subjectivism any philosophical view that attempts to understand in a subjective manner what at first glance would seem to be a class of judgments that are objectively either true or false – i.e., true or false independently of what we believe, want, or hope. There are two ways of being a subjectivist. In the first way, one can say that the judgments in question, despite first appearances, are really judgments about our own attitudes, beliefs, emotions, etc. In the second way, one can deny that the judgments are true or false at all, arguing instead that they are disguised commands or expressions of attitudes. In ethics, for example, a subjective view of the second sort is that moral judgments are simply expressions of our positive and negative attitudes. This is emotivism. Prescriptivism is also a subjective view of the second sort; it is the view that moral judgments are really commands – to say ‘X is good’ is to say, details aside, ‘Do X.’ Views that make morality ultimately a matter of conventions (or what we or most people agree to) can also be construed as subjective theories, albeit of the first type. Subjectivism is not limited to ethics, however. According to a subjective view of epistemic rationality, the standards of rational belief are the standards that the individual (or perhaps most members in the individual’s community) would approve of insofar as they are interested in believing those propositions that are true and not believing those propositions that are false. Similarly, phenomenalists can be regarded as proposing a subjective account of material object statements, since according to them, such statements are best understood as complex statements about the course of our experiences. See also EMOTIVISM , EPISTE- MOLOGY , ETHICAL OBJECTIVISM , IDEAL OB — SERVE. R.Fo.