Objectivity

Objectivity has two aspects. It means, in the metaphysical sense, a correspondence between a statement and the way the world is independently of human conceptual activities. It refers, in the methodological sense, to products of processes of inquiry disciplined by the demand to exclude all that would render those products dependent on prejudice or bias. Already in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, we see that the convergence from multiple unbiased perspectives that we expect from a methodologically objective process might be seen as evidence of correspondence with underlying independent realities. In some domains, convergence may be all that’s on offer, there being no mind-independent reality with which correspondence might be sought. This was the view of John Rawls, as for example in his “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory.” Among the many unquestioned certainties of the postwar scientistic settlement was that the pursuit of objectivity in science, ethics, and the professions was the key to the success of these enterprises. This was disturbed by scholarly developments, of which the profoundest was the feminist critique of objectivity from the mid-1970s. Another important development was the sociological and historiographical interrogation of objectivity, as manifested in “the strong programme” or “social studies of science,” but most strikingly exemplified in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s Objectivity, which gave the idea of objectivity a history that showed how much intellectual work had to be done to develop an idea that we later came to take for granted. Of course, the fact of the historical contingency and social entanglement of “objectivity” shows nothing about its usefulness, indeed effectiveness. It may, despite its historicity, still be effective in disciplining our inquiries. Among the more interesting aspects of the concept of objectivity is its perhaps essentially contestable character as a concept, as shown in its multiple manifestations, as identified by Heather Douglas, “The Irreducible Complexity of Objectivity.” As Daston put it (“Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective,” p. 598), “its thick layering of oddly matched meanings . . . betrays signs of a complicated and contingent history.” While the idea of objectivity has played an important philosophical role, its general cultural significance spiked in the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election. Oxford University Press has noted this phenomenon. “After much discussion, debate, and research, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is post-truth—an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’”