Objectivity

What and Why

Most contemporary thinkers regard objectivity as impossible to achieve, at least in the traditional sense of positivist science, as stated in this entry's opening paragraph.

In principle, all objective observers, using the same scientific procedures, would reach the same conclusions. Within limits of available observational technology, the conclusions would be true in an empirical sense, where empirical indicates knowledge obtained through logical processing of sensory encounters with natural reality. Objectivity is contrasted to subjectivity, the realm of the individual mind or the shared world of culture, which interprets the world through wishes and preconceived frameworks.

A common confusion between subjectivity as research object and as method must be clarified immediately. The former is legitimate to all schools of thought; the latter is deeply contentious. When a survey asks “Do you believe in the supernatural?,” the object observed is a subjective phenomenon, but the method aims to map accurately the substance of the respondent's orientation—and perhaps causes and consequences—with no interest in the truth value of the belief itself. Anthropologists clarify this by labeling respondents' claims (native point of view) as emic knowledge, compared with the etic scientific interpretation of the belief system by an analytical outsider.

Scientific method, the strategic embodiment of objectivity, is widely viewed as the most effective approach to knowing the world. Traditionally (in positivism), it was supposed to let us see how things really are, along with the causal chains behind them. With such knowledge we can manipulate controllable determinants to improve circumstances and let lie factors that are beyond our control; otherwise, we waste resources and worsen the circumstances.

Trouble starts first in trying to locate an ultimate basis for judging truth about the way things are and second in demonstrating that human objectivity is possible. Those are philosophical tasks of epistemology (the study of knowing), which offers a complex and contentious array of answers on which hinge the very nature of scientific truth and possibility of objectivity. Foundationalists believe in some kind of knowable and certain information or principles that provide final grounds for judging the truth of knowledge claims, whether the foundation lies in logical reasoning (rationalism) or in sensory tests of the material world (empiricism). Relativists, by contrast, deny the existence or knowability of such a foundation, arguing that all knowledge is necessarily shaped to historical and cultural frameworks available to people making the knowledge claims, so their truth value is relative to the worldview of the knowers. It likewise follows that even the scientific analyst acquires only such truth as her socially constructed cognition can fit together.

...