The honest answer is entropy. There's no guiding force, but things being "ordered" and "nice" are unlikely to happen by chance. If you leave a house unattended for centuries, what happens? They turn into ruins. Order requires upkeep. So when cords get moved around and aren't bound, there are more ways for them to get tangled than to stay untangled. It's just probability.

Fear not, we are in r/philosophy so it is quite appropriate!

I think we must define our terms then. What do you define "subjective", "objective", "fact", and "opinion" as?

For me:

Something subjective is the experience a subject has. It is inherent related to the subject's point of view. Something objective is what is true about the object itself, outside of the experience. A green object reflects a certain wavelength of light (an objective fact), and that gives a viewer the subjective experience of what color it is. The subjective fact is the experience of green, through many physical processes we would call objective.

The word Fact I am using as a particular case/item/detail that is true (this can be at different levels of truth, either a scientific fact that we have good evidence to treat as true or speaking abstractly about a Fact which we want to know is part of any "Truth"). But i admit that usage could be cleaned up. I'm mainly just using it as a detail we want to know or are experiencing (for example, the light reflects off the green object).

It's also worth noting that I would not say I'm conflating "subjective" and "opinion" but rather that an opinion is a straightforward example of a subjective truth. Other subjective truths could include experiences.

Naturally, there's always interplay between the two and value to understanding/discussing both. I share your urge to not use subjective pejorativly.

>This approach [how much something is true beyond a certain point of view] conflates objective with popular, or risks doing so, and misrepresents what (if anything) distinguishes facts from opinions.

Not for nothing, how else do we approach identifing what is objective? Peer review is all about identifying what holds up across multiple perspectives. It dies indeed risk "popular" theories being passed as objective until such time as we disprove that iteration, but that is a mighty effective strategy.

>The same can be said of any opinion, though

This, to some extent, is my point I suppose.

In the end you're definitely right; I was too caught up in the (erronous, lay, and/or postmodern) debate between subjective and objective that sees an opinion as subjective rather than the use of the term to merely describe whether we are talking about the object or the experience of the object. So I appreciate the discussion.

True, I am tragically aware that my so-called clever idea is not anything that will revolutionize philosophy. However, I am glad that it does contest (however trivially or non-usefully) the view that anything subjective is not objective. While trite, pointing out that the thought behind the opinion and the fact that the opinion exists is worth mentioning in my opinion.

I think generalizability is an important aspect when defining objective. We have a collection of facts about how atoms work and thus have significant amounts of statements that we can generalize beyond an individual's point of view.

>it isn't whether it corresponds (usefully, logically, or accurately) to some state of affairs outside of your brain that make it "objective".

But I would argue that the content of the opinion, if aligned with that outside state of affairs, is more likely to align with generalizable truths. In that way, it is what makes it objective. It is a generalizable truth that anyone can say that you have such and such opinion (the opinion objectively occurs), but whether the content of the opinion is objective depends on how much it is true beyond a certain point of view.

And indeed, that does not make for a dichotomy of subjective and objective, since many different aspects of any "fact" can be some gradient of more generalizable or less generalizable.

I always think it's clever to point out that subjective truths can be treated objectively--it can be a fact that Person A thinks Bansky art is ugly even if it's not generalizable to say that the art is objectively ugly. Just fun to think about--subjective isn't lesser it's just different and harder to work with because it doesn't generalize.