Through recent discussions, I’ve found myself wanting to clarify where my own sympathies lie.
I find myself strongly resonating with the view associated with Merleau-Ponty — the idea that we cannot be certain that an objective world exists as a fully completed structure, entirely independent of observation or engagement.
This is not a denial of the world’s existence. Rather, it is a refusal to take for granted the assumption that the world is given to us as a finished object, already complete before any encounter with it.
We are not beings who apprehend the world from a completely detached, external standpoint. We are embodied, acting, perceiving beings who are always already involved with it — through movement, observation, and interaction.
In that sense, objectivity seems less like something guaranteed prior to experience, and more like something that gradually stabilizes through engagement, sharing, and repetition.
This is not the claim that “everything is subjective.” It is simply the sense that we do not need to presuppose a purely observer-independent, unquestionably objective world in order to think meaningfully about reality at all.
I largely agree with what you’re saying. I don’t think we need to deny the possibility of an external reality, nor do I think the impossibility of a perfectly “objective” standpoint prevents us from developing highly effective and accurate models.
Where my thinking diverges slightly is here: I don’t see subjectivity merely as a limitation on knowledge, or as noise introduced by being embedded in reality.
I’m increasingly inclined to think that some form of subjectivity is a necessary condition for reality to be intelligible as a unified system at all — not in the sense that it distorts reality, but in the sense that it allows coherence, integration, and unity to appear.
In other words, even very accurate models already presuppose a prior condition under which “this all hangs together” is meaningful.
This line of thought was prompted by encountering a paper that approaches these questions not only philosophically, but through scientific experimentation, and since then my thinking has been moving in this direction.