Objectivity

Objectivity and Subjectivity

Objectivity is often regarded as an ideal for scientific inquiry, expressing the idea that the knowledge gained as a result of inquiry should depend on the object of investigation but not on the subject doing the investigation. In general, this requires that the claims made on the basis of inquiry should be testable independently of the individual or individuals making the claims. The truth of the claim that Mount Everest is higher than Mount Kilimanjaro can be verified independently of any individual, whereas the truth of the claim that Gauguin is a better painter than Renoir cannot be verified. The concept of objectivity thus expresses a value that underlies or is closely related to other scientific values including replicability, reproducibility, generalizability, validity, and invariance. Historically, the perception that scientific inquiry leads to objective knowledge has played a significant role in explaining the prestige and authority commonly afforded to science on the part of the general public.

A classic perspective holds that objectivity implies faithfulness to reality, that is, claims are objective if they accurately describe facts about the world, implying that such facts are true independently of the perspective of any given individual. This view capitalizes on the intuition that, although each individual experiences the world from a particular perspective, there are features of the world itself that seem to be constant and thus (at least possibly) to exist and have properties independently of the minds of those who perceive them. A common perspective on science maintains that at least one major aim of scientific inquiry is to understand such observer-independent aspects of reality and that the best explanation for the demonstrated value of science (e.g., in terms of historically progressive success in prediction, explanation, and control) is that many fields of inquiry have, at least to some extent, succeeded in this aim. A somewhat softer version of this perspective is captured by the term intersubjectivity, which refers to the idea that all members of a community of observers perceive something in common and agree on what is perceived. In practice, intersubjective agreement may have many of the same consequences as objective knowledge but does not [Page 1170]preclude the possibility that what is agreed upon does not actually refer to objective reality, nor the possibility that some other subject might disagree with the original community of observers.

Especially in the social sciences, it may be of value to distinguish between claims regarding epistemic and ontological forms of objectivity and subjectivity. This entry has so far focused on epistemic objectivity, which is a matter of whether knowledge and the methods for acquiring knowledge are independent of individual perspectives. Ontological objectivity and subjectivity, on the other hand, refer to whether the existence of a thing or property of a thing depends on individual perspectives. While most of the subject matter of the physical sciences is commonly regarded as ontologically objective—that is, the physical world is assumed to exist independently of the way it is perceived by any individual—much of the subject matter of the social sciences is ontologically subjective. That is, phenomena such as feelings, goals, beliefs, hopes, fears, and desires exist insofar as they are experienced as existing by an individual; in other words, unlike with ontologically objective phenomena, there is no distinction between appearance and reality. Further, some phenomena, such as money, countries, and marriages, appear to exist and have properties independently of any given individual but not independently of groups of individuals taken together (e.g., money has value insofar as it is perceived by multiple individuals to have value). This distinction is relevant for the psychological and social sciences because ontological subjectivity is not in itself a barrier to epistemic objectivity. It could even be said that, to a large extent, the purpose of the psychological sciences is to provide objective knowledge about subjective phenomena.

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