Subjectivism is an approach to doing science which acknowledges and makes room for subjectivity. Subjectivism accords primacy to subjective experience as fundamental of all measure and law. Subjectivism may hold that the nature and existence of every object depends solely on someone's subjective awareness of it. Subjectivism is the doctrine that "our own mental activity is the only unquestionable fact of our experience" instead of shared or communal, and that there is no external or objective truth. Subjectivism accords primacy to subjective experience as fundamental of all measure and law.
Ethical subjectivism is the meta-ethical belief that ethical sentences reduce to factual statements about the attitudes and/or conventions of individual people, or that any ethical sentence implies an attitude held by someone. In traditional positivistic and macro-structural sociology, the subjectivity of the researcher and of the subjects is seen as something to be avoided. The preferred stance for the researcher is objectivity or objectivism, making the assumption that the observation of the world can occur in a neutral fashion without being influenced by theory or cultural or personal assumptions.
The subjectivity of the subjects being studied is to be avoided since it is assumed that peoples lives are shaped by structural and cultural forces of which the subject may be unaware. Metaphysical subjectivism is the theory that reality is what we perceive to be real, and that there is no underlying true reality that exists independently of perception.
Giovanni Merlo has developed a specific version of metaphysical subjectivism, under which subjective facts always concern mental properties. Metaphysical subjectivism is the theory that reality is what we perceive to be real, and that there is no underlying true reality that exists independently of perception.
Giovanni Merlo has developed a specific version of metaphysical subjectivism, under which subjective facts always concern mental properties. - Merlo, Giovanni (2016). "Subjectivism and the Mental". Dialectica.
Interpretive Theory, and Ethnomethodology is open to acknowledging the subjectivity of both researcher and subjects. One might study, for example, the ways in which the coroner interprets notes, slash marks, family environments, or medical histories, in an effort to arrive at an interpretation of a death.
The coroner's subjectivity then is a valid area for investigation. Similarly one might be interested in how the scientist too is also involved in arriving at an interpretation and examining how this is shaped by the subjective assumptions made. Subjectivism is thus an approach to doing science which both acknowledges and makes room for subjectivity.