Topics Science

Question It is commonly believed that what falls under the domain of science is what is "objective". I put "objective" in quotation marks for the following reasons: everything we perceive is not immune to our circumstances, for example, the school we went, the home we grew up in, our interests and beliefs, what book we read recently, who our friends are... (I could go on and on), secondly, we perceive everything through our mind, or consciousness, which is widely considered subjective. So here is my question: How can we consider something that we perceive to be objective, if we perceive it through something that is, if not completely, in many ways, subjective? (The quote from the Woody Allen movie "Love and Death" comes to mind: Subjectivity is objective. If it is, then how? Or is it objectivity that is subjective? Or neither?)

Accepted:
September 30, 2014

Comments

You are right that science is often described as an "objective" pursuit. But the word "objective" has multiple meanings. It could mean independent of the specific characteristics of particular individuals, or independent of the general characteristics of human minds more generally. It could mean "standardized"; it could mean "reasonable"; it could mean "true." The kind of paradoxes about objectivity that you are thinking about typically result (in my opinion) from unclarity or equivocation on the word "objective." Best to pick a specific meaning and stick with it, or (my preference) avoid the use of the term altogether. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's 2007 book "Objectivity" describes the historical emergence of our ideas about objectivity.