Objectivity as a Replacement of Truth in Science[12]

The most immediate consequence of that generalized crisis has been that scientists no longer dared to call “true” even the best founded of their statements and tried to avoid the use of the notion of truth.

The solution to this problem that first occurs to mind is that the whole value of a theory or a single proposition should consist in the usefulness that they can show as instruments for an efficient conduct and also for an easier intellectual management of the external world and of our everyday experience (the view of Mach, as we have seen). This is the well-known conception (at the same time conventionalist and instrumentalist) that has dominated the first two decades of the twentieth century and amounts to denying to science the capability and even the intention of actually producing genuine knowledge. It is certainly possible that such a view prevail during a short time of discomfort, but it is hardly possible that it lasts as a real conviction, especially with scientists, because a working scientist cannot be really persuaded that he does not attain knowledge when he is doing his investigation. Therefore, here is the impasse: how can we recover the confidence in the cognitive capability of science without falling back into the difficulties that surface when we attribute to science the capability of attaining truth? The way out that has been found was the invention of a kind of replacement of the notion of truth, by the introduction of the idea of objectivity. In such a way it became possible to say: well, we agree that science is not a ‘true’ knowledge, it is however, an ‘objective’ knowledge. At this junction, however, our problem becomes “What is objectivity?”

4.1 Objectivity as Intersubjectivity

If one consults the literature produced both by scientists and philosophers of science one finds a variety of implicit characterizations of objectivity, that we shall try to collect under two fundamental headings, that summarize the most salient proposals.

A first sense of objectivity is the following: objective means intersubjective. This meaning corresponds, in a first approximation, to the colloquial expression that science is a ‘public’ discourse. By this it is meant that it is a discourse open to everyone provided, obviously, that one puts oneself in the condition of entering this discourse. It is a discourse in which every statement is submitted to the control of anybody belonging to the scientific community, and this means someone that has undergone the standard training necessary for understanding and checking the statement at issue. It is a discourse in which what I have said does no longer belong to me in the first person, but also what my colleague has said does no longer belong to him: it is a discourse on which we ought to be in agreement. Now the difficulty resides precisely in this “ought to” or, said in a more precise way, the problem is that of answering the question “how can we found intersubjectivity?” since the problem is that of rendering public a knowledge that, as such, is always private (one always knows in the first person).

The difficulties that one encounters in looking for a solution to this problem are easy to imagine and also widely discussed in the literature. They concentrate especially on one crucial point, that is, on the impossibility of realizing a direct exchange of cognitive experience, at whatever level. I cannot ‘have a look’ in the thoughts of another person in order to see whether the notions she has are identical with mine. I cannot perceive another person’s perceptions, I cannot be conscious of her states of consciousness, feel her emotions, and so forth. Taking all this into account, it seems that there is no ground for ‘making public’ whatever content of knowledge, and intersubjectivity appears as an illusory mirage.

Against such radical objections, however, stands an undeniable fact of life: humans, and also other animals, are able to communicate among themselves.

Therefore, what we need is not to know whether intersubjectivity is possible, but to understand how it is possible. And if the difficulties we have just mentioned are really insurmountable (as indeed they are), this means that this is not the price one has to pay in order to attain the intersubjective agreement.

Actually a little reflection shows us that what is needed in order to attain an intersubjective agreement regarding a certain notion is not the ascertainment of a conformity in the way of conceiving that notion, but the ascertainment of a con­formity in the way of using it, and this ascertainment is generally possible, whereas the first one is never. We can easily confirm this fact by considering examples of concrete familiar notions as well as of complex abstract notions.

4.2 Objectivity as Reference to Objects

Something a little strange resides in the fact that we have defined objectivity as intersubjectivity, for actually the terms “objective” and “objectivity” contains in their own linguistic root a reference to the object much more than to the subject, as does, on the contrary, the term “intersubjective”. Actually it is not difficult to recognize that the original sense of the notion of objectivity, the sense that we could call strong, entails the reference to the object: objective is—in this sense—a characteristic, a property, a judgment that concern “what is inherent in the object”. From this strong sense follows the weak sense according to the following reasoning: if a property is intrinsic to the object, it must hold independently of the subjects who know the object, therefore, all the subjects should in principle recognize it in the same way. The inverse does not obviously hold. Nevertheless, for well-known historical reasons culminated with the philosophy of Kant, philosophers lost the confidence in the human capability of knowing the object such as it is in itself and, as a consequence, the strong sense of objectivity lost as well any concrete interest and was replaced by the objectivity in its weak sense. This last one—that funda­mentally expresses the idea of an “independence with regard to the (individual) subject”—has received different formulations in philosophy, and its translation as intersubjectivity is its current version, especially regarding the sciences.

This I why, in the opinion of many philosophers and also scientists, there is no point in looking for an objectivity that would be stronger than the weak objectivity understood as intersubjectivity. In particular, every effort to attribute to objectivity an “ontological” sense, by conceiving it as a “reference to existing objects” would be the expression of an obsolete mentality. Statements like “in science we remain content with an objective description of phenomena without any pretension to know reality as it is in itself” seem to express this attitude very faithfully. Nevertheless, beside this kind of statements we find another one (even more widespread) which strongly stresses that every science is a “specialized” discourse dealing only with “its own specific objects”. And it would be difficult to deny that such an expression contains the idea of a “reference to objects” with an implicit ontological under­standing that requires to be investigated. Is this simply a colloquial ‘way of speaking' or does this contain something deeper that must be well understood and made explicit?

In order to answer this question one must make a clear distinction between the “things” of ordinary experience and the “objects” of the different sciences, though recognizing that precise links exist between them. Now, while it would be wrong to say that every science specifically deals with a particular domain of “things” (be­cause any “thing” can become the “object” of several sciences) one can say that every science deals with whatever thing “from its own point of view”, and it is owing to this particular point of view that it makes this thing one of its proper “objects”. Therefore, one could say that the objects of a science are the “clippings” obtained in things by considering them from the point of view of that science.

It may be useful to clarify this point by means of an example. Let us consider a watch that I hold in my hand and which as such can be considered a “thing” of ordinary experience that we find in the world.

We cannot enter here the presentation of the details necessary for making precise the intuitive notion of “clipping” that we have used above but it is sufficient to point out that every science realizes its clipping by using in its language a limited number of specific predicates (whose sense is determined in a univocal and technical way) that it employs for speaking about things. These predicates are intended to corre­spond to certain attributes (that is, properties, relations and functions) that are present in things (though not necessarily all in whatever thing). So the use of predicates such as those of mass, length, duration and force determines the clipping (and hence the objects) of mechanics; the use of predicates such as those of metabolism, generation, etc. determines the objects of biology; whereas if we use predicates such as price, market value, supply and demand we are constructing the objects of economics.

We must now underscore that every science that we intend to qualify as “em­pirical” must rely upon certain means for ‘touching' the things of ordinary expe­rience. Therefore, it is indispensable that at least a part of the predicates constituting the language of an empirical science be of an operational nature in the sense of being directly linked with concrete standardized operations.

The last affirmation entails two significant consequences. The first is that the operational conditions that constitute the foundations of intersubjectivity are at the same time the conditions that permit the construction of the scientific objects. In such a way we are justified in affirming that the two notions of objectivity (un­derstood as intersubjectivity and as a reference to objects) practically coincide, though being conceptually distinct. The second consequence is that we can recover the notion of truth in the sciences, provided that we are aware that this truth is always “relative to the specific objects” about which the propositions are formu­lated. The crisis of the old notion of scientific truth depended on having conceived it as an absolute and total truth, that is, a truth regarding things in themselves. As a consequence this truth was seen to be ruined when new aspects of reality were discovered (that is, new “domains of objects”) with which the old theories were unable to cope. The issue, however, appears under a completely different light if one is conscious that any theory has to be true only about its own objects.

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