Objective Ambiguity

Objective ambiguity is not only possible but common. Indeed its denial is responsible for much of what is wrong with the world.

This is what I would call an interpretive principle. I think it is characteristic of facts as well.

We only make judgments about ambiguity in contrast with things more definite. But perhaps the converse could be said as well, and we only make judgments about definiteness in contrast with things more ambiguous. I am inclined to think that the absolute poles on this spectrum — absolute definiteness and absolute indefiniteness — are never found in what I still want to call the real world.

What we want to say objectivity is seems to be one of the things that could always be more pondered. But I want to say that there are quite meaningful things we can say about it, and one of these is that objectivity properly said must include an appropriate recognition of objective ambiguity.

There is a human-sized definiteness that is not absolute, but remains morally compelling. Definiteness itself does not have razor-sharp edges. We adhere to it in a broad way and not in an absolutist way, and that is for the better. Broad adherence to anything is better than absolutist adherence, which overdoes things and is not responsive to nuance.

Sensitivity to nuance is a delicate thing, but it is the better thing. When I recently wrote about “kindly objectivity”, one thing that slipped out spontaneously was that the ethical sense of objectivity is characterized not only from an angle of fairness, or objectivity as fairness and lack of bias in interpreting things and people, but also as a kind of magnanimity. As the word “magnanimity” wrote itself into the text, I paused and wondered where that came from? But the more I think about it, the more I think it is true. To be magnanimous is to be more than fair, whereas normal biases as well as extraordinary ones cause people to be less than fair. It is to display the “wise charity” by which Leibniz characterized justice.

As we reach toward our best judgments of things and people, we display magnanimity and wise charity. When we get to the level of nuance, we get closer to reality. Hard edges become fractally ramified, but at the same time substantiality, “thickness”, conditional definiteness, reality begin to emerge of themselves out of the shimmering. Reciprocity lifts itself by the bootstraps. We and the other can find coexistence and emergent truth together.

Poetically speaking, this has great relevance to the kind of second-order historical interpretation I call “historiographical”.