[f. SUBJECTIVE + -ISM. Cf. F. subjectivisme.]
1. The philosophical theory according to which all our knowledge is merely subjective and relative, and which denies the possibility of objective knowledge.
1857. W. Fleming, Vocab. Philos., 492. Subjectivism is the doctrine of Kant, that all human knowledge is merely relative; or rather that we cannot prove it to be absolute.
1872. trans. Ueberweg’s Hist. Philos., I. 72. Protagoras the Individualist, Gorgias the Nihilist, Hippias the Polymathist, and Prodicus the Moralist … were followed by a younger generation of Sophists, who perverted the philosophical principle of subjectivism more and more, till it ended in mere frivolity.
1834. D. Hunter, Reuss’s Hist. Canon, xviii. 388. The eighteenth century … which gave birth to a subjectivism so boundless as to end in denying the reality of the world.
2. The subjective method (see SUBJECTIVE 3 b).
1882. T. Davidson, trans. Rosmini’s Phil. Syst., p. xxvi. The subjectivism of Descartes and Malebranche.
3. A theory or method based exclusively on subjective facts.
1865. Grote, Plato, II. 361. He cannot be content … to be a measure for himself and for those whom his arguments may satisfy. This would be to proclaim what some German critics denounce as Subjectivism.
1899. S. L. Wilson, Theol. Mod. Lit., 420. In this strongly marked tendency to psychic analysis and searching subjectivism, Meredith is the true child of his time.
1900. Pilot, 23 June, 515/1. This would … eliminate the danger of subjectivism, and secure that the points emphasized should not be merely personal or of local … importance.
1905. J. Orr, Probl. Old Test., v. (1906), 119. These methods seem to us eaten through with an arbitrary subjectivism which vitiates their application at every point.
b. An ethical theory that conceives the aim of morality to be based upon, or to consist in, the attainment of states of feeling.
1897. Pillsbury & Titchener, trans. Külpe’s Introd. Philos., 111. The aim of morality is for subjectivism the production of a subjective state, that of pleasure or happiness (hedonism and eudæmonism).
1909. Edin. Rev., Oct., 350. So far from weakening religious beliefs of an enlightened kind, ethical subjectivism in no way affects the question of their veracity.
