Science is fundamentally refined common sense, but it's not
   _shackled_ by common sense either. This is what allows
   Schroedinger and Heisenberg to be there right along side "what
   goes up, must come down", Psychology, chemical compounds,
   evolution and such. Mind you, I personally don't believe that
   objectivity is the start and finish of things, so your aunt is
   also correct. Shared subjectivity *is* the closet thing to
   objective measure that we *can* have., so for _pragmatic_
   purposes, a careful collective subjectivity and objectivity are
   more or less the same. Yet, like with the sciences and common
   sense (or a more direct example: mathematics and physics) -
   there are places they correlate and places they differ.
   Sometimes collective subjectivity can be wrong. It may appear
   objective when it turns out to be collective error. Yet, what
   else can we go with? Gotta use something if we want to get stuff
   done smile emoticon So in my mind, when I hear "objective" my
   mind substitutes, 'pragmatic collective subjectivity" and it
   works out to the same for me. Do I believe objective reality
   exists? Sure I do. Do i believe we can measure it? Sure I do.
   But we're making the maps of the territories as we're reading
   off older maps of the territories. We're still exploring the
   territories as we're continually updating the maps as best we
   can. The finger that points to the moon isn't the moon, but it's
   useful, so long as we don't get *too* caught up on the models
   and lose sight of what's around us.