Because people are involved in measuring or even defining a thing does not make that thing non-objective, though it can make it stupidly hard to study.
For example, when people are shown a round blobby image and an angular spiky image and asked to determine which one of them depicts a “buba” and which one a “kiki”, most people will apparently say that the blobby one is the “buba”, whatever culture they come from (Köhler, 1929, Spanish speakers on Tenerife; Ramachandran, Hubbard, 2001, English speakers in the US and Tamil speakers in India). More generally, people with synæsthesia agree to some extent on the correspondence between the sensations: if sounds have color to you, then high sounds are almost certain to be brighter than low ones.
A space alien would be entirely incapable of observing this phenomenon; when the human race is dead and gone, it will have ceased to exist; until an underlying mechanism is discovered, it is impossible to tell whether it extends to non-sapient species. It is nevertheless objective in every practical sense.
Similarly, if most people that do J themselves believe that J is bullshit, then it’s reasonable to think that something is up with J. It might be that it’s not a property of J in isolation, and reliably getting at what people actually believe (as opposed to what they tell their employer they believe, what they tell you they believe, or what they tell themselves they believe) can be stupendously difficult, but the question itself is not meaningless or unscientific.
For example, when people are shown a round blobby image and an angular spiky image and asked to determine which one of them depicts a “buba” and which one a “kiki”, most people will apparently say that the blobby one is the “buba”, whatever culture they come from (Köhler, 1929, Spanish speakers on Tenerife; Ramachandran, Hubbard, 2001, English speakers in the US and Tamil speakers in India). More generally, people with synæsthesia agree to some extent on the correspondence between the sensations: if sounds have color to you, then high sounds are almost certain to be brighter than low ones.
A space alien would be entirely incapable of observing this phenomenon; when the human race is dead and gone, it will have ceased to exist; until an underlying mechanism is discovered, it is impossible to tell whether it extends to non-sapient species. It is nevertheless objective in every practical sense.
Similarly, if most people that do J themselves believe that J is bullshit, then it’s reasonable to think that something is up with J. It might be that it’s not a property of J in isolation, and reliably getting at what people actually believe (as opposed to what they tell their employer they believe, what they tell you they believe, or what they tell themselves they believe) can be stupendously difficult, but the question itself is not meaningless or unscientific.