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What is "subjective"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
subjective
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
highly
▪ Reactions can therefore be highly subjective and we may find ourselves disagreeing strongly with what the artist is saying.
▪ Evaluative core beliefs, however, are often highly subjective.
▪ Each year, a decision is taken, often on a highly subjective basis, on our continuing worth.
▪ Data on the market value of autos and houses can be highly subjective.
▪ In the final analysis a judgement on the political stability of most countries must be highly subjective.
▪ Secondly, many of the symptoms produced are highly subjective - headache, confusion or nausea, for example.
▪ To start the Christmas debate, the following are highly subjective and totally personal suggestions.
▪ However, this is a highly subjective area in which the rules themselves can only be guiding principles.
more
▪ A subjective view Choreographers can also take a more subjective view of their work.
▪ Hedonic value is more subjective and personal than its utilitarian counterpart and results from fun and playfulness rather than from task completion.
▪ Some ethologists favour a purely quantitative approach, while others prefer a more subjective treatment.
▪ Price is easy to measure; service is far more subjective.
▪ Chapters 5 and 6 explore the more subjective, sometimes unpleasant, aspects of power.
▪ Judgment of humorous writing is even more subjective than with any other kind.
purely
▪ It has an irritatingly small backspace key and I think it has a horrible plastic feel, but this is purely subjective.
▪ The truth is, he just grosses me out -- this is purely subjective.
▪ This attitude was, of course, purely subjective, and their appreciation of primitive art was almost entirely emotional.
▪ It is difficult to avoid the feeling that this, one of his first university essays, is purely subjective.
very
▪ At times she was very subjective, at others quite detached as if floating outside her body.
▪ Martin Scorsese is a very subjective artist, if not one with much sense of perspective.
▪ Sometimes the approach is very subjective, but the result is entertaining and informative, easy to read and full of insight.
▪ Odours are very subjective in nature and affect people in different ways.
▪ This is very subjective and I question whose past he's referring to.
▪ They are very subjective, unlike shoplifting.
■ NOUN
assessment
▪ Some have been used informally for many years, subjective assessments such as those made by parents, teachers, and librarians.
▪ As a practising scientist, I could not allow such subjective assessments of the human condition to influence my work.
▪ We were particularly interested in the practices' subjective assessments of the impact of this change on practice management and patient care.
▪ That exercise, inevitably based on superficial and subjective assessments, allows too much scope for prejudice and irrationality.
experience
▪ She ignores the usual boundaries drawn between these factors, and subjective experience.
▪ The subjective experience of individual actors is brought together with the objective reality of public issues.
▪ We just need to add something else, some new fundamental principles, to bridge the gap between neuroscience and subjective experience.
▪ If we believe that humans have evolved, we are liable to assume that our subjective experiences are shared by other animals.
▪ My point is that the form that an animal's subjective experience takes will be a property of the internal computer model.
▪ Clearly, this emphasis on subjective experience and meaning can help to further an understanding of ageing with a disability.
▪ Our objective measures of light intensity would be discarded if they universally gave answers that contradicted our subjective experiences.
▪ They were also starting to analyse subjective experiences of gender, and were finding traditional psychological accounts of them inadequate.
impression
▪ The emphasis is on objective analysis of evidence rather than on a subjective impression of any single witness.
▪ Beyond this, however, many of the claims were supported by anecdotal and subjective impressions only.
▪ The findings of this questionnaire do not unfortunately enable us to assess such subjective impressions.
▪ The subjective impressions experienced by the observers were influenced by their expectations.
▪ However, there is no data to show that first babies really do cry more - it is just a subjective impression.
interpretation
▪ We wanted both detailed accounts and subjective interpretations, and we were given both.
▪ Smith told me that his opinion was based upon his subjective interpretation of the statutes.
▪ Age is the most obvious factor that will change the subjective interpretation of events.
▪ This relates to both the farm worker's own expectations from life and his subjective interpretations of what he sees around him.
▪ This humanistic attention to the subjective interpretation by prisoners of their situation marks a distinct departure from the orthodox account.
judgement
▪ The individual's employment involves a subjective judgement on the part of some one else.
▪ However, there are serious drawbacks to this approach which relies very much on the analyst's interpretational skills and subjective judgement.
▪ Perfection is relative and, for potato lice or anything else, depends on subjective judgement.
▪ Our subjective judgement of what seems like a good bet is irrelevant to what is actually a good bet.
▪ The subjective judgement of an alien with a lifetime of a million centuries will be quite different.
▪ In fact our subjective judgement is probably wrong by an even greater margin.
judgements
▪ Accruing depreciation, stock valuations, provisions for doubtful debts, etc., are subjective judgements which make historic cost profit subjective.
▪ Comparing these subjective judgements with actual costs might suggest that people are wrong about, for example check trading being cheap.
judgment
▪ This is usually done by the subjective judgment of the officer concerned.
▪ Reasonableness, however is a subjective judgment, which in turn can lead to differences of opinion.
▪ Marking the tests calls for a dangerous amount of subjective judgment.
meaning
▪ The task of the social sciences is seen by Schutz to be the understanding of the subjective meaning of social action.
▪ Nor are subjective meanings or rational choices independent of public social rules for doing the right or rational thing.
▪ If action stems from subjective meanings, it follows that the sociologist must discover those meanings in order to understand action.
▪ Studies of action are concerned with the subjective meaning attached to actions by human beings.
nature
▪ Another major limiting factor in excavation is the subjective nature of the excavation process.
▪ Inevitably this leads to the question of injecting matters of a subjective nature into the account.
▪ This has generated considerable concern about the ethnographic experience itself, and specifically about the subjective nature of the process.
▪ The subjective nature of measuring program effectiveness may lead to irreconcilable differences between the review staff and program management.
▪ It is the subjective nature of ethnicity which can make it tricky to handle as a speaker variable.
▪ The strength of the Marxist approach was its acknowledgement of the subjective nature of historical reconstruction.
▪ Because of the subjective nature of the experience, pain tends to be enhanced by anxiety and stressful situations.
opinion
▪ In general, young children may not distinguish between judgements about reality and judgements about appearance or subjective opinion.
▪ The owners' subjective opinions are borne out by objective facts.
▪ If sociologists produce their own statistics these too are the product of subjective opinions, in this case the opinions of sociologists.
▪ Comparisons can be made and standards judged on quantitive data rather than on subjective opinion.
response
▪ As stated earlier, subjective responses to ageing are also shaped by social and material resources.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ A person's perception of stress is often very subjective.
▪ Hiring new employees can be very much a subjective process.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Beyond this, however, many of the claims were supported by anecdotal and subjective impressions only.
▪ It is the subjective voice, the primary experience of hunger.
▪ Martin Scorsese is a very subjective artist, if not one with much sense of perspective.
▪ Once again there is no hint of an overall inverted-U relationship or indeed any overall relationship between subjective risk and recognition sensitivity.
▪ One of the questions most central to this research was whether drivers can generally report fluctuating levels of subjective risk.
▪ The subjective theory, for example, when put to work on causation by a proponent, renders causation subjective.
▪ The test is a subjective one.
▪ These interpretations, however, are based on the assumption that there were no effects of subjective risk in Study 2.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Subjective

Subjective \Sub*jec"tive\, a. [L. subjectivus: cf. F. subjectif.]

  1. Of or pertaining to a subject.

  2. Especially, pertaining to, or derived from, one's own consciousness, in distinction from external observation; ralating to the mind, or intellectual world, in distinction from the outward or material excessively occupied with, or brooding over, one's own internal states.

    Note: In the philosophy of the mind, subjective denotes what is to be referred to the thinking subject, the ego; objective, what belongs to the object of thought, the non-ego. See Objective, a., 2.
    --Sir W. Hamilton.

  3. (Lit. & Art) Modified by, or making prominent, the individuality of a writer or an artist; as, a subjective drama or painting; a subjective writer.

    Syn: See Objective.

    Subjective sensation (Physiol.), one of the sensations occurring when stimuli due to internal causes excite the nervous apparatus of the sense organs, as when a person imagines he sees figures which have no objective reality. [1913 Webster] -- Sub*jec"tive*ly, adv. -- Sub*jec"tive*ness, n.

Related phrases:
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
subjective

c.1500, "characteristic of one who is submissive or obedient," from Late Latin subiectivus "of the subject, subjective," from subiectus "lying under, below, near bordering on," figuratively "subjected, subdued"(see subject (n.)). In early Modern English as "existing, real;" more restricted meaning "existing in the mind" (the mind as "the thinking subject") is from 1707, popularized by Kant and his contemporaries; thus, in art and literature, "personal, idiosyncratic" (1767). Related: Subjectively; subjectiveness.

Wiktionary
subjective

a. 1 Pertaining to subjects as opposed to objects (A ''subject'' is one who perceives or is aware; an ''object'' is the thing perceived or the thing that the subject is aware of.) 2 Formed, as in opinions, based upon a person's feelings or intuition, not upon observation or reasoning; coming more from within the observer than from observations of the external environment. 3 Resulting from or pertaining to personal mindsets or experience, arising from perceptive mental conditions within the brain and not necessarily or directly from external stimuli.

Related phrases:
WordNet
subjective

  1. adj. taking place within the mind and modified by individual bias; "a subjective judgment" [ant: objective]

  2. of a mental act performed entirely within the mind; "a cognition is an immanent act of mind" [syn: immanent] [ant: transeunt]

Wikipedia
Subjective

Subjective may refer to:

  • Subjectivity, a subject's personal perspective, feelings, beliefs, desires or discovery, as opposed to those made from an independent, objective, point of view
    • Subjective experience, the subjective quality of conscious experience
  • Subjectivism, a philosophical tenet that accords primacy to subjective experience as fundamental of all measure and law
  • Subjective case, grammatical case for a noun
  • Subject (philosophy),has subjective experiences or a relationship with another entity
  • Subjective theory of value, an economic theory of value
  • A school of bayesian probability stating that the state of knowledge corresponds to personal belief
Related phrases:

Usage examples of "subjective".

Genemod enzymes are designed to eliminate, through allosteric interactions, any subjective feelings of hunger.

It represents the erotic, libidinal, anarchistic, and subjective values worshiped by Hagbard Celine and our friends in the Legion of Dynamic Discord.

If we regard the acquired knowledge as the objective result of apperception, interest must be regarded as the subjective side.

Here the intense experiential disclosures do not have to be worked into a subjective structure already present, but rather have to be part of a subjective and intersubjective process of building a structure not yet in existence: experiences have to be part, not of structural uncovering, but of structural building.

The challenge he faced was to present a model of the introspective observation of subjective, mental phenomena so that it appeared akin to the well-established, scientific modes of extraspective observation of objective physical phenomena.

But subtle as they may have been there were nevertheless sufficient clues to foster in Paul a vague yet intense subjective sense of certainty that Patina came from a rich or well-to-do family.

The philosophical mistakes with which this chapter is concerned assert, for different reasons, that moral values and prescriptive judgments are subjective and relative.

There might be things in this imaginary environment capable of inflicting subjective or psychosomatic injury which in turn might bring about actual bodily injury.

The subjective space that builds those representational cybernetic models is not itself built only of representations but also of interpretive and intersubjective occasions, themselves not modeled in the theory that is supposed to explain them.

Alteration or expansion of the sensorium alters consciousness and behavior by altering the very subjective universe in which consciousness and behavior take place.

Here is a very over-simplified example, this time expressed in the form of a subjective soliloquy rather than a computer simulation.

As always, the subjective soliloquy is intended for illustration only.

At this level, radical emphasis on seeing everything within a relativistic or subjective frame of reference leaves the person close to a solipsistic position.

Scientific materialists have long sought to sublate the existence of subjective phenomena by reducing them to objective phenomena.

He was a theoretical thaumaturgist who worked with the higher and more esoteric forms of the subjective algebrae, leaving it to others to test his theories in practice.