this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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People don't know what words mean in English either yet continue trying to force their made up definitions on others.
Language is objective, because a language is an immaterial object. The opposite, subjective, would impy that language itself has an experience of the world as an entity in itself; that it is a subject.
People's understanding of the languages they speak is subjective (the subject is the person), but their use of language is objective, because they create objects (words, sentences) in the air or on a screen. When another person, a subject, reads those objective words, they then have a new subjective understanding of them. But the words, and the language, remain objects.
Subjective in this sense would mean everyone has their own singular way as opposed to "its the same/similar indepently of the person looking at it".
Words are objects in a sense, although they are abstract, but there is no singular objective language in the same way that there is no objective gender. Both are intersubjective, they are interactions negotiated between subjects. There is no fixed object that you can point to and call "language" independent of a subjective experience of that language.
And your argument could be applied to expressions of gender. A feminine dress is an object, and a beard is an object. These are gender signifiers, but that doesn't make gender itself objective in any way. The analogy to language is very close. They are both sets of signifiers.