In other words, one can enjoy or not enjoy a film, on one level, and emotionlessly evaluate it on another simultaneously—this is called multi-tasking; but the point is that enjoyment is not fundamentally connected to quality. This is why one should never argue one’s subjective likes, only objective quality. Sometimes, people will try to counter the fallacy of self limits with another Straw Man argument, such as claiming not subjectivity, but taste. Yet, physical taste is a wholly different matter from artistic taste. All taste buds, on every person’s tongue, are wired wholly differently; therefore one can taste the same thing, yet like it as something else. In the arts and sciences, brains recognize that words (to use the case of writing) have distinct meanings. They are grounded in something that any human brain can share the same meaning of, unlike a tastebud. Therefore they are objective.
And it is because of objectivity’s damning ability to just be, despite human will to change everything to suit the human’s needs, that one gets all the logical fallacies hurled at one, or at one’s opinions of art. Often this devolves down to grammar Nazis, who will try to chide me for ‘bad writing,’ not because my work is filled with clichés, or other objective criteria, but because of the aforementioned (and ironic) subjective ‘solecisms’ of grammar based in no logic. I often get emails over why my early essays used the number 1 over the word one, or why I still prefer to use a single dash/hyphen to an en- or em- dash or hyphen, or the single word alot over the two words a lot, but that’s a stylistic preference, not any indicator of the quality of the writing (although I could argue that, in the former, my dash-hyphen adds ambiguity to the sentences, and often serves a dual purpose, and, in the latter, that my form of the term is prescient, as many words that begin with the prefix a- started out as two words).
But, none of that actually touches objectivity, thus logical fallacies proliferate, especially in the arts, because of it. And, not so oddly, this is perfectly logical, if utterly wrong.
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