 100% objective, or intersubjective, if you wish. A mistake would be to conflate judgment as arising from the same processes, and therefore objective. Another mistake would be to call the sum of these two processes 50% objective. On one hand, you are erasing the line in between the two; on the other hand, you are providing a blurred version of reality and appealing to vagueness. In fact, we could distinctly discern where objectivity ends and subjectivity starts. Objectivity ends when you see some shape of brown-yellowish light on a background of different colors. Subjectivity starts when you decide that there is a character and it is a female student. Once we realize that, we understand that effectively 100% (or 99.9% if you will) of analysis is subjective. (Note: A "character" is not an actual female student, but it is imagined as such. A wide variety of visualizations can be imagined to be a female student.) MarthePryde said: This is just obfuscation. It essentially admits that beauty and experience of interpretation is subjective wisdom.People are, of course, free to interpret and add to things in their own way. This view does not take away aesthetic freedom: it organises it; it does not remove the beauty and experience of interpretation: it elucidates the relevant objectivity and allows for parametric sense in discussing subjective wisdom. SuzuMine-chan said: Just because an apple is red doesn't mean everything is red.Clebardman said: This is my main statement to go against it. If subjectivity is the only thing that exist, they're making this a fact, but it can't be a fact since nothing is objective. How contradictory of them.EDIT: The great irony of all this is how people claiming that "everything is subjective" don't realize that the statement they're making is categorically objective, and thus paradoxical. Fvlminatvs said: None of these metrics are "codified methods of measuring art in an objective sense". I have challenged multiple people in this thread who hold this misconception to describe in theory how they would propose that a scientific study be conducted to discover the objective metric in character quality. Everyone continues to parrot this a priori belief while conveniently ignoring the only thing that would prove the belief true. On the other hand, true scientists understand that they are not in the field of examining normative systems, but positive systems.This, 100%, sums up a lot of what I think people are missing about trying to codify methods of measuring art in an objective sense. It does not eliminate one's subjective experience of that art. It will, however, enable people to understand the components of the art and how they work together to form a gestalt phenomenon. A young man on MAL PM'ed me a few days ago and asked me to look over a blog entry about character development. I talked a bit about what he wrote and while I didn't disagree with what he was saying, I felt it necessary to explain some things he hadn't yet learned about the creation of compelling characters in a narrative. Those qualities of a compelling character are the sort of thing we can break down and measure. There is still plenty of room for individual interpretation, however. What one of us may consider a perfectly serviceable character may still be a bit flat and uninteresting to another one of us, even if we're trying to use the same metrics to judge. Fvlminatvs said: I agree that no one seems to learn anything. These topics spring up from time to time and rarely does anyone change their opinions. Some people pretend to be impressed by rational analysis only to snicker about academia while ironically arguing about analysis. I mean do you or SuzuMine-chan really agree with anything I've said, when you then go on to say the exact opposite? I don't believe it. The 3 problems are real, and they're only elitist in the sense that a student uninterested in math calls Calculus elitist.Frankly, I'm just tired of seeing this getting hashed out repeatedly, and the OP has by-and-large abandoned the thread, it seems. Nothing was achieved. Nobody here has really learned anything. The intellectuals (i.e. the "elitists") with fancy book-learnin' have had a nice talk but aside from a few nuances, we all seem to agree on this stuff. Nobody else gives a damn and they're uninterested in learning anything. Sorry if I sound pessimistic. I'm just frustrated by how often these threads spring up. Shukanteki said: Notice how this paragraph commits the 3 errors. Since Shukanteki spends two paragraphs talking about subjectivity. One would presume that his describes objectivity as opposed to subjectivity, but is hardly surprised when he characterizes objectivity as "looking at something in a somewhat detached way" -- which is the opposite of bias. Secondly, he talks about knowledge to judge emotional elements, which is a good way to describe narrative structure, dramatic tension, etc. It is good because it gets to the root of the matter: emotional. Anime isn't emotional. People are. Grammatically, this is personification. One understands that traffic doesn't crawl, the wind doesn't howl, and books don't speak. But this "understanding" goes right out the window when the topic isn't grammar. Anime is described as emotional when people have emotions watching them, therefore an "emotional anime" is the property of the audience (i.e. subject) rather than the object.And that's what I call objectivity: having the knowledge to judge something based in it's machinery, in the formal or emotional elements that makes that movie, that book, that anime, work. Obviously the more you learn and experience, the better for your capacity of looking at something in a somewhat detached way. Unfortunately, even after learning why there cannot be a non-local actor in quantum physics, people still want to use their "common sense" to find God, and convince other people of it. And that's what this conversation boils down to. |
katsucatsJan 8, 2018 11:39 PM
| My subjective reviews: katsureview.wordpress.com THE CHAT CLUB. |
Fvlminatvs said: MarthePryde said: His ontological understanding, here, can be applied to aesthetics: taking aesthetic communication as linguistic communication of a composition of different language mediums. A certain RGB value a frame of an anime has is like a letter in visual notation. To be clear, I suppose the anime as a whole - as an essential aesthetic communication - to be one compound language. The sum of its parts: visual notation, audio notation and verbal notation form this seemingly distinct and opaque language we call aesthetics. Break it down and it can be objectively analysed. We haven't yet elucidated audio or visual notation as complete communicable languages - thereof lies the problem. Elucidate their objective properties, understand the essential communication, and see a common ground in aesthetics. People are, of course, free to interpret and add to things in their own way. This view does not take away aesthetic freedom: it organises it; it does not remove the beauty and experience of interpretation: it elucidates the relevant objectivity and allows for parametric sense in discussing subjective wisdom. Emphasis added by me. This, 100%, sums up a lot of what I think people are missing about trying to codify methods of measuring art in an objective sense. It does not eliminate one's subjective experience of that art. It will, however, enable people to understand the components of the art and how they work together to form a gestalt phenomenon. A young man on MAL PM'ed me a few days ago and asked me to look over a blog entry about character development. I talked a bit about what he wrote and while I didn't disagree with what he was saying, I felt it necessary to explain some things he hadn't yet learned about the creation of compelling characters in a narrative. Those qualities of a compelling character are the sort of thing we can break down and measure. There is still plenty of room for individual interpretation, however. What one of us may consider a perfectly serviceable character may still be a bit flat and uninteresting to another one of us, even if we're trying to use the same metrics to judge. Here's the question though, when it comes to a story as a whole. Is there really just a standard to judge or is it several standards? I mean, the basic questions like "should a story necessarily follow proper plot structuring?", or "should a story even have a plot?" etc., etc., i.e questions that tries to elucidate upon the nature of a story. This is where all standards starts. Since there is a whole genre in anime that actually challenges at the very least proper plot structuring or even the existence of a plot, itself aka the slice of life genre. Some critics and people actually dismisses the slice of life genre because it is about "nothing" or at the very least I think they're pointing out that it's without a plot while others actually thinks that a slice of life is still a story albeit where characters are more of the center point rather than a sometimes non existent plot. Going back to the main question though, if it's the latter (which it is), can it really be called "objective"? and if it's the former, then it begs the question, who in this scenario holds the right standard? According to this guy, the plot is right. Would you agree? I rest my case. |
ethotJan 9, 2018 12:05 AM
Paradigmatic said: This is especially relevant:Fvlminatvs said: Emphasis added by me. This, 100%, sums up a lot of what I think people are missing about trying to codify methods of measuring art in an objective sense. It does not eliminate one's subjective experience of that art. It will, however, enable people to understand the components of the art and how they work together to form a gestalt phenomenon. A young man on MAL PM'ed me a few days ago and asked me to look over a blog entry about character development. I talked a bit about what he wrote and while I didn't disagree with what he was saying, I felt it necessary to explain some things he hadn't yet learned about the creation of compelling characters in a narrative. Those qualities of a compelling character are the sort of thing we can break down and measure. There is still plenty of room for individual interpretation, however. What one of us may consider a perfectly serviceable character may still be a bit flat and uninteresting to another one of us, even if we're trying to use the same metrics to judge. Here's the question though, when it comes to a story as a whole. Is there really just a standard to judge or is it several standards? I mean, the basic questions like "should a story necessarily follow proper plot structuring?", or "should a story even have a plot?" etc., etc., i.e questions that tries to elucidate upon the nature of a story. Since there is a whole genre in anime that actually challenges at the very least proper plot structuring or even the existence of a plot, itself aka the slice of life genre. Some critics and people actually dismisses the slice of life genre because it is about "nothing" or at the very least I think they're pointing out that it's without a plot while others actually thinks that a slice of life is still a story. Going back to the main question though, if it's the latter (which it is), can it really be called "objective"? and if it's the former, then it begs the question, who in this scenario holds the right standard? I rest my case. http://www.theblackandblue.com/2010/03/29/the-french-new-wave-a-cinematic-revolution/ In the 1950's, a new film movement came out that challenged the traditional analyses of films based on plot and characters. These films had almost no plot, and couldn't even be precisely called "slice of life". While it's very easy to read this article and note all of the ways it analyzed these films, this would be a historian's fallacy, since these films would be considered trash by predominant mode of analysis at that time. This shows very simply that much of analysis of this kind of cultural, and flies in the face of anyone who proclaims objective analysis. They would have to explain why analysis changes depending on the period. In fact, this doesn't just pertain to French New Wave. Contemporary art was considered derivatives by the Avant Garde, the Avant Garde/Modernist movement was considered fake art by the Classical Realists, which was in turn a response to the excesses of the Romantic/Baroque period of art, which saw themselves as a more emotional and deep version of Renaissance art, which was created in likeness of classical Greek and Roman art, which was more proportionally correct than Medieval art. Each of these movements in their respective time periods saw that their art was superior to other movements. It's very easy to look back, as other posters have attempted, and see that Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night or da Vinci's Mona Lisa are obviously high quality art, objectively, and fail to realize that they weren't necessarily considered as such. It's also easy to say that people back then are ignorant, but this would be an excellent example of the chronological snobbery fallacy. This is fair criticism, because it is a matter of fact that the various artistic movements and literary analysis movements are not scientifically derived, but derived analytically or synthetically. Therefore, if they are objective, they should be objective timelessly. And if every other time was mistaken, there's no reason to believe in significant accuracy of this time; then, we run into an epistemological problem of whether aesthetic knowledge is even possible, even if it is objective? If not, then the position is evidently useless. But why come up with useless and metaphysically stretching positions when there are more reasonable alternatives that are more useful and do not require committing to metaphysical faux pas? To compound this view, aesthetic philosophy is essentially a field of psychology nowadays. There are plenty of psychological studies pertaining to art appreciation: http://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/06/arts-creativity.aspx Particularly relevant from this page is: People with different patterns of emotion regulation prefer different types of artistic subject matter, find researchers at the University of Rome–Sapienza. Scientists divided 100 adults into two groups, one that scored high and the other low on measures of alexithymia, a subclinical difficulty in experiencing, expressing and describing emotions. The participants were asked to evaluate 20 works of art on cognitive, emotional and aesthetic dimensions. Low-alexithymic participants preferred pictures showing excitation, such as Francesco Hayez's "The Kiss," which depicts a couple in a passionate embrace. High-alexithymic individuals were more likely to appreciate emotionally contained subjects, such as Edward Hopper's "Railroad Sunset," which features a dark, empty railroad depot against a stark though colorful sunset. The results indicate the need to include measures of emotional regulation in a comprehensive model of aesthetic experience, the researchers say (Creativity Research Journal, July 2013). If one reads all this and still concludes that aesthetic judging is independent the subject's values, culture, ethnicity, emotional patterns, age, sex, education, etc., all the characters that pertain to the subject and not the object, then the burden of proof is on him. If one wants to suggest that a high correlation of emotional regulation with art style is caused by some physical substance in the art and not the psychology, then the burden of proof is on him. If one insists on these things against all rationality and without evidence, then they are just manifestly spewing bullshit and they know it. |
| My subjective reviews: katsureview.wordpress.com THE CHAT CLUB. |
katsucats said: Paradigmatic said: This is especially relevant:Here's the question though, when it comes to a story as a whole. Is there really just a standard to judge or is it several standards? I mean, the basic questions like "should a story necessarily follow proper plot structuring?", or "should a story even have a plot?" etc., etc., i.e questions that tries to elucidate upon the nature of a story. Since there is a whole genre in anime that actually challenges at the very least proper plot structuring or even the existence of a plot, itself aka the slice of life genre. Some critics and people actually dismisses the slice of life genre because it is about "nothing" or at the very least I think they're pointing out that it's without a plot while others actually thinks that a slice of life is still a story. Going back to the main question though, if it's the latter (which it is), can it really be called "objective"? and if it's the former, then it begs the question, who in this scenario holds the right standard? I rest my case. http://www.theblackandblue.com/2010/03/29/the-french-new-wave-a-cinematic-revolution/ In the 1950's, a new film movement came out that challenged the traditional analyses of films based on plot and characters. These films had almost no plot, and couldn't even be precisely called "slice of life". While it's very easy to read this article and note all of the ways it analyzed these films, this would be a historian's fallacy, since these films would be considered trash by predominant mode of analysis at that time. This shows very simply that much of analysis of this kind of cultural, and flies in the face of anyone who proclaims objective analysis. They would have to explain why analysis changes depending on the period. In fact, this doesn't just pertain to French New Wave. Contemporary art was considered derivatives by the Avant Garde, the Avant Garde/Modernist movement was considered fake art by the Classical Realists, which was in turn a response to the excesses of the Romantic/Baroque period of art, which saw themselves as a more emotional and deep version of Renaissance art, which was created in likeness of classical Greek and Roman art, which was more proportionally correct than Medieval art. Each of these movements in their respective time periods saw that their art was superior to other movements. It's very easy to look back, as other posters have attempted, and see that Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night or da Vinci's Mona Lisa are obviously high quality art, objectively, and fail to realize that they weren't necessarily considered as such. It's also easy to say that people back then are ignorant, but this would be an excellent example of the chronological snobbery fallacy. This is fair criticism, because it is a matter of fact that the various artistic movements and literary analysis movements are not scientifically derived, but derived analytically or synthetically. Therefore, if they are objective, they should be objective timelessly. And if every other time was mistaken, there's no reason to believe in significant accuracy of this time; then, we run into an epistemological problem of whether aesthetic knowledge is even possible, even if it is objective? If not, then the position is evidently useless. But why come up with useless and metaphysically stretching positions when there are more reasonable alternatives that are more useful and do not require committing to metaphysical faux pas? To compound this view, aesthetic philosophy is essentially a field of psychology nowadays. There are plenty of psychological studies pertaining to art appreciation: http://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/06/arts-creativity.aspx Particularly relevant from this page is: People with different patterns of emotion regulation prefer different types of artistic subject matter, find researchers at the University of Rome–Sapienza. Scientists divided 100 adults into two groups, one that scored high and the other low on measures of alexithymia, a subclinical difficulty in experiencing, expressing and describing emotions. The participants were asked to evaluate 20 works of art on cognitive, emotional and aesthetic dimensions. Low-alexithymic participants preferred pictures showing excitation, such as Francesco Hayez's "The Kiss," which depicts a couple in a passionate embrace. High-alexithymic individuals were more likely to appreciate emotionally contained subjects, such as Edward Hopper's "Railroad Sunset," which features a dark, empty railroad depot against a stark though colorful sunset. The results indicate the need to include measures of emotional regulation in a comprehensive model of aesthetic experience, the researchers say (Creativity Research Journal, July 2013). If one reads all this and still concludes that aesthetic judging is independent the subject's values, culture, ethnicity, emotional patterns, age, sex, education, etc., all the characters that pertain to the subject and not the object, then the burden of proof is on him. If one wants to suggest that a high correlation of emotional regulation with art style is caused by some physical substance in the art and not the psychology, then the burden of proof is on him. If one insists on these things against all rationality and without evidence, then they are just manifestly spewing bullshit and they know it. Oh, thanks for this. I think I'm just lacking the necessary information to make the idea i'm presenting clear. I kind of think things through on the fly. |
| The only objective thing you can say about anime is whether you yourself enjoyed it or not, you can point out which part you did enjoy and parts which detracted from your experience. If your experience is synonymous with the majority of people, your criticism is likely correct but if it isn't and what you are pointing out is enjoyed, then perhaps that aspect is what constitutes as good to some people. |
| My overall point is not to argue about objectivity vs. subjectivity with anyone. My point is that, from my (admittedly subjective) experience, these threads are always started by someone who wants to bash objectivity, which begins a poop-slinging argument, resulting in nobody learning anything. I am arguing that if the anti-objectivity crowd (for lack of a better name) would stop bringing it up, then perhaps the meme would die. Nevertheless, you've said some interesting stuff, so I'm going to engage a bit more. katsucats said: In fact, people have the ability to relate to the personal experiences of other people, unlike in the pessimistic, robotic world view of Fvlminatvs where people are social because feelings are objective. katsucats, that's actually my entire point that things are more complex than some binary subjectivity-objectivity framework. We can relate to one-another, not because feelings and experiences are subjective or objective, but because of the intersubjective frameworks through which people communicate and form thought-communities. There is a degree of overlap between the subjective and objective in that intersubjective realm because intersubjectivity is where the very objectivity of objects existing outside of our own consciousness can be apprehended. Let's keep in mind the context of aesthetic judgment. That aesthetic judgment is 100% subjective does not mean rocks do not exist. Again, you're arguing for the existence of intersubjectivity. I'm not about to argue with Husserl or you about this. I ascribe to the concept myself because, by this point, modern epistemological study demands it, even post-Derridean epistemology. I'm not arguing for this magical, mystical 100% objective world. That place exists, and can only exist, beyond our conscious minds. We can perceive it through intermediaries. None of these metrics are "codified methods of measuring art in an objective sense". I have challenged multiple people in this thread who hold this misconception to describe in theory how they would propose that a scientific study be conducted to discover the objective metric in character quality. So counting frame-rates wouldn't be considered objective? Determining the smoothness of animation in that manner would not be an objective measurement of quality? If you take the position that there can be absolutely zero methods of achieving any sort of quantitative data on a piece of art that will establish, without a doubt, some sort of aesthetic quality, I think I can guess that it would be due to the inherent subjectivity of the individual interpreting that data. Correct me if I am wrong. However, I do not see how quantitative data itself can be anything but objective information. Let's take that apple you referenced--it's redness cannot be debated if we take the data on the wavelength of reflected light coming off the apple, despite our individual experience of the apple's redness. Everyone continues to parrot this a priori belief while conveniently ignoring the only thing that would prove the belief true. On the other hand, true scientists understand that they are not in the field of examining normative systems, but positive systems. This is probably the best rebuttal I've seen all year and I've got to concede this particular point. You're right that science itself is not normative. Yet scientific conclusions can be made to make qualitative, normative statements that are true and objective, such as "fast food is unhealthy for you." You and I do agree on the importance of the intersubjective, although I think you may have lumped me in a bit too much with the "objectivity" crowd. I think where we differ is the precise interaction between the objective, subjective, and intersubjective when making qualitative statements about aesthetics, which is a very different argument than the one that tends to raise its ugly head on MAL every two or three months. To clarify my position, I am not a member of the so-called "objectivity" crowd. And I do agree that "objective" does not necessarily mean "unbiased." That confusion does nothing but cause problems and I wish people would simply drop the "objective" and "subjective" terms altogether for purposes of their arguments because it would help to clarify things. I also think there is some misunderstanding between us as to what we mean by aesthetic judgment and whether or not it is 100% subjective. What I mean by this is that, I recognize that one can, perhaps, reduce bias. For example, I'm a big fan of John Updike's essay on book reviews. He wrote this essay (I forget it's title but its, I think, the first one in his Picked-Up Pieces), wherein he admonishes a potential reviewer to ask themselves if the flaws in a book are actually flaws and not actually failures or limitations in the reader/reviewer. I recognize that even this self-reflection is, by necessity, subjective, but at the same time, would it not have the potential to reduce bias? In addition, before making one's own judgment on a work, if one should read a number of other responses and reactions to that work, I would posit that perhaps one would become less subjective in their assessment and, if not more objective, than perhaps more intersubjective. You can deem observation to be 100% objective, or intersubjective, if you wish. A mistake would be to conflate judgment as arising from the same processes, and therefore objective. Another mistake would be to call the sum of these two processes 50% objective. On one hand, you are erasing the line in between the two; on the other hand, you are providing a blurred version of reality and appealing to vagueness. In fact, we could distinctly discern where objectivity ends and subjectivity starts. Objectivity ends when you see some shape of brown-yellowish light on a background of different colors. Subjectivity starts when you decide that there is a character and it is a female student. Once we realize that, we understand that effectively 100% (or 99.9% if you will) of analysis is subjective. (Note: A "character" is not an actual female student, but it is imagined as such. A wide variety of visualizations can be imagined to be a female student.) This paragraph is my "a-ha, I now understand what you're saying." This makes exactly what your position is crystal clear. Now, to drive a bit further, then, the most we could achieve is an intersubjective consensus that the paint represented a female student but we could never achieve any sort of objective, qualitative statement that the paint represented a female student. Am I understanding you clearly? Let me keep digging. Is the intersubjective a realm of its own or is it a sort of borderland where the objective and subjective directly interact? You seem to key into it being a completely separate realm, or perhaps borderland through which the objective and subjective indirectly interact. This is fair criticism, because it is a matter of fact that the various artistic movements and literary analysis movements are not scientifically derived, but derived analytically or synthetically. Therefore, if they are objective, they should be objective timelessly. And if every other time was mistaken, there's no reason to believe in significant accuracy of this time; then, we run into an epistemological problem of whether aesthetic knowledge is even possible, even if it is objective? If not, then the position is evidently useless. Let's take Aristotle's Poetics, then, as one of these examples of "aesthetic knowledge." It is true that many of the components of ancient Greek theater would seem very odd to modern moviegoers, such as the chorus, masks, etc. However, where Aristotle breaks down his analysis as to what makes a good tragic character, what elements work well, and how to generate catharsis, could we not argue that there are certain truths to his position due to near-universality of specific aspects of the human condition? What I mean by this is, we all fear loss, we all fear falling from our station and hitting rock bottom. Aristotle described elements of successful tragedies as playing upon certain universal human fears--he just happened to do it in a Greek context. If we can tease out these elements he identified as successful, could we not say that these are aesthetic elements that could be, if not proven to be universally effective, then at least effective on a significant majority of the human population? In that case, could you not make a statement that was objective and true that these elements, executed in this manner, will produce this reaction in an audience with significant reliability? I'm not asking this to be facetious, I am genuinely interested in what you think, here. And I admit, at this point, I am punching above my weight class as you've obviously been involved in this sort of study longer than I. I'm a historian, not an artist or literary critic, here. |
| Don't mind me, I'm just reading from the sidelines and trying not to get lost (^: |
|
| I started off responding to your post with a definition of "intersubjective", which I feel is the correct definition in this context. Half way through, I realized that you might be considering another usage, so I addressed that as well. So if that's a cause for confusion, please read the last half of the responses before the first. I doubt you'd be satisfied, but due to the abstract nature of this topic, any further elaboration will become much longer than it already has, and I'll admit that I am not a graduate scholar on this topic. There are a number of nuances here that are hard to cover in a forum post (partially because I, myself, am not the perfect reviewer). Fvlminatvs said: Truths are brought up when there are people mistaken.My overall point is not to argue about objectivity vs. subjectivity with anyone. My point is that, from my (admittedly subjective) experience, these threads are always started by someone who wants to bash objectivity, which begins a poop-slinging argument, resulting in nobody learning anything. I am arguing that if the anti-objectivity crowd (for lack of a better name) would stop bringing it up, then perhaps the meme would die. Fvlminatvs said: Intersubjectivity is objectivity, practically. It is called intersubjectivity because it is impossible to process sense without the accompanied perception; therefore, what is commonly referred to as objective is really just everyone subjectively perceiving the same thing -- intersubjectivity. The subjective-intersubjective is binary. A thing and its negation encompasses all possibility. This is the law of excluded middle.katsucats said: In fact, people have the ability to relate to the personal experiences of other people, unlike in the pessimistic, robotic world view of Fvlminatvs where people are social because feelings are objective. katsucats, that's actually my entire point that things are more complex than some binary subjectivity-objectivity framework. We can relate to one-another, not because feelings and experiences are subjective or objective, but because of the intersubjective frameworks through which people communicate and form thought-communities. There is a degree of overlap between the subjective and objective in that intersubjective realm because intersubjectivity is where the very objectivity of objects existing outside of our own consciousness can be apprehended. Fvlminatvs said: I'm arguing for subjectivity in aesthetic value judgments. The existence of a mind does not contradict the existence of matter.Let's keep in mind the context of aesthetic judgment. That aesthetic judgment is 100% subjective does not mean rocks do not exist. Again, you're arguing for the existence of intersubjectivity. I'm not about to argue with Husserl or you about this. I ascribe to the concept myself because, by this point, modern epistemological study demands it, even post-Derridean epistemology. Fvlminatvs said: The objective-intersubjective distinction is really beyond the scope of this argument. It's a distraction.I'm not arguing for this magical, mystical 100% objective world. That place exists, and can only exist, beyond our conscious minds. We can perceive it through intermediaries. Fvlminatvs said: The frequency of frames is objective, but not the determination of "smoothness". What is smooth to you? 30 frames per second? 60? 120? 600? Unless you reduce smoothness to a trivial mathematical function of frames, in which it becomes uninteresting and not a value judgment, smoothness is not objective (or intersubjective). If you'd like, please propose how we should conduct a study to find some physical property called "smoothness" without simply defining it as such, and turning it circular?None of these metrics are "codified methods of measuring art in an objective sense". I have challenged multiple people in this thread who hold this misconception to describe in theory how they would propose that a scientific study be conducted to discover the objective metric in character quality. So counting frame-rates wouldn't be considered objective? Determining the smoothness of animation in that manner would not be an objective measurement of quality? Fvlminatvs said: Bingo!If you take the position that there can be absolutely zero methods of achieving any sort of quantitative data on a piece of art that will establish, without a doubt, some sort of aesthetic quality, I think I can guess that it would be due to the inherent subjectivity of the individual interpreting that data. Fvlminatvs said: Quantitative data is objective, but value judgments are not quantitative, but qualitative. Smoothness is not a number, but a perception.Correct me if I am wrong. However, I do not see how quantitative data itself can be anything but objective information. Let's take that apple you referenced--it's redness cannot be debated if we take the data on the wavelength of reflected light coming off the apple, despite our individual experience of the apple's redness. Fvlminatvs said: If we presume some qualified definition of being healthy, which everyone in common parlance does, then such a statement is a positive, not a normative statement. I'm not going to digress with you into the semantics of what it means to be healthy, but one can easily conceive that health is a set of results in a system, and fast food brings the system further from that result. Nothing inherent in this remark says anything about the desirability of health. A medical statement would NEVER say being healthy is desirable. People typical go by that assumption because subjectively, that's what they want.Everyone continues to parrot this a priori belief while conveniently ignoring the only thing that would prove the belief true. On the other hand, true scientists understand that they are not in the field of examining normative systems, but positive systems. This is probably the best rebuttal I've seen all year and I've got to concede this particular point. You're right that science itself is not normative. Yet scientific conclusions can be made to make qualitative, normative statements that are true and objective, such as "fast food is unhealthy for you." Fvlminatvs said: Once again, intersubjective is, for all intents and purposes, objective.You and I do agree on the importance of the intersubjective, although I think you may have lumped me in a bit too much with the "objectivity" crowd. I think where we differ is the precise interaction between the objective, subjective, and intersubjective when making qualitative statements about aesthetics, which is a very different argument than the one that tends to raise its ugly head on MAL every two or three months. Fvlminatvs said: Yes, we should drop it as soon as we understand what objective, subjective, and intersubjective means and why they're not relevant (or relevant). To clarify my position, I am not a member of the so-called "objectivity" crowd. And I do agree that "objective" does not necessarily mean "unbiased." That confusion does nothing but cause problems and I wish people would simply drop the "objective" and "subjective" terms altogether for purposes of their arguments because it would help to clarify things. Fvlminatvs said: In the previous paragraph, you said you recognize that objective does not mean unbiased, but here you say that it is possible to reduce bias. But I argue that it is not possible to be unbiased, even a little bit, when it comes to reviewing. In my opinion, a reviewer's task is to properly translate his personal feelings and reflection of the reviewed work perfectly so that the reader can, having lived inside his shoes, figure out if the work is something that he would enjoy. A reviewer's feelings are never flawed, his descriptions can be flawed if they do not give a complete or accurate portrayal of his feelings. Of course, reviewers can and do have limitations, as do all humans. The reader's responsibility, provided that the reviewer properly accomplishes his task, is to pick a reviewer with a similar mindset so that he could acquire the right impression. If the reviewer is utterly ignorant about Europe and is reviewing a work about Europe, a more enlightened reader would not sympathize. If the reader is also ignorant about Europe, then the reader would understand where the reviewer is coming from. If the reviewer is an expert on Europe but not the reader, then the reader might frankly not give a shit about the reviewer's analyses. This is not a flaw per se, but a mismatch.I also think there is some misunderstanding between us as to what we mean by aesthetic judgment and whether or not it is 100% subjective. What I mean by this is that, I recognize that one can, perhaps, reduce bias. For example, I'm a big fan of John Updike's essay on book reviews. He wrote this essay (I forget it's title but its, I think, the first one in his Picked-Up Pieces), wherein he admonishes a potential reviewer to ask themselves if the flaws in a book are actually flaws and not actually failures or limitations in the reader/reviewer. I recognize that even this self-reflection is, by necessity, subjective, but at the same time, would it not have the potential to reduce bias? Fvlminatvs said: Once again, objective is intersubjective. A reviewer who takes into account other people's opinions is merely a reviewer who does that. It does not make him even a cent more objective or intersubjective. It could be a detriment since he is biased by other experiences, or it could be desired if the reader enjoys a comparison filtered through the reviewer's mind. However, popularity does not make objectivity or intersubjective. (Note: You seem to want to associate sharing opinions, or popularity, with intersubjectivity, to make it seem more authoritative (I guess?). That might be one usage of the word in common parlance but it would not be how it's used in philosophy. Using the term in this way makes it subjective, not objective. Even if it is, it grants no special powers over mere popularity. It does not remove bias. It adds bias. When you do a statistical/scientific experiment, you never ever consult the opinions of other people or the test set because when you're looking for some particular result, that's what you'll find.)In addition, before making one's own judgment on a work, if one should read a number of other responses and reactions to that work, I would posit that perhaps one would become less subjective in their assessment and, if not more objective, than perhaps more intersubjective. Fvlminatvs said: There are two and only two realms: subjective and intersubjective (practically objective). By definition, they are with or without a mind, and something cannot be considered by neither with or without the mind. If A is true, then ~A (read as Not A) is false. If A is false, then ~A is true. There is no other option. A task is often achieved in observing both.You can deem observation to be 100% objective, or intersubjective, if you wish. A mistake would be to conflate judgment as arising from the same processes, and therefore objective. Another mistake would be to call the sum of these two processes 50% objective. On one hand, you are erasing the line in between the two; on the other hand, you are providing a blurred version of reality and appealing to vagueness. In fact, we could distinctly discern where objectivity ends and subjectivity starts. Objectivity ends when you see some shape of brown-yellowish light on a background of different colors. Subjectivity starts when you decide that there is a character and it is a female student. Once we realize that, we understand that effectively 100% (or 99.9% if you will) of analysis is subjective. (Note: A "character" is not an actual female student, but it is imagined as such. A wide variety of visualizations can be imagined to be a female student.) This paragraph is my "a-ha, I now understand what you're saying." This makes exactly what your position is crystal clear. Now, to drive a bit further, then, the most we could achieve is an intersubjective consensus that the paint represented a female student but we could never achieve any sort of objective, qualitative statement that the paint represented a female student. Am I understanding you clearly? Let me keep digging. Is the intersubjective a realm of its own or is it a sort of borderland where the objective and subjective directly interact? You seem to key into it being a completely separate realm, or perhaps borderland through which the objective and subjective indirectly interact. You see a table. The act of sensing (seeing) the table makes the table a physical thing that exists, objectively you could say. However, the light enters through your pupils and hits your retinal ganglia, which sends an electro-magnetic signal through your nervous system. You brain picks up this signal and causes you to consciously perceive the thing as a "table" based on past experience of what properties comprise a table. You can say that this is subjective -- and it is, technically speaking. However, it is more practical to think of both of the above as "intersubjective" (bundling this case of subjectivity into the objective) since the light enters all of our eyes in a similar way, and we can communicate properties that we all observe. This is the important part. I am not saying that all perception, including imagination, is intersubjective. There is a great amount of what you perceive that is not directly the result of physical stimuli, but is called from your past experience, cultural understanding, habits in language patterns, development cycle of the brain, hormonal and emotional regulation, learned values, aesthetic sensibilities, knowledge synthesis, etc. These are generally not considered intersubjective, but squarely subjective. When you watch anime, you intersubjectively note the number of frames per second. But how does that affect the quality of what is considered smooth in your mind? We could study the resolution of the eye, its reaction speed, etc., and determine a sort of general understanding of how people perceive smoothness, and come up with some arbitrary metric to quantify smoothness. But that is not the same as how people experience smoothness. Similarly, we could quantify temperature to a degree system, but we cannot say, objectively or intersubjectively, that 20 degrees Fahrenheit is cold. Cold must be derived from experience. The temperature is a measure of the vibrational frequency of gasses in the air, not a measure of the experience. I hope this ridiculously long exposition is the last time I repeat this. Feel free to disagree with how I'm using the terminology or my position, even, but I would implore you or anyone else to look deeper into what is implied by the words that you use. Note that if you do consider popular opinion, or anything that I consider subjective and is held by more than 1 person, as intersubjective, then the logical structure of my argument changes only slightly. We would have to come up with some new terminology to distinguish between popular opinion "intersubjectivity" and perception from direct observation intersubjectivity. Fvlminatvs said: I would say that Aristotelian analysis counts as objective truths within the system that he establishes, since it is a tautology. That is that given certain assumptions, we could make objectively true statements. For example, given the rules of Chess, white pawn to e4 is a proper first move. This is fair criticism, because it is a matter of fact that the various artistic movements and literary analysis movements are not scientifically derived, but derived analytically or synthetically. Therefore, if they are objective, they should be objective timelessly. And if every other time was mistaken, there's no reason to believe in significant accuracy of this time; then, we run into an epistemological problem of whether aesthetic knowledge is even possible, even if it is objective? If not, then the position is evidently useless. Let's take Aristotle's Poetics, then, as one of these examples of "aesthetic knowledge." It is true that many of the components of ancient Greek theater would seem very odd to modern moviegoers, such as the chorus, masks, etc. However, where Aristotle breaks down his analysis as to what makes a good tragic character, what elements work well, and how to generate catharsis, could we not argue that there are certain truths to his position due to near-universality of specific aspects of the human condition? What I mean by this is, we all fear loss, we all fear falling from our station and hitting rock bottom. Aristotle described elements of successful tragedies as playing upon certain universal human fears--he just happened to do it in a Greek context. If we can tease out these elements he identified as successful, could we not say that these are aesthetic elements that could be, if not proven to be universally effective, then at least effective on a significant majority of the human population? In that case, could you not make a statement that was objective and true that these elements, executed in this manner, will produce this reaction in an audience with significant reliability? I'm not asking this to be facetious, I am genuinely interested in what you think, here. I would not generalize this to the human condition, but suppose you conduct some scientific study that show most people -- or even all people -- are sensitive to some particular dramatic structure. Suppose, even, that we have discovered some part of the brain that makes a particular structure most effective (we have not, but hypothetically speaking, let's assume so). Then there are two questions here, as before: 1. What people would perceive. 2. What you perceive. And I would argue that, despite how similar sounding they are, they actually describe completely different phenomena. As different as, perhaps, that there is a 650nm wave bouncing off the wall, and that you see and experience a red wall. When you describe the red wall, you are not describing the 650nm wave, you are describing what you feel. In accordance with our assumptions, we could explain that the exact timing of the final scene triggered amygdala, but that is almost irrelevant in capturing how you felt. Fvlminatvs said: I'm not a literary critic either.And I admit, at this point, I am punching above my weight class as you've obviously been involved in this sort of study longer than I. I'm a historian, not an artist or literary critic, here. |
| My subjective reviews: katsureview.wordpress.com THE CHAT CLUB. |
| @katsucats, I think we've hit a brick wall. Given my understanding of intersubjectivity, I ascribe to a more Husserlian phenomenological comprehension in which it is possible to create or at least approach categorical objectivity and that which is objective is a discrete and distinct from that which is intersubjective (in the strict sense). At least, that is how I understand phenomenology. You seem to be a student of the empiricist idealism of George Berkeley. I, on the other hand, am far more of a Kantian, perhaps more distantly a Cartesian and while I respect Hume, I remain unconvinced by his assertions. Basically, it is almost as though you and I have completely different religious paradigms. You ascribe to the idea that it is impossible to be less biased whereas I take a more phenomenological approach in that elimination of bias is approachable through epoché, methods to mitigate assumptions and beliefs. That's me keeping it as simple as possible, myself. It's been a long time since graduate school when I had to read excerpts of Husserl and I could be misremembering things. As much as I did enjoy reading your response, and found it quite illuminating as to from where you're coming, I think I agree with you that digressing into massive walls of text isn't necessarily the best use of our time. |
| I did not understand how a discussion about reviewing art could lead into religion. But I guess if a naturalistic approach is not taken, but instead objectivity is taken to refer to some supernatural mental plane, then it could resolve to one's metaphysical world view. I maintain that evidence for such a view of the world is sparse or non-existent, but arguing about religion is tedious. I guess I'm not a life coach and neither are you. Thankfully, the semantics of objectivity is unimportant as long as one has a clear view of what it is he's referring to. Communication is ultimately empathetic, and to review is an act of communication about something of the reviewer. A reviewer that fails to divulge how he truly feels, whether by acts of omission on one aspect of his response to a work, or by insufficient detail or misrepresentation, fails in empathy. This communication failure should be undesirable regardless of whether one considers his work subjective or objective. It is only necessary that a view advances communication rather than impede it. If one holds that a reviewer becomes objective by maintaining stoicism, not using first-person, not using active tense, withholding elaborations on his thoughts, etc., I suggest that the view would impede communication, and therefore it is detrimental to proper review or discussion. Therefore, the purpose of reviews is upheld independently of metaphysics -- one only has to accept that communication is desirable, and that reviewing is an act of expressing one's own reaction to a work, or what one ascribes to the work itself in enough detail. |
| My subjective reviews: katsureview.wordpress.com THE CHAT CLUB. |
| Relativism and absolutism exist on a spectrum. That is, there is your subjective experience, your opinions on the show, and then there is the objective experience of what the show is. "trash" or "good" are actually oriented very heavily towards the subjective experience. Whereas saying "colorful" or "low-budget animation" is more oriented towards the objective experience, and it's easier to make points on said topics. I appreciate reviews because they describe objectively what's going on in the show, while also letting me know their opinions, how the show hit them in particular in different ways. They give me information that's useful for determining what I subjectively must consider when deciding whether I think I will enjoy the show or not. The scores have some value, but they are completely and utterly subjective. And more important than that, the only score that matters is your own at the end of the day. You are only looking at the scores to predict how much you will like the show. Or at least, I think that's really what their true purpose is. Scores can be aggregated together, so you can get a pretty good idea about what the MAL community's opinion is about any particular series. However, this comes with the disadvantage of not conveying much information at all about the intricacies of the show itself, which matter greatly when one is trying to predict how much they will like it, with their particular tastes. tl;dr your taste is the only thing that matters. Scores and reviews are just tools to help you predict whether you'll like it or not. |
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