In Search of Objectivity
"Objective Visions" by Bruce Bower, in Science News (Dec. 5, 1998), 1719 N St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
"Objective Visions" by Bruce Bower, in Science News (Dec. 5, 1998), 1719 N St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
Objectivity is a fighting word in the current "science wars." Postmodernist sociologists and philosophers claim that it’s only a socially constructed idea masking scientists’ shared assumptions and self-interested drives for power and prestige. Scientists themselves insist that it is a scientific lodestar. What both sides tend to ignore, maintains Science News writer Bower, is the history of objectivity in science. In assuming that objectivity has one fixed meaning, many on both sides of the science wars are making a mistake, historians tell him. "Objectivity has had and continues to have different meanings," says Lorraine Daston, director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Among its modern ones: empirical reliability, procedural correctness, emotional detachment, and absolute truth. The term objectivity "did not acquire its current cachet in science until the 19th century," Bower points out. Eighteenth-century scientists relied more on imagination, especially the informed imaginations of acknowledged geniuses such as Dutch anatomist Bernhard Albinus. His 1747 atlas of the human body portrayed not the skeletons he had carefully reassembled but an "improved" depiction based on his insights. Between about 1830 and 1920, according to Peter L. Galison, a historian of science at Harvard University, that sort of approach declined, as scientists sought to remove overt signs of imagination—now the province of poets and artists—from their work. They were pushed by both the collapse of major theories (e.g., the Newtonian theory of light) built the old way and the availability of new devices, such as the camera. In this new era of "mechanical objectivity," it was thought better to illustrate atlases, for example, with a blurred photograph of a distant star or a fragment of a fossil than to present an imaginative reconstruction.
Scientists busied themselves standardizing their instruments, clarifying their basic concepts, and adopting an impersonal style of writing—all to make it easier for other scientists to understand their work. Facts were no longer "malleable observations but...unbreakable nuggets of reality," writes Bower.
In the medical and natural sciences, however, another shift occurred by about 1920, as a door opened to trained imagination and informed judgment.
Today, rigid standards of quantitative rigor tend to be most strongly valued in embattled and divided disciplines such as experimental psychology, contends Theodore M. Porter, a historian of science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Scientists in more secure disciplines, such as in the small community of experimental high-energy physics, operate, in contrast, much more informally. With only a few particle accelerators available, and experimenters continually adjusting their equipment, independent replication of experimental results is difficult. As a result, influential physicists often assess the skills and trustworthiness of the experimenters themselves in order to reach a collective judgment on whether particular findings merit acceptance.
"Scientists employ techniques and ways of thinking which are powerful and effective, but which are often hard to articulate," Porter says. "In science, as in political and administrative affairs, objectivity has more to do with the exclusion of personal judgment and the struggle against subjectivity than with truth to nature."