From Subjectivity to Something That Will Have to Do

Working notes, not prose. This page is a research packet for drafting the chapter: the brief, source material, questions, examples, reader perspectives, and the earlier draft.

Brief

Must: Establish that we can never look inside each other’s heads, so subjectivity is the only way anyone experiences the world, through the filters of senses, body, history and language. Show that seeing the world purely is impossible except mathematically, which leaves much out, and that objectivity takes extra, deliberate work. Motivate questioning ourselves and a measured self-doubt about our senses, then end on the conviction that self-awareness earns. This chapter also absorbs the former objectivity chapter: separating observation from story, and asking whose account gets heard.
Serves: It sets up the “know thyself” stance Act II builds on, and gives the reader the first defense against being cheated: knowing the limits of their own view before trusting anyone else’s.

Quote options

“Every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.” — Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, The Philosophical Review 83.4 (1974), p. 437. [verified: https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil201/Nagel.pdf] Why: We cannot see inside other heads, and the purely objective or mathematical description leaves the experience out.
“Accordingly, seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose that there existed nothing really such as they presented to us.” — René Descartes, Discourse on the Method (1637), Part IV, trans. John Veitch. [verified: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/59/pg59.txt] Why: The classic measured self-doubt about the senses. It also echoes Chapter 1’s cogito, since the argument leads straight to Descartes’ conviction.
“I am not yet able, as the Delphic inscription has it, to know myself; so it seems to me ridiculous, when I do not yet know that, to investigate irrelevant things.” — Plato, Phaedrus 229e–230a, trans. Harold N. Fowler (1925). [verified: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174%3Atext%3DPhaedrus%3Asection%3D229e] Why: The “know thyself” stance the outline wants the chapter to hand to Act II: know your own limits before judging the world.
“The moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objective vision.” — Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988), p. 583. [verified: https://diversions.constantvzw.org/2016-12-04-sunday/041216.pdf] Why: Objectivity comes from deliberate, located work, not from a view from nowhere. That is the conviction self-awareness earns.
“Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word; hermeneutical injustice occurs at a prior stage, when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences.” — Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007), Introduction, p. 1. [verified: https://www.mirandafricker.com/uploads/1/3/6/2/136236203/introduction.pdf] Why: Covers the absorbed objectivity chapter’s question of whose account gets heard. The first clause alone works as an epigraph.

Research

Core argument

Start with the locked box. No one has ever looked out through another person’s eyes. Everything you know about another mind comes to you as behavior, words, and your own guesses about them. Subjectivity is not a flaw in how people experience the world. It is the only way anyone has ever experienced it.
Name the filters. Every view passes through at least four filters. Senses: what a body can detect at all (the tick’s three signals, the bee’s ultraviolet, your blind spot). Body: mood, hunger, pain, and where you happen to be standing. History: memory, which gets rebuilt each time it is recalled (Loftus and Palmer). Language: the categories you have words for (Russian blues, Wittgenstein’s beetle). Each filter is useful. Each one also hides things.
Show that disagreement is the normal case. When two honest people see the same thing differently (the dress, Russell’s table, a room that is “cold”), neither is necessarily broken. Different filters produce different reports.
Try the purest view available: mathematics. From Galileo on, science tried to escape the filters by keeping only what can be measured, meaning shape, number and motion, and setting aside color, taste and feeling as “mere names.” It works astonishingly well, but it pays for that by dropping what it is like to be someone. That is Nagel’s bat, the tickle, the redness of red. The only view that looks like it comes from nowhere is also a view with nobody in it.
So objectivity is not a place you stand. It is work you do. Blinding (Franklin in 1784, Pfungst with Clever Hans in 1907), measuring, recording before the result is known, repeating, and inviting criticism (Longino) are all techniques for making a claim depend less on one person’s position. Nagel defines “more objective” as a matter of degree, not a finish line.
Separate observation from story. The hot cup, the valve 1.4 m from the path: split what was sensed, what was inferred, what else could explain it, and what would change your mind. This is the smallest unit of objective work, and anyone can do it.
Ask whose account got heard. Averaging many views can still exclude some. Semmelweis’s numbers were ignored. Clinicians who hold false beliefs rate Black patients’ pain lower. A committee writes down “no complaint.” Objectivity has a social side: whose testimony counts, and who has the words to describe what they went through (Fricker).
Turn the doubt inward in measured doses. The right attitude is not Cartesian demolition, and it is not paralysis. It is calibrated self-doubt: “I am the easiest person to fool” (Feynman). Doubt your senses in the specific ways they are known to fail, not everywhere at once.
End on what self-awareness earns. A person who knows where their own view is weak gets three things. They are harder to cheat, because they can see the lever a con artist or a preacher would pull. They are better at combining their view with others’. And they get to hold convictions honestly, since a belief that has survived your own best objection is worth more than one that was never tested. This is “know thyself” as the entrance to Act II.

Key questions

How do I know you see the same red I do? Would it change anything if you didn’t?
If no one can look into my head, how did I learn words like “pain” or “sad” at all? (Wittgenstein’s beetle)
Child: Does my dog see the same room I see? What does the room look like to a fly?
Child: If I close my eyes, is the room still there? How do I know?
Cynic: If everyone’s view is filtered, isn’t “objectivity” just the filter of whoever holds the power?
Cynic: Scientists have egos, funding, and careers. Why trust them more than my own eyes?
Is a thermometer less subjective than my hand, or is it only subjective in a different way that can be shared?
What exactly gets lost when the world is described with mathematics? Could a complete physics tell you what coffee tastes like?
Can memory count as observation, when it gets rebuilt every time it’s recalled?
How do the words I have change what I notice? Could I see a color I have no word for?
When is agreement evidence, and when is it just contagion?
Who wasn’t in the room when this “fact” was established?
Is “trust your gut” ever good advice? When is the gut actually a well-trained instrument?
How much self-doubt is too much? Where does humility shade into being unable to act?
If I’m the easiest person to fool, who is the second easiest? (Hint: people who agree with me.)
Is there anything I can be certain of? (Descartes’ answer, and whether wanting comes before it, per Chapter 1.)
What would it look like for a group, a company, or a country to “know itself”?
Why do we trust a blind test more than an expert’s open-eyed judgment, even when the expert is honest?
Child: Why does my voice sound weird on a recording? Which one is my real voice?
What does a con artist need you not to know about your own perception?

Examples

The tick’s world (animals, sensing). Jakob von Uexküll’s tick waits on a branch and reacts to only three signals: the smell of butyric acid in mammal sweat, a temperature of about 37°C, and the feel of hair. Its whole world is built from those three signals. Ours is built from more, but it is still finite and still made of a selection. Umwelt, Wikipedia; Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (1934).
E. coli’s world (cells). A bacterium can’t sense a chemical gradient across its own tiny body. Instead it compares concentrations from moment to moment and swims on or tumbles depending on whether things are getting better. Its entire “view” is a comparison over time. This makes a good opening scale-down: even a cell perceives through its own particular mechanism. (Standard chemotaxis biology, e.g. Berg, E. coli in Motion, 2004. Check before stating numbers.)
Mantis shrimp paradox (animals, more sensors ≠ better picture). Mantis shrimp have 12 to 16 photoreceptor types against our 3 kinds of cone. Yet Thoen et al. (2014, Science) found they are poor at telling apart wavelengths less than about 25 nm apart, so they seem to read color quickly with something like a barcode rather than finely. Having more sensors doesn’t mean seeing “more truly.” It means seeing differently for different purposes. Mantis shrimp, Wikipedia
The blind spot (your own body). Every human eye has a gap where the optic nerve leaves the retina. Edme Mariotte described it in the 1660s. The brain fills it in, so you never notice the hole. This makes an easy live demonstration for the reader (see Exercise 1).
The dress (people, same photo, different worlds). On 26 February 2015 Caitlin McNeill posted a photo of a dress to Tumblr. Within 24 hours it had generated 4.4 million tweets. The dress was really royal blue and black. In Lafer-Sousa et al.’s survey (Current Biology, 2015, about 1,400 respondents), 57% saw blue/black, 30% white/gold, and 11% blue/brown. The best explanation is that people differ in what they unconsciously assume about the lighting. The dress, Wikipedia
Russell’s table (philosophy classic). Bertrand Russell pointed out that a brown table looks different colors from different angles and under different light, and that the painter has to unlearn “the colour it really is.” (Quoted below.) This is the gentlest way into the appearance/reality distinction.
Memory rewritten by a verb (history filter). In Loftus and Palmer (1974), 45 students watched car-crash films. Asked how fast the cars were going when they “smashed,” they estimated 40.8 mph on average. With “contacted,” they said 31.8 mph. A week later, 32% (16 of 50) of the “smashed” group remembered broken glass that was never shown, against 14% of the “hit” group. Simply Psychology summary
Eyewitnesses and wrongful convictions (people, stakes). The Innocence Project reports that more than 60% of its clients were wrongly convicted on eyewitness misidentification. Sincere testimony can still be false testimony. Innocence Project (A possible scene to use: Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton, 1984. Thompson was certain, and she was wrong.)
Russian blues (language filter). Russian has two basic color words for blue, goluboy (light) and siniy (dark). Winawer et al. (PNAS, 2007) found Russian speakers were faster at telling apart blues that fell on opposite sides of that boundary. The advantage disappeared when a verbal task tied up their language. English speakers showed no such effect. Words shape perception at the edges. doi:10.1073/pnas.0701644104
Clever Hans (objectivity as deliberate work, animals + people). Wilhelm von Osten’s horse seemed to do arithmetic. A 13-member commission led by Carl Stumpf found no trickery in September 1904. In 1907 Oskar Pfungst blinded the setup. When Hans could see a questioner who knew the answer, he got 89% right (50 of 56). When he couldn’t, he got 6% (2 of 35). The horse was reading involuntary body language. Nobody was lying, yet everybody was fooled until someone deliberately designed a test. Clever Hans, Wikipedia
Franklin’s blindfold (civilizational turning point). On 12 March 1784 the French crown appointed a commission, including Benjamin Franklin, Lavoisier, Guillotin and Bailly, to test Mesmer’s “animal magnetism.” Lavoisier’s design magnetized some people without their knowledge and told others they were being magnetized when they weren’t. The effects followed belief, not magnetism. This is one of the first blinded experiments: objectivity invented as a procedure. Royal Commission on Animal Magnetism, Wikipedia
Millikan’s shadow (experts fooling themselves). Feynman recounts that after Millikan’s 1909 oil-drop measurement of the electron’s charge, which was slightly off because of a wrong value for the viscosity of air, later results crept upward only gradually. Experimenters threw out numbers that strayed too far from Millikan’s. Even the best instruments are read by people who have expectations. Feynman, “Cargo Cult Science”
Semmelweis (whose account gets heard). In 1847, at the First Obstetrical Clinic of the Vienna General Hospital, Ignaz Semmelweis had staff wash their hands in chlorinated lime. Maternal mortality fell from about 18.3% to 1–2%. Colleagues rejected him: there was no germ theory yet to explain it, and gentlemen doctors took offense at the idea that their hands were dirty. He died in an asylum in 1865. The data was there, but the social route to being believed was not. Ignaz Semmelweis, Wikipedia
Pain that isn’t believed (testimonial injustice today). Hoffman et al. (PNAS, 2016) surveyed 222 white medical students and residents. About 50% rated at least one false claim about Black bodies as possibly or more likely true (for example, “black people’s skin has more collagen (i.e., it’s thicker)”). Those who endorsed more false beliefs rated a Black patient’s pain lower. A patient’s report of their own experience was discounted by a story about their skin. PMC4843483
Thought experiments. Mary’s room (Frank Jackson, 1982): a color scientist who knows all the physics of color but has lived only in black and white sees red for the first time. Does she learn something? This is the chapter’s “mathematics leaves much out” point made vivid. Blind men and the elephant (Udāna 6.4, Pali Canon): each man’s report is true of what he touched and false as a description of the whole. Also Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950): four sworn accounts of one death, each one serving its teller.

Source material

“Hence I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness.” Galileo Galilei, The Assayer (1623), trans. Stillman Drake, in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (1957). [verified: https://web.stanford.edu/~jsabol/certainty/readings/Galileo-Assayer.pdf] (The PDF has a typo, “he consciousness.” The standard text reads “the.”) Use: This is the founding move of the mathematical view: keep what can be measured and set aside what is felt. It supports the “pure seeing leaves much out” step.
“It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.” Galileo Galilei, The Assayer (1623), trans. Stillman Drake. [verified: https://web.stanford.edu/~jsabol/certainty/readings/Galileo-Assayer.pdf] Use: Pair it with quote 1 to show the promise of a filter-free language and, on the same pages, its cost.
“It is evident from what we have found, that there is no colour which pre-eminently appears to be the colour of the table, or even of any one particular part of the table—it appears to be of different colours from different points of view” Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912), ch. 1, “Appearance and Reality.” [verified: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5827/pg5827.txt] Use: A gentle, everyday opening for the filters. The same chapter’s line that the painter must “unlearn” common-sense color makes a nice aside.
“Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle”. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.—Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), §293, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. [verified: https://web.stanford.edu/~paulsko/Wittgenstein293.html] Use: The chapter’s opening image of the locked box. Also sets up the turn to language: we coordinate on the word, not on the beetle.
“…and of course the clear and certain truth no man has seen nor will there be anyone who knows about the gods and what I say about all things. For even if, in the best case, one happened to speak just of what has been brought to pass, still he himself would not know. But opinion is allotted to all.” Xenophanes of Colophon, fragment B34 (c. 6th century BCE), trans. J. H. Lesher, quoted in Lesher, “Xenophanes,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [verified: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/xenophanes/] The same page gives B16: “Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black; Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired.” (The SEP page has a typo, “are are,” in B16.) Use: Measured self-doubt is about 2,500 years old. B16 shows the history/culture filter projecting even onto gods, which foreshadows “not being cheated by religions.”
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists.” Richard P. Feynman, “Cargo Cult Science,” Caltech commencement address, 1974, printed in Engineering and Science 37:7. [verified: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm] Use: The chapter’s thesis in one line: self-awareness comes first, and trustworthiness to others follows. Pairs with the Millikan example from the same talk.
“We’re all hallucinating all the time, including right now. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, we call that reality.” Anil Seth, “Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality,” TED2017 talk. [verified: https://singjupost.com/anil-seth-your-brain-hallucinates-your-conscious-reality-full-transcript/?singlepage=1] (A third-party transcript; the TED tweet quoting the same line is at https://x.com/TEDTalks/status/1536080899866910720.) The same talk calls perception “a controlled hallucination in which the brain’s predictions are being reigned in by sensory information from the world” (“reigned” [sic], in the transcript). Use: A modern neuroscience framing of subjectivity. The “controlled” part matters: the world pushes back, so this is not relativism. Seth is already in references.json.
“Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions, blind.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), Transcendental Logic, Introduction (A51/B75), trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn. [verified: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4280/pg4280.txt] Use: Senses without concepts see nothing, and concepts without senses are about nothing. This frames language and history as filters that also make seeing possible.
“According to Longino, the only check against the arbitrary dominance of subjective (metaphysical, political, aesthetic) preference in such cases is critical interaction among the members of the scientific community or among members of different communities.” Helen Longino, “The Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (rev. 2019), §3. [verified: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-knowledge-social/] Note that this is an encyclopedia summary of Longino’s position, not a line from Science as Social Knowledge (1990). Use: Objectivity as a social achievement that comes from challenge. It bridges “objectivity is work” and “whose account gets heard.”
“A view or form of thought is more objective than another if it relies less on the specifics of the individual’s makeup and position in the world, or on the character of the particular type of creature he is.” Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (1986), Introduction, p. 5. [UNVERIFIED] Web search surfaced this wording, but I could not fetch a primary text. Philosophy Now (issue 142) paraphrases it as “one view is more objective than another if it relies less than the other on the specifics of the viewer’s makeup and position.” Check it against the book before using. Use: Defines objectivity as a matter of degree, “more objective,” which is exactly the chapter’s title (“something that will have to do”).

Counterarguments and limits

“We can’t see inside other heads” is overstated. Brain imaging can decode some perceived images and words, and people share a great deal through empathy, facial expression and joint attention (Tomasello). The honest claim is “never directly and never completely,” not “never at all.” Neurophenomenology and the predictive-processing people (Seth, Clark) would say that much of experience is structured in shared ways.
Wittgenstein cuts both ways. The beetle passage is usually read as an argument against the idea of a private inner theater: meaning is public. If the chapter leans on the box image to argue for radical privacy, a philosopher will object. Use it to show that language coordinates without ever opening the box.
“Pure seeing is only mathematical” is a strong claim. Mathematics is also a human-made, filtered representation (Chapter 12 covers this). Structural realists would say mathematics captures the world’s structure but not its intrinsic nature. Phenomenologists would say lived experience is itself a kind of knowledge. Frame it as “the least perspectival description we have,” not as “the pure view.”
Relativism risk. “Everyone’s view is filtered” can slide into “all views are equal,” which is the opposite of the book’s anti-cheating aim. Keep the resistance of the world in view: the mountain still bends the path, and controlled hallucination is still controlled.
Skepticism risk. Too much doubt about the senses is its own way of being cheated: gaslighting works by making people distrust their accurate perceptions. Measured doubt has to include trusting your senses where they have a good track record.
Epistemic-injustice framing can be turned around. A cynic will say that “whose account gets heard” can be used to demand credibility for any claim whatsoever. Fricker’s point is about prejudicially deflated credibility, not about giving everyone equal credence. The Hoffman pain study and Semmelweis are good cases because the discounted report was actually correct.
Replication problems cut against “science is objective.” The Open Science Collaboration (2015) could replicate only about 36–39% of 100 psychology findings, and some of the chapter’s examples (like the Goldin and Rouse blind-audition study) have been statistically questioned. Say that objectivity is a practice that fails and gets corrected. Don’t call it a guarantee.
The dress and illusions are edge cases. Most of the time perception works well enough for survival. Don’t imply that the senses usually lie. They are tuned for usefulness, not for accuracy (Hoffman’s “interface theory” is the extreme version, and it is controversial).
Language shaping perception (Whorf) is modest. The Russian-blues effect is measured in milliseconds, and the strong Whorfian claim that words determine what you can perceive is not supported.

Connections

Preface / Prologue: The Prologue’s method (“observe, separate story from event, mark what is unknown”) is fully carried out here for the first time. The hot-cup notebook is that method in miniature.
Ch. 1 (Before Thought, There Is Want): Descartes’ doubt and the cogito come back. Ask whether the doubting itself is driven by a want: to not be fooled.
Ch. 2 (Will Creates Difference): Different wants produce different views. Sapolsky’s layers (body state, history) are exactly the filters named here.
Ch. 3 (Love, Growth, and Meaning): Listening to someone whose view you can’t access is a form of care. Epistemic justice is love applied to knowledge.
Act I close (Unnatural in Volition): How much of our apparent freedom is visible only from inside?
Ch. 5 (The First Blade: Me and World): “Know thyself” becomes the organism/environment cut. The filters are the boundary where that system meets the world.
Ch. 6 (Reality and Representation): Perception already is representation. Galileo’s mathematical book is the information world at its most formal.
Ch. 7 (Good, Bad): Why a belief survives is separate from whether it’s true: Millikan’s number survived because of deference.
Ch. 9 (The Cost of the Blade): Measures replacing purposes. The “no complaint” minutes are the canonical example.
Ch. 10 (Thingification): Diagnoses and records become “facts” that can outvote testimony.
Ch. 11 (Knowledge) / Ch. 12 (Mathematics and the Limits of Proof): Even the mathematical view has limits, which extends “mathematics leaves much out.”
Act III measurement cycles (Chs. 13–14, Measure → Model → Manipulate): Blinding, measuring and recording are the start of Cycle 1.

Exercise ideas

Find your hole. Draw a small cross and, 8 cm to its right, a dot on a sheet of paper. Close your left eye, look at the cross with your right eye, and slowly bring the page toward your face until the dot vanishes, usually at about 25–35 cm. Notice: you don’t see a black hole. You see blank paper that your brain invented. Then draw a line through the dot and watch the line appear to continue across the gap. Why: this is thirty seconds of proof that your view has a missing piece that your brain covers up without telling you. It makes “measured self-doubt” physical, not abstract.
Observation / story split (the two-column minute). Tonight, write down one moment from today when you judged someone, for example “my coworker was annoyed with me.” Divide a page into two columns. On the left, write only what a camera and microphone would have captured (“she said ‘fine’ and looked at her screen”). On the right, write everything you added: motive, tone, history. Then write one other story that fits the left column just as well, and one thing you could do to tell the stories apart (such as asking her). Notice: how much of the “event” lives in the right column, and which filter (body, history, language) supplied it. Why: this is the chapter’s core technique, separating observation from story, practiced on something with real personal stakes rather than a hot cup.
The blind taste (objectivity as work). Pick something you have strong opinions about, such as two coffees, two waters, two brands of cola, or cheap versus expensive wine. Ask someone else to pour them into identical unmarked cups and keep the key hidden. Taste both, write down which is which and how sure you are (0–100%), then check. Repeat three times with the order shuffled. Notice: how your confidence compares with how often you were right, and how different the tasting felt when you didn’t know. Why: it recreates Franklin’s 1784 blindfold and Pfungst’s test of Clever Hans at your kitchen table. It shows that objectivity is a procedure you can do, not a gift you either have or lack, and that your certainty is a separate quantity from your accuracy.

Open questions for the author

Title and scope: Does “Something That Will Have to Do” stay? It captures the degree-not-destination idea well, but it may undersell the conviction the chapter is supposed to end on.
How far to go on the mathematics claim: Should the chapter say mathematics is the pure view (and risk overreaching), or “the least perspectival view we have”? And how much should it borrow from Chapter 12 here?
Wittgenstein’s beetle: Use it as an image of privacy (the popular reading), or honor its anti-private-language point? The second reading fits the move toward shared knowledge better.
Where to put “whose account gets heard”: Should it be a closing section, or woven through (Semmelweis in the middle, the valve committee at the end)? The earlier draft had it as two separate chapters’ worth of material.
Tone on religion and authority: The book’s goal mentions not being cheated by religions. Xenophanes B16 is a gentle, ancient way in. Do you want to be explicit here, or save it for later?
Which scale leads: Open with the cell or tick (in keeping with Act I’s multi-scale habit), or with a human scene (the hot cup, the dress)?
Descartes callback: Chapter 1 already uses the cogito, and quote option 2 in this file is Descartes on the senses. Is that repetition welcome, or should this chapter use Xenophanes or Feynman for the doubt instead?
Keep the notebook practice from the earlier draft (observation / story / unknowns / confidence / test / revision) as a formal tool the book reuses, or let Exercise 2 replace it?
Nagel’s definition needs to be checked against the book (p. 5) before it goes in.

Reader perspectives

Curious young child

First reactions:

“You can never see inside someone else’s head” feels like a secret they’ve always suspected. Instant fascination: “So nobody knows what I’m thinking right now?”
“Is my red the same as your red?” is a question many kids have already asked in the car. This chapter is where it belongs, and they’d be thrilled to find it.
The hot-cup example works. Every kid has been told “careful, it’s hot”, and some have tested it.
“Objectivity” is a scary word. “The most fair way to check” is the version they’d get.
The epistemic injustice part hits hard: “Nobody listens to kids.” They’d feel seen, and a bit outraged.

Questions they’d ask:

“Is my blue the same as your blue? How would we ever know?”
“Does my dog see the same world I do? What does he smell that I can’t?”
“If I can’t see inside your head, how do I know you’re real and not a robot?”
“Why does the same song sound good to me and bad to my dad?”
“Why does one minute feel really long when I’m waiting and really short when I’m playing?”
“If my eyes can trick me, what else can trick me?”
“How does math see the world? Does math have eyes?”
“Why did the teacher believe the other kid and not me?”
“If everybody says something, does that make it true?”
“If I close my eyes, is the room still there?”
“How do you know yourself? Aren’t I just… me?”
“What does a bee see when it looks at a flower?”

Where they’d get lost, bored, offended or unconvinced:

The chapter now joins two drafts, and the second (“The Most Objective We Can Be”) uses a committee, minutes, and a garden valve 1.4 metres from the path. They’d be completely lost. Committees are not in their world.
References to “Learning”, “Creating”, “Becoming” and “the modes” in the second draft point to later chapters. At this point in the book they’re confusing for anyone, especially a kid.
The brief says seeing the world purely is only possible “mathematically, which leaves much out”, but neither draft shows it. A kid would need: “A ruler can tell you the table is 1 metre long, but not that it’s where Grandma used to sit.”
The mountain paragraph is nice but static. They’d want the mountain to be a hill they sled down, which is one hill with fun, scary and boring versions depending on who’s sledding.
“Measured self-doubt about our senses” could make them anxious: “So I can’t trust anything?” The chapter must end on the confident note the brief asks for (“the conviction that self-awareness earns”), or a kid leaves scared.
The whose-account-gets-heard point is the most powerful for a kid, but it’s told through adults at work. Tell it with a kid who saw what happened and wasn’t believed.

Examples they’d bring:

The checker shadow illusion: Edward Adelson’s (MIT, 1995) picture where two squares are exactly the same grey but look totally different. It’s proof your eyes make stuff up, and kids beg to see it again.
Bees see ultraviolet: many flowers have ultraviolet patterns, sometimes called nectar guides, that bees can see and we can’t. The same flower is a different picture to different eyes.
A dog’s nose: a dog lives in a smell-world a person barely notices. It’s the “filters of senses and body” point, told through a pet.
Bath water: put one hand in cold water and one in hot, then both in lukewarm. One hand says warm, the other says cold. It’s a classic experiment, old enough that John Locke described it in 1690 in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Senses disagree, and a thermometer settles it.
“Who broke the vase?”: two kids, one grown-up, and one kid who is always believed. Whose account gets heard, at home.
Telephone (the whisper game): a sentence goes around the circle and comes out totally different. It’s the story drifting away from the event, and why you check.

What would win them over:

Letting them do the experiments: the bath water, the illusion, the whisper game. Doubt becomes fun instead of scary.
Saying clearly that everyone, even grown-ups and scientists, sees from inside their own head, so kids aren’t worse at seeing, just differently placed.
Taking the “nobody listens to kids” feeling seriously as a real example of whose account gets heard.
Ending with confidence: “Knowing your eyes can be tricked is a superpower. It means you’re harder to trick.”

Cynical adult

First reactions:

This is the chapter I came for: how not to be cheated. The brief is sharp. The draft is two old chapters stapled together, and it shows (the garden-valve story is told twice).
“We can never look inside each other’s heads” is obvious to me. What’s not obvious, and what I’d actually want, is how to act on that when a doctor, a pundit or my partner claims to know.
“Seeing the world purely is impossible except mathematically.” A huge claim, buried in the brief, absent from the draft. Is maths really “pure seeing,” or just a very clean language?
The observation/story/unknowns/confidence/test notebook is useful. It’s also the scientific method and a CBT thought record. Say so.
The Fricker material is the most important thing here, and the most likely to be dismissed by readers like me as “woke epistemology” unless the example is watertight.

Questions they’d ask:

If all views are subjective, why should I trust your account of objectivity?
Isn’t “self-doubt about my senses” exactly what gaslighters and cult leaders want me to feel? How is measured self-doubt different from being talked out of what I saw?
What does “objectivity takes extra, deliberate work” mean in practice? A checklist, peer review, a second opinion?
Maths “sees purely”: pure what? A proof tells me nothing about whether my tea is hot.
When experts disagree, what do I actually do, since I can’t run the test myself?
“Who was heard” matters. But isn’t “the marginalized voice is right” just another shortcut? When are they wrong?
How confident should I be in my own memory, given what’s known about eyewitness testimony?
What’s the difference between Haraway’s “partial perspective” and “everyone has their own truth,” which chapter 2 rejected?
“Self-awareness earns a conviction.” Earns what conviction, exactly? That I’m right, or that I might be wrong?
Who funds the measurements? Isn’t the instrument itself someone’s perspective?
Is Descartes’ doubt really useful, or a philosopher’s parlour game nobody lives by?

Where they’d get lost, bored, offended or unconvinced:

Bored/confused: the duplicate valve story (once as “someone says,” once as “imagine a junior worker”). It reads as an unedited merge.
Unconvinced: the mountain paragraph (“the mountain still makes their paths bend”) gives realism a free pass with a pretty image. A skeptic wants the hard case, where the “mountain” is contested: a diagnosis, a crime statistic, a vaccine side-effect report.
Lost: the brief promises four filters (senses, body, history, language). The draft gestures at “bodies, histories, interests, and limited attention” and never shows how a filter distorts. One clean example per filter would fix it.
Offended (two directions): progressives may find the valve example tokenistic; conservatives may read Fricker as a political move. The fix is an example where the unheard witness was right and it is not politically coded (see below).
Unconvinced: the “ethics doesn’t follow from evidence” paragraph (“Our earlier ethical commitments… care, preventable harm, fairness…”) suddenly asserts a value list the book hasn’t argued for. It feels like a party platform arriving uninvited.
Missing: the brief’s closing move, “the conviction that self-awareness earns,” doesn’t appear. The chapter ends on “an accountable view from here,” which is sensible but flat. What’s the payoff for the doubt?

Examples they’d bring:

The Dress (2015). Millions of people saw the same photo as white-gold or blue-black and were each certain. It’s subjectivity of the senses shown at scale and hard to argue with.
Loftus and Palmer (1974), Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior. Asking how fast cars were going when they “smashed” rather than “hit” raised speed estimates, and more people later falsely recalled broken glass. Language filtering memory, in one experiment.
Pulse oximeters. Sjoding et al. (2020, New England Journal of Medicine) found these devices missed hidden low oxygen about three times as often in Black patients as in White patients. The “objective” instrument carried a perspective. That’s a perfect, non-rhetorical case for “who is measured, who is heard.”
Semmelweis (1840s). He showed handwashing cut deaths from childbed fever in the Vienna clinic and was dismissed by colleagues. It’s the unheard-correct-witness case with no modern political valence.
Challenger (1986). Engineers warned about O-rings in cold weather and were overruled. Feynman’s ice-water demonstration at the Rogers Commission hearing made the point in seconds. Credibility, hierarchy, and a test anyone could see.
Second opinions in medicine. The everyday version of “objectivity takes deliberate work”: the reader can do it next week.

What would win them over:

Merge the two source chapters into one argument, with one extended case (pulse oximeters or Challenger) carrying senses → instrument → institution → who got heard.
Distinguish measured self-doubt from being gaslit, explicitly. Give a test: doubt that invites checking is healthy; doubt that demands deference is a con.
Either defend “only mathematics sees purely” with care (and what it leaves out, per Nagel), or trim it to a promise paid off in chapter 12.
End with a concrete conviction (“I can’t see perfectly, but I can know how I’m likely to be wrong, and that makes me harder to fool”), not a mood.

Believer / spiritual reader

First reactions:

“We can never look inside each other’s heads” and “seeing the world purely is impossible” are claims believers find deeply congenial: “For now we see through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor 13:12). The humility is shared. The question is what fills the gap: revelation, or method.
The mountain example (“shelter, obstacle, sacred place, or poor location for a picnic”) will sting. Putting “sacred place” in a list that ends in a picnic joke makes the sacred one more preference. For a Lakota reader thinking of the Black Hills, or a Hindu reader thinking of Kailash, that is not a neutral list.
This is where the book’s “don’t be cheated by authorities” goal is most active. Believers will read “who was able to produce evidence, and who was heard” and think: yes, and mystics, peasants and women visionaries were famously not heard, often by church authorities and by secular ones.
Moved by Fricker. Many believers from minority traditions have been on the receiving end of testimonial injustice, with their experience dismissed as superstition.
Suspicious that “objectivity takes extra, deliberate work” will turn into “only measurable things count”, given that “seeing the world purely is impossible except mathematically”.

Questions they’d ask:

If subjectivity is the only access anyone has, does religious experience get the same standing as other first-person reports: provisional, but data?
How would your notebook method (observation, story, unknowns, test) handle a report of answered prayer or a near-death experience? Honestly, not dismissively.
Is “know thyself” (the Delphic maxim, which is itself a temple inscription) sufficient, or do you need to be known by another, as in Psalm 139, to see yourself truly?
Mathematics “leaves much out”. What exactly, and could what it leaves out include the things religions care about most?
Does “whose account gets heard” apply to the religious poor in the Global South, whose worldviews are often called pre-scientific?
Measured self-doubt about the senses: how is that different from ascetic training in distrusting appearances (māyā, the Buddhist teaching on perception)?
If agreement can be manufactured by exclusion, how would you tell a real scientific consensus from a manufactured one without trusting an authority at some point?
Doesn’t the scientific community also run on trusted testimony, which is a kind of faith?
What does the chapter’s “conviction that self-awareness earns” rest on? That is a statement of faith in method.
Why Nagel’s view from nowhere, and not the traditional God’s-eye view that it secularizes?

Where they’d get lost, bored, offended or unconvinced:

Offended by the picnic list, described above. Remove the joke from that sentence or move it elsewhere.
Unconvinced that the garden-valve and hot-cup examples bear the chapter’s weight. The brief promises “subjectivity is the only way anyone experiences the world”, a claim about consciousness itself, and the draft delivers committee minutes.
Lost in the two stitched sections (“Subjectivity” and “The Most Objective We Can Be”). The valve example appears twice, and the jump to “That is Learning. Creating… Becoming…” refers to MMM terms not yet introduced in Act I.
They would push back on the implied order: first know your own limits, then trust others. Most traditions teach that you learn your limits by submitting to a teacher or community. The brief puts self-knowledge first, and a religious reader would call that individualism.

Examples they’d bring:

The blind men and the elephant, in its canonical Buddhist form (Udāna 6.4, the Tittha Sutta): sectarians each touching part of the elephant and quarrelling. It is the classic image of partial perspective, and the Buddha tells it against dogmatists, which makes it a gift to this chapter.
1 Corinthians 13:12 (“now I know in part”): the Christian scriptural version of situated knowledge, paired with a hope of fuller knowing.
The Kalama Sutta (AN 3.65) again: test teachings against your own experience of what leads to harm and to welfare. A religious endorsement of the notebook practice.
Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream (Zhuangzi ch. 2): the Taoist version of “I cannot be certain my view is the real one”.
Qur’an 17:85, “and of knowledge you have been given only a little”: scriptural epistemic humility that believers can bring to the table.
Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, rules for the discernment of spirits: a 16th-century method for questioning your own inner states (consolation and desolation) before trusting them. It is systematic self-doubt with a procedure.

What would win them over:

Treating religious experience as testimony that deserves Fricker’s standard, neither accepted as revelation nor dismissed as delusion.
Acknowledging that traditions built serious tools for doubting the self (discernment, vipassana, confession) and that the book stands in that line.
Removing the “sacred place / picnic” juxtaposition, or turning it into a real example of whose meaning of the mountain gets heard.
Admitting the book’s own starting faith: that shared, correctable method is the best we have. Believers respect someone who names their creed.

Skeptical scientist

First reactions:

This is the chapter where the book earns or loses scientists. The draft’s “accountable view from here” is close to how working scientists actually think about objectivity. The brief’s claim that “we can never look inside each other’s heads” is now empirically too strong, though.
“Seeing the world purely is impossible except mathematically” overreaches in the other direction. Mathematical physics is not pure seeing: it rests on measurement, instruments, calibration and theory-laden choices about what to measure. Math is a way of compressing and checking reports, not a window without a frame.
The valve and wheelchair example is excellent. It is concrete, it shows a record omitting a fact without disproving it, and it has a measurement in it. Keep it.
The chapter would be much stronger if it showed objectivity as procedures (blinding, controls, pre-registration, replication, calibration), each invented because a particular bias kept fooling people. That is the “extra, deliberate work” the brief asks for, and it is concrete and historical.
The hot-cup opening treats “steam rises” as pure observation. Even that involves categorization and inference, so the three-way split is too tidy.

Questions they’d ask:

“Never look inside each other’s heads.” What about fMRI decoding of imagined speech or viewed images, or detecting covert awareness in unresponsive patients? Do you mean “never directly experience another’s experience”? That is defensible; the other isn’t.
What do you mean by “mathematically pure”? Is a thermometer reading pure? It depends on calibration, and on which substance’s expansion you trust.
What exactly does math leave out? Qualia? Values? Context? Name it, because “much” is vague.
How reliable are the senses, quantitatively? Illusions are edge cases; everyday perception is quite good for survival-relevant tasks. Is the measured self-doubt proportionate?
What is the evidence that instruments carry their makers’ blind spots? Is there a clear case?
Is “observation versus story” actually separable? Hanson and Kuhn argued observation is theory-laden. How much is the chapter conceding?
Why the blind trial? Tell the history: who discovered that observers influence results, and how.
If consensus can be manufactured by exclusion, what distinguishes legitimate scientific consensus from manufactured consensus?
How does the chapter handle a lone dissenter who was right (Semmelweis) versus the many who were wrong? Base rates matter.
Is objectivity a property of individuals or of communities? Longino says communities. Which does the chapter mean?
How do you avoid ending up at “everything is perspective,” which the book elsewhere rejects?

Where they’d get lost, bored, offended or unconvinced:

“Subjectivity is the only way anyone experiences the world” is true but trivial. The interesting question is how different subjectivities differ and converge, and the chapter should quantify that (color vision variation, perceptual illusions).
The mountain paragraph is fine but abstract. Replace or supplement it with a real case where a shared instrument corrected many individual views, or failed to.
The claim that “objectivity takes extra, deliberate work” gets asserted three times and demonstrated zero times. Show one procedure that was invented because people kept fooling themselves.
The draft reuses the practice links from the disagreement chapter, so the two chapters blur. Make the practice specific to calibration or blinding.
A scientist would be offended if Haraway’s “situated knowledges” came across as “science is just another perspective.” The chapter should make clear that situated knowledge strengthens objectivity, which is what Haraway argues, rather than dissolving it.

Examples they’d bring:

The Dress (2015): Lafer-Sousa, Hermann & Conway (2015), Current Biology, “Striking individual differences in color perception uncovered by ‘the dress’ photograph.” Millions of people with normal vision disagreed about the same pixels, partly explained by differing assumptions about the lighting. It is a perfect, recent, widely known case of subjectivity.
Pulse oximeters: Sjoding et al. (2020), New England Journal of Medicine, “Racial bias in pulse oximetry measurement.” Black patients had occult hypoxemia missed by oximeters about three times as often as white patients. It is a direct case that instruments can encode whose body was the reference, and that “whose account gets heard” includes calibration.
N-rays (1903–04): Blondlot and many French labs reported a new radiation. R. W. Wood secretly removed the prism during a demonstration and Blondlot kept “seeing” the rays. It shows why blinding exists.
Clever Hans (Pfungst, 1907) and blind analysis in physics: Klein & Roodman (2005), Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science, “Blind analysis in nuclear and particle physics.” Physicists hide results from themselves until the analysis is fixed. That is objectivity as deliberate work.
Reading minds, partially: Owen et al. (2006), Science, “Detecting awareness in the vegetative state”: a patient imagining tennis showed motor-area activation like healthy controls. Tang, LeBel, Jain & Huth (2023), Nature Neuroscience: semantic reconstruction of continuous language from non-invasive fMRI. Both show that “never look inside heads” should become “only indirectly, and only with the person’s cooperation.”
Inattentional blindness: Simons & Chabris (1999), Perception, “Gorillas in our midst.” About half of observers counting basketball passes failed to see a person in a gorilla suit. The senses report what attention selects.
Mantis shrimp: Thoen et al. (2014), Science. Despite 12 photoreceptor types, mantis shrimp discriminate colors worse than humans. More sensors do not mean a truer view. It is a good corrective to the idea that better senses equal objectivity.

What would win them over:

Rewording “never look inside each other’s heads” to “never have another’s experience; at best, indirect, cooperative inference,” and citing the decoding work honestly.
Replacing “purely mathematically” with the more accurate claim that mathematical description is portable and checkable but abstracts away from experience, and naming what it drops.
One historical case where a debiasing procedure was invented after a failure (Clever Hans, then blinding; N-rays, then controls), to show objectivity as craft.
The pulse-oximeter case joining “measured self-doubt” to “whose account gets heard”: a measurement can be precise and still biased by whose body set the standard.

Earlier draft

From “From Subjectivity to Something That Will Have to Do”

Put a hot cup on a table and three things happen at once. Steam rises. Your hand moves away. You decide the cup is too hot to drink. The first is an observation. The second is a response. The third is a useful inference, though perhaps it is the handle that is hot, perhaps the tea has cooled, perhaps you are in a very dramatic room.

We live from inside this sort of position. Bodies, histories, interests, and limited attention give each of us a view from somewhere. That does not make the cup imaginary, nor does it make the first explanation final. It means we need ways to compare views and let the world interrupt a confident story.

A mountain is a simple example. People may approach it by different paths, describe different weather, value it as shelter, obstacle, sacred place, or poor location for a picnic. The mountain still makes their paths bend. Its resistance is not produced by their agreement. Yet agreement helps them coordinate: map a route, warn about a ledge, decide where to meet, discover that the map has an optimistic relationship with the slope.

That is the modest beginning of objectivity. We do not acquire a view from nowhere. We make accounts less dependent on one person’s position by comparing reports, measuring where measurement helps, recording what happened, testing a prediction, and leaving a route for correction. Thomas Nagel’s account of objectivity is useful as an ideal of stepping back from a particular view without pretending to escape every view.

Call the result shared knowledge rather than a perfect mirror. “The cup is too hot to drink” can be checked with time, a thermometer, another hand, or a cautious sip. It may turn out to be false. But it is answerable to more than the speaker’s confidence. A shared route, diagnosis, or rule becomes stronger when it can meet that kind of resistance.

Many agreeing voices are not enough. A group can repeat a false story because agreement is rewarded. A person can notice something real before the group has language or willingness to hear it. Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice names two related failures: prejudice can make a speaker less credible, and a community can lack the concepts needed to make an experience intelligible. Ask not only, “What does the evidence say?” but also, “Who was able to produce evidence, and who was heard?”

This is not a reason to abandon trust. It is a reason to make trust repairable. Let another person’s report enter your picture; ask what they observed; test what can be tested; be willing to revise without demanding that every disagreement finish in agreement. Sometimes the shared fact is that one person is cold, another cannot work with the window shut, and a third person has been ignored while both argue.

Try the notebook practice with a hot cup, a room, or another small event. Write the observation, your inference, what is missing, and one possible test. Then try the disagreement practice: what might the same situation look like from the other side of the room? The task is not to float above all perspectives. It is to become more answerable from the one you have.

Finite beings can do this only by selecting, naming, and leaving things out. The next act begins with that necessary, dangerous craft: drawing an edge.

From “The Most Objective We Can Be”

Someone says the garden valve cannot be reached from a wheelchair. The committee records “no complaint” because its minutes contain no such report. When a senior member repeats the concern, it becomes an item for inspection. The valve is physically present; the access claim is also real. A record can omit a fact without disproving it.

This is where objectivity gets tangible. Separate what happened, what you inferred, what else could explain it, and what would change your confidence. Reality exists independently of our account; access to it is partial, mediated, and corrigible. A shared test might measure the reach, ask the affected person to try the route, inspect the written record, and revise the design when those sources disagree.

A notebook can make the discipline visible:

Observation: the valve is 1.4 metres from the path and the handle requires a twist.
Story: the arrangement is usable because nobody logged a complaint.
Unknowns: who tried it, what access the route permits, and whose report was discounted.
Confidence: high about the measured distance; low about whether the design works for everyone.
Test: ask affected people to use the route and compare their reports with the measurement.
Revision: change the design or the claim when those tests conflict with the plan.

That is Learning. Creating provided the question that contacted the world. Becoming held open the possibility that the first story was incomplete. The modes help, but objectivity requires more than a well-run personal loop.

Whose report is heard matters. Imagine a junior worker repeatedly warning that the garden valve cannot be reached from a wheelchair. The committee records the problem only when a senior member repeats it. The eventual measurement may be accurate, yet the process has distributed credibility unjustly. Miranda Fricker calls attention to epistemic injustice: people can be wronged as knowers when prejudice discounts their testimony, or when shared language is inadequate to express an experience.

So objectivity is not just many views averaged together. It needs evidence, meaningful challenge, relevant expertise, and conditions in which affected people can contest the frame. Consensus can be manufactured by exclusion. Dissent can be mistaken. The work is to examine how a claim earned its standing.

Nor does truth exhaust judgment. Accurate knowledge can be used cruelly. A system can predict behavior while violating consent. Our earlier ethical commitments—care, preventable harm, fairness, participation, and future choice—do not follow automatically from better evidence. They guide what we investigate and what we do with what we learn.

Try reopening one confident claim from your week. Write the strongest rival account, one observation that favors each, and one question that could discriminate between them. Name whose testimony is missing. Then revise your confidence, even if the revision is only from certainty to a sharper uncertainty.

The aim is not a view from nowhere. It is an accountable view from here: explicit about position, answerable to evidence, open to correction, and attentive to who was able to speak and be heard.