of sweating, etc.) nicely correlate with subjective reports of hotflashes that happen
in the laboratory during waking hours, and subjects often awaken when biomarkers
indicate that such an episode is occurring. But sometimes the biomarkers occurred
but the subject does not awaken. Did this subject have a hotflash (as the objective
measures stated) or not (as she reported)? This quasi-conflict is minor, but it does
exist. Did an apparent itch that you scratched while asleep really exist (as an itch) or
not? The ontology of itches is a minor topic, even among philosophers, but the
contradiction exists.
Rudzik and Ball (Chap. 3 , this volume) discuss a problem similar in its sub-
jective–objective structure to that of Fisher and Thurston. They examine the phe-
nomenon of baby-lag or parental exhaustion due to sleep loss. Their emic
documentation reveals how dramatic the phenomenon can be. But there are still
puzzles of subjective–objective mismatch. Is a parent who actually has little or no
objectively measured sleep loss butfeelsexhausted a subject of baby-lag? Must we
find causes other than literal sleep loss, for subjective exhaustion? Conversely, is a
parent who loses sleep but does not report exhaustionnota subject for the study?
One is reluctant simply to allow the subject’s own self-diagnosis to rule the
investigation, but such problems call for some remediation.
More complex problems occur with regard to Weber and Maki’s report
(Chap. 13 , this volume) of subjective memory complaints (SMC). The authors
examine whether SMC correlate with objectively measurable memory problems.
They report that a major study reassured its study population that memory worries
are‘generally unfounded.’This conclusion stemmed largely from the fact that SMC
are extremely widespread. It is certainly true that the significance of a potential
medical problem is diminished when thousands of people falsely come to believe
that the problem applies to them. This is a frequent effect of media coverage. But
the authors also report that subsets of people who make SMC actually do have
testable memory problems, for example, among some women experiencing
menopause. So, although we would not want to regard SMC as epistemically
privileged, neither would we want to dismiss such complaints. A widespread dif-
ficulty is the fact that many different abilities are involved with what lay people
label simply‘memory’(speed of recall, attention, concentration, etc.). If the lack of
correspondence between SMC and objective confirmation arises simply from the
smaller set of labels used by subjects, perhaps this is merely a matter of commu-
nication between the healthcare professional and patient.
By far the most interesting study for the subjective–objective puzzles is Brown’s
study (Chap. 7 , this volume). Brown’s data lead him to ask the question that came
up in the previous paragraphs: when a biomarker exists without subjective con-
sciousness of the state that it is presumed to mark, what do we say about it? That the
state existed unperceived, or that the state had not existed? Brown discusses a
number of experimental results that raise these puzzles, and he proposes ways of
avoiding the paradoxes. One experiment compared the emic reports and biomarkers
of two linguistically (and presumably culturally) distinct groups of Filipino
immigrants in Hawaii. One of the groups reported a significantly higher level of
stress than the other. However, the stress-related biomarkers for the groups were not
14 Subjective and Objective Knowledge: Persistent Puzzles 307