Objectivism

Objectivism is the view that there can be a “permanent, ahistorical matrix or framework to which we can ultimately appeal in determining the nature of rationality, knowledge, truth, reality, goodness or rightness” (Bernstein, 1983, p. 8). Although long challenged by the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions in social science, it was nevertheless the default position in both the natural and social sciences until the 1960s. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962 (Kuhn, 1970), challenged this orthodoxy in natural science (and by extension in social science) by claiming that there is no linear progress in science; rather, there are “paradigms” of thought and practice that are taken to represent scientific truth at particular times. These are subject to occasional and dramatic revolution that can be accounted for more readily by social and psychological factors than by objective facts about the world. Indeed, so opposed are competing paradigms that they are epistemologically incommensurate.

Kuhn's work influenced a number of antiobjectivist positions in social science (or perhaps more correctly social studies, for in these positions there was often a denial the social world could be studied scientifically): relativism, social constructionism, and subjectivism. Though sometimes an antiobjectivist view will incorporate all these oppositions, they are not necessarily synonymous. Relativists will deny that knowledge and/or morality can be judged from a perspective that is not embedded in subjective epistemological or moral positions, and thus they claim there can be no privileging of any one truth or morality. Subjectivists will deny the existence of an objective reality existing outside of agents' perceptions or constructions of it. Social constructionism, though similar, places stress on the social construction of what we call “reality.”

Objectivism, like so many other “isms,” is often something of a straw person, and there are few now who would wholeheartedly embrace either it or its complete denial. There are, however, more moderate successor positions in respect of objectivity as an achievable goal or realism as an ontological stance in social theory and methodology. In the first case, the question addressed is to what extent can objectivity, as a pursuit of truth in the social world, be retained when the social world is actively constructed by its participants? Realists have attempted to find a middle ground by accepting that the social world is socially constructed, but once it comes into being it exists as an objective reality independent of any individual conception of it.

One influential attempt to transcend objectivism and its oppositions came from Pierre Bourdieu (1977), who associated it with the structuralism of Durkheim, Althusser, and Lévi-Strauss and the consequent “disappearance” of the agent from social theory. Conversely, he saw the ethnomethodologists and symbolic interactionists as overly concentrating on agents' subjectivity and ignoring the objective structures acting upon them. Instead, he proposed that there existed a dialectic relationship between subjective and objective factors in the practice of the construction of social reality. Objective structures bear upon day-to-day interactions, and although agents will reproduce and transform them, the ways in which they are presented [Page 750]will make a difference in how they will be reproduced and transformed.

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