F Objectivity

“The authority of science relies on its objectivity.”¹⁶ This may seem so obvious, even trite, that you'll be surprised to learn that objectivity has not always been a core characteristic of science.

Indeed, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison argue¹⁷ that recognition of the importance of objectivity is relatively new to science, with its origins dating to the mid-late nineteenth century. It emerged as scientists gradually realized that, in order to communicate and carry on science as a cumulative, collective activity, there had to be ways of establishing what the facts in any given field were. In those pre-statistical days, scientists dealt with random variability mainly by ignoring it, which they justified essentially as follows: if you're interested in finding the true regularities that you know must underlie natural phenomena, the minor details are unimportant. They trusted their own powers of observation and imagination to guide them to the truth. Unfortunately, as they discovered, not everybody's observations of the same phenomenon led to the same truth about it. Worse, they found that their own observations could be unreliable. There is a touching tale¹⁸ of a physicist in the late 1800s who wanted to investigate the splash that occurred at the instant that a falling drop of liquid contacted a surface. He had a stroboscopic setup that let him visualize the splash during a brief flash of light and, with no way of recording what happened, painstakingly hand-drew each visual afterimage as it transiently imprinted itself on his retinas. He sketched thousands of beautifully symmetrical splashes, until, after 20 years of this, he succeeded in making a camera that could capture the images photographically. He was crestfallen to discover that his meticulous drawings were largely figments of his imagination; reality was not nearly as orderly as he had perceived.

Eventually, it became clear that facts had to be independent of the idiosyncrasies of the individual scientist. “To be objective is to aspire to knowledge that bears no trace of the knower—knowledge unmarked by prejudice or skill, fantasy or judgement, wishing or striving,” according to Daston and Galison. The authors use the development of scientific atlases, compendia of pictures of birds, clouds, images of brain scans, etc., to examine how standards of objectivity emerged. The atlases were the common working objects that made it possible for communal science, for collective empiricism, to arise and engage scientists from all over the world. Sadly, high hopes that atlases and other products of instrumental measurements would be the cure-all for the ills of subjectivity were doomed to disappointment, too. Instruments such as cameras recorded too much detail—experts had to decide what was crucial so the user could develop her own judgmental skills. Thus objectivity standards passed from the preobjective truth-in-nature (seeking ideal natural forms; what the droplet-drawing physicist was doing) through stages of mechanical objectivity (recording information instrumentally, warts and all; what the camera enabled him to do) to mechanical objectivity supplemented by “trained judgment.” Objectivity, it seemed, had an ineradicable element of subjectivity to it.

Scientists today take it for granted that we can observe the world in reasonably accurate ways. However, imperfections in our sensory and instrumental apparatus, in our ability to remain detached from our theoretical constructions or the influence of our social surroundings, all conspire to hinder attainment of a pure state of scientific objectivity. Some philosophers view objectivity and subjectivity as opposites that “define each other”¹⁹ and that, therefore, in order to achieve objectivity, we must be aggressive in dealing with subjectivity, striving for “suppression of some aspect of the self” or admitting that objectivity is a hopeless dream.

Luckily, summoning up steely, self-abnegating willpower is not required for the day-to-day demands of experimental science. Instead, modern science tends to equate the necessary objectivity with “intersubjective”²⁰ reliability: an observation is objective if anybody can, in principle, make it. No special personal fortitude required. People who are subjectively biased can make observations that corroborate the findings of other equally biased individuals and thereby produce objectively reliable results. Indeed, science counts on its finding to be replicated in different independent laboratories as a way of telling whether they’re correct. Yet science is not “value free” and cannot give one “tidy account” of nature.²¹ Judgment does come into play, but in the form of general agreement or consensus among scientists that determines what they accept as true.²² Objectivity, therefore, arises as a community virtue and doesn’t refer only to the behavior of individual scientists. Concern about reproducibility in science (Chapter 7) is mainly a concern about community-wide objectivity.

In some quarters, “objectivity” has acquired offensive overtones.²³ It has become a surrogate for “superior” or “true.” The word has been used to sanctify certain kinds of research. Feminist philosopher of science Sandra Harding is not primarily bothered by the research lab-delimited view of objectivity, which she calls “weak objectivity.” She believes that research should be “fair to the evidence,... to one's critics, and fair to the most severe criticisms that one can imagine.” For her, “the question is how to go about doing research that simultaneously advances the comprehensiveness and reliability of its results and also produces resources for answering the kinds of questions that are most important to an oppressed group.”

Social issues, in other words, especially issues of social justice, are interwoven with this notion of objectivity.

“The shape and purpose of the research project... are at issue,” and Harding sees truly “value-free” research as a myth, an ideal so mistaken as to be worse than useless. The driving forces behind the research—the identity and motivations of the research funders, the cultural factors that determine the problems considered worth investigating—all necessarily influence research from beginning to end. To counter the negative influences, Harding proposes a program of “strong objectivity” that encompasses weak objectivity and then goes beyond to advocate for a vision of a deliberately inclusive, socially aware, and responsive kind of science.²⁴

Is science value-free? It aspires to be but, if value-free means a perfectly detached, Olympian “view from Nowhere”²⁵ that is disconnected from and unsullied by ordinary human foibles, biases, limitations, and emotions, then it can't be. Scientists are human beings who are immersed in complex social systems, and it would be a miracle if we were not affected by them. However, acknowledging that science is not totally removed from the concerns of society and culture (“weak cultural constructivism”²⁶) is not the same as agreeing with “postmodernist” critics that science is no more than a cultural construction (“strong cultural constructivism”). Science is much more than the expression of the biases of one group or another. Though incomplete and imperfect, the understanding of nature provided by modern science is vastly greater than that achieved in earlier ages. Scientists aim to get their knowledge of the world right, and they are aware (or are reminded) of the possibility that they could be wrong.

Philosophers, though not fully comfortable with this state of affairs, agree that we ought not to “throw out the valuable baby with the bathwater”²⁷ when it comes to assessing objectivity. They thus concede that scientists cannot wait until all the philosophical brain teasers have been solved, that scientists have to take action, and that an imperfect principle of objectivity is better than none.

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Source: Alger Bradley E.. Defense of the Scientific Hypothesis: From Reproducibility Crisis to Big Data. Oxford University Press,2020. — 449 p.. 2020

F Objectivity

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