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In philosophy, a subject is a being which has subjective experiences or a relationship with another entity (or "object"). A subject is an observer and an object is a thing observed.
The following are examples of my subjective experiences:
Contrast these with the objects of these subjective experiences:
The object is the thing perceived; the subject is the one who perceives.
For some ways of thinking, subjectivity implies not simply a passive relationship to the world and the sense impressions it causes in subjects, but also agency, an active engagement with that material. Agency might be thought to occur simply in the act of interpretation of sense data, making choices about how to allocate meanings to those data. Or it might be thought to occur in a stronger sense, acting upon the world and changing its organization to suit the subject's goals. In the latter case, a feedback loop of modified world - new sense data - new modification might be established, with open-ended consequences. Baldwinian evolution may be a candidate instance of such a feedback system.
In critical theory and psychology, subjectivity is also the actions or discourses that produce individuals or 'I'; the 'I' is the subject -- the observer.
The word subjectivity is also used to refer to the antithesis of objectivity as an epistemic virtue: one who judges according to personal feelings or intuitions, rather than according to objective observation, reasoning, and judgment, is judging subjectively.
Subjectivism is a philosophical tenet that accords primacy to subjective experiences. In an extreme form, it may hold that the nature and existence of every object depends only on someone's subjective awareness of it.
Metaphysical subjectivism is the theory that perception creates reality, and that there is no underlying, true, reality that exists independent of perception. One can also hold that it is consciousness rather than perception that creates reality. This is in contrast to metaphysical objectivism.
This holding should not be confused with the stance that "all is illusion" or that "there is no such thing as reality." Metaphysical subjectivists hold that reality is real enough, and that physical objects do exist. They conceive, however, that the nature of reality as related to a given consciousness unit is created and governed by that consciousness.
One of the ways a subjectivist might attempt to respond to that thought experiment is to argue that there was subjective consciousness within the volcano all along. Perhaps the camera itself or its component parts have a subjective side. Or, perhaps the volcano's own rocks do.
In this way, though, subjectivism morphs into a related doctrine, panpsychism, the view that every objective fact has an inward or subjective aspect.
The invention of machines that can "see", "hear", or otherwise observe and record events provides a thought experiment (offered by Winston Churchill, who is not otherwise known as a philosopher) that is difficult for subjectivists to explain. Let us set up an automatic camera to record events in a place that no human (or other creature reasonably considered "conscious") can observe. Say that it is set inside a volcano, for example. The camera is later retrieved and its photographs, with date markings, are observed. Did the events recorded in the photographs really happen even though no one consciously observed them? Did the conscious observation of the photographs themselves somehow suddenly cause them to depict events that apparently happened at an earlier time?
Ethical subjectivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences reduce to factual statements about the attitudes and/or conventions of individual people or groups thereof. An ethical subjectivist might propose, for example, that what it means for something to be morally right is just for it to be approved of by society. (This leads to the view that different things are right in different societies.) Another ethical subjectivist might define "good" as "that which I desire". One implication is that, unlike the moral skeptic or the non-cognitivist, the subjectivist thinks that ethical sentences, while relative or subjective, are nonetheless the kind of thing that can be true or false.
See moral relativism for a less philosophical, more postmodern consideration of related issues. See meta-ethics for alternative philosophical views about the meaning and function of ethical sentences.
In probability, a subjectivist would tell you that probabilities are simply degree-of-beliefs by rational agents, with no objective reality. Unlike a frequentist, a subjectivist would be happy to accept that we can deduce the probability that the sun will rise again tomorrow merely from its age, colour, chemical composition, and so forth. Unlike an objectivist, a subjectivist has no problem with differing people giving different probabilities to an uncertain proposition, and all being correct. See Bayesianism.
In practice, it's quite tricky to get humans (or, if we ever met any, other rational agents) to tell you what their degrees of belief are - we do all kinds of things like hedging our bets, exerting peer pressure, being suspicious, not trusting our friends, and/or searching for patterns - in general, all the things which mark us as intelligent beings but probability researchers seem to see as a downside.
To get round this, people normally call upon people to 'put their money where their probabilities are'. Specifically, when someone states their degree-of-belief in something other experimental subjects are free to place small bets (usually with plastic tokens) for or against that belief, with appropriate odds. Confronted with material gain or loss, most people quickly change their quoted odds to be more accurate. So effective is this method that it's been designated by some as the fundamental meaning of probability: the willingness to take or place a bet.
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