Is Quality Subjective?

I feel like Alan Turing when people say, "Quality is subjective," or other post-modern phrases like, "Truth is relative." I have no idea what they are trying to say, because what those words actually mean is impossible and self-contradicting.

Are they trying to say, "Quality seems subjective?" You know like when someone says a movie is good, but what they actually mean is they liked it. Or do they actually think the physical properties of objects are literally and simultaneously different for every individual person?

I personally believe that truth is absolute, quality is purely objective, and the thing that is actually being subjected is our perception, not the objects themselves.

This topic has interested me for years, but I still can't wrap my mind around the opposing view.

You lost me at "physical properties of objects"

That's not really enough to tell me what I actually need to explain to you. Objects have physical properties... why are you lost?

What are your standards and how do you determine how they will be measured? It's easy enough usually to determine really bad acting from really good acting, but what about everything in between and how is it measured and how important is it to the overall film? I do think an informed person can make arguments about the quality of a film, but you can also lose sight of the intangibles, those things people in the audience connect to.

I do think it's perfectly acceptable to not like a film and still acknowledge its overall high quality. And vice versa, obviously.

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I tend to dislike "pure relativism" (if only because it preempts argument altogether), but I do think I understand how some make their claims about the world. For one, many use it as a pragmatic approach. Using "Quality is subjective" and "Quality seems subjective" interchangeably bypasses a lengthy (if interesting) argument.

For example, let's take your argument for granted. The universe is full of objective truth, and only objective truth. But our perception is at least partially relative. Well, since our perception is relative, our grounds for argument will be at least partially relative. And there we are, back at arguing over quality in a partially subjective manner.

It's also just really easy to say that quality is subjective. You can just say it and a lot of people accept it, which often robs people of really interesting conversations, appeals to pure relativism are discussion serial murderers.

I do think that there is at least some objectivity in quality however, otherwise I'd expect a more random distribution of the most beloved pieces of art.

I like Hume's method for approaching a definition of quality in art. Which is to say that a standard of taste can be approached (though not fully arrived at). It also includes the acceptance of disproportionate pairs (which Kaplan essentially is talking about with being able to separate the really good from the really bad, usually).

"Citizen Kane is a better film than Transformers 2."
- subjective
"1 + 1 = 2" - objective

I think it's like this. What color is Barney if you're colorblind? Is he the color you see, or is he purple but you see him as red for some reason? What is the subjective element, his color or your perception?

Nothing about any of that is subjective

Please explain.

There is certainly a large subjective aspect to art, but to suggest it's purely and wholly subjective is poppycock. Otherwise, what, all of us here are as talented and brilliant as Michelangelo, Beethoven, Faulkner, or, say, Kubrick? Someone's personal preferences and personal response to art is subjective, but the whole idea of art becomes meaningless if there's not some sort of outside standard to judge it.

And wasn't there already a thread for this topic?

I wonder why some people think that just because you can't pinpoint exact qualitative differences in a lot of things that the actual difference isn't still there merely on a level we can't perceive.

Are you talking about an individual not being able to perceive it or people in general being unable to perceive it?

I'm talking about in a general sense, but it works in more specific cases as well.

Like who performed better in Foxcatcher? If I say Tatum performed better, that's my subjective opinion. The director probably knows who performed better. The actors themselves may know. But why do a bunch of outside observers who can't tell which was better just from watching the movie once think that it is purely subjective just because they don't know?

But people will say that which performance was better is subjective because a bunch of people have different opinions. It's not the quality of the performance itself that changes based on our feelings, it's our opinions that are based subjectively on our feelings.

Don't you think, though, after a certain point art becomes almost entirely subjective? Acting is probably not the best example, because I don't see it as an end in itself, but rather serving the greater work, but nonetheless if you judge two actors to be outstanding in their work, then how do you decide which is better? The whole who's better De Niro or Pacino argument. I don't think it matters, except as a topic of discussion (the whole reason we come to these forums), they're both outstanding. But if someone claimed Adam Sandler is a better actor than both of them, they would be wrong. I think there are objective standards to acting, and I think an actor's body of work can be objectively judged based on their performances. I also recognize that it's not as easy as timing someone's speed in the 100m sprint, and that different cultures and different eras have had different expectations for what constitutes great acting.

I don't know, it's not an easy topic. I do think quality is not an illusion and not simply a case of every possible opinion being of equal value. Clearly I couldn't manage to paint on the level Picasso if I had a thousand years to study painting, and so that would suggest to me there is such a thing as innate talent and developed skill, and that means in theory there is an objective standard of "quality."

If objects have physical properties of what do they consist? As we all learned in our high school science classes, objects are made up of molecules which consist of atomic elements which can be further divided into the sub-atomic realm. Just where in the model of the atomic theory of physical reality does quality fit in? All scientific theory is relative because our theories of our understanding of our universe change over time as we progressively refine and discover new aspects of the world around us. We live in an Einsteinian world where reality is dependent on the position of the observer and described by the formulation of Theories. We no longer live in an unchanging world of absolute Newtonian Laws. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principal applies in all things. There are no absolutes except the speed of light in a vacuum. (And then there is quantum theory which might mean that something can come out of nothing.)

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I believe that truth is absolute, as well, but I'm not sure that has to lead to the conclusion that quality is objective.

For example, how is "quality" defined? Normally it's defined as value to either a person or a group, and obviously which of those you prioritize when answering this question determines how you answer the larger question.

What it doesn't do, however, is dictate that others should answer it the same way. If you say that a film has quality because it corresponds to standard rules about cinematography or act structure, that can be an objective statement, because you've presupposed a standard to compare the film to. But the choice to make that the standard is not an objective choice. At some point in the process an essentially arbitrary decision has to be made, and that's the point at which the quality relativist can point to.

All that said, I dislike using relativism to avoid or dismiss arguments about subjective things. It may be technically true, but it's also technically true that this fact is usually used to deflect valid critiques and questions.

Yes, it is, because i say so.

In reality, though, you can decide what is quality or superior and, within a similar thinking group, that will be the truth. But outside of that, you'll do well to convince anyone. Especially if they're not concerned with 'quality' or think of quality as something you'd describe otherwise.

As for what colour Barney is. He's purple. If you don't see him as purple it's because a) you don't know what purple is or, b) you have some kind of impairment/difference which leads you to see the colour differently. If the second is the case then, while you don't see him that way, you can acknowledge that because of the way you see things, he may be/is but, to you, he wouldn't be.

My sister is more than happy to hear that Citizen Kane is the best film ever made, but it's not, because (I think I'm right in saying) the best film ever made is Pretty Woman and the fact that Kane is B&W is all the proof she needs to see that Pretty Woman is better. She also freely admits that, had Pretty Woman been B&W it wouldn't be the best film ever made. Not only that, but she wouldn't know that because she wouldn't have seen it because it's B&W.

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I can't speak for him but for me it's the implied move from "objects have physical properties" to "quality is a physical property" or "value is a physical property." The most you can say is maybe there are higher order "physical" properties associated with value, like scarcity or novelty. There's also "function" but I hesitate to call that a physical property because as with the meaning of conceptual "objects" the function of physical ones can be quite plastic. And can you really define a fixed "function" for art anyway? At best function is analogical wrt art (and worse still, analogical to something that is often somewhat malleable even in its proper domain).

Another option is to study the aggregate effect a work has on people. The up-shot of "effect" for objectivites is that you might be able to find some sort of a consensus, at least in this culture, at this time. The draw-back (at least if you're honest with yourself about believing that the quality of art is a real thing that exists outside human observation and cognition) is that then you'll have to look at all cultures across all times, and you might indeed find ones who value Adam Sandler over Robert Deniro. Ultimately though, I think the consensus approach is not very satisfying to many people on either side of the argument because effect is by definition, well, an epiphenomenon and so you're not looking at "the thing itself" or digging down to first principles. All you're looking at is other people's perceptions, so even in the unlikely circumstance you found a universal consensus, it still wouldn't prove that quality is tied to objects in any truly definitive way.

At some point you're going to be reduced to flat assertion, regardless of whether you think quality of art is subjective.

Very true, but I'm not trying to define what the standards are. I'm trying to discover what the standards are. The fact that the standards of quality are identifiable leads me to the logical conclusion that they are measurable. Because I CAN identify the qualities in the same way as you and when you identify and desceibe them I can either learn it from your description, agree with you, or give a detailed description of how I think you're wrong. And the fact that my observations of your identification of specific qualitative aspects could be totally wrong also means that there are necessarily true and untrue perceptions of quality, and that the qualities themselves remain ever unchanging.

At least in my mind saying quality is subjective means the quality changes.
But what actually changes is not the quality, only our limited understanding changes as we grow and learn.

But whether or not they're discovered or created is kind of the whole debate, no?

How do we conclude that the "standards of quality are identifiable"? People identify things they believe to indicate quality, but what makes that decision objective?

This is all true...if we first agree on the standard. But asking if quality is subjective is asking what basis there is for this standard in the first place.

In a nutshell: objective comparisons are possible if we presuppose a standard. We can argue rationally and objectively about how something is or isn't like something else. But the argument against this is that choosing that standard is not objective, and if someone doesn't agree with its choosing, there's no objective way to contradict them.

I want to quote this because I think it hints at the most useful attitude towards all this. I think it's technically true that quality is subjective, but that this is almost always an argumentative crutch. I think the most useful thing is to get people talking about why they have the opinions they do, and to let that reasoning (or lack of same) speak for itself.

In other words, I don't care too much if people can technically let themselves off the hook by saying "taste is subjective." Instead, I find it more useful to simply draw out whether or not a given opinion is well thought out and/or born in knowledge, or if it's superficial and kneejerk.