Objectivity

Guy Axtell

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781509502097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Epistemología en filosofía

What do you find more trustworthy, experts or numbers, personal know-how or objective facts? Can science claim special authority based on the objectivity of its methods? Are our ethical decisions always better when we strive to be impartial and unbiased? Why should we value objectivity, and is it achievable anyway?

These are a few of the thought-provoking questions Guy Axtell asks in this comprehensive new text book, employing examples from the natural and social sciences as well as philosophy. This unique introduction surveys the key issues in a clear and concise way, assessing the nature of objectivity and value of the demand to be impartial decision-makers. Moving beyond the fundamentals, Axtell explores contemporary feminist and social epistemological attempts to reconstruct the concept of objectivity, explains the implications of the so-called science wars for philosophy and the analytical method, and the ethical consequences of these debates.

Objectivity is an excellent introduction to one of the most exciting areas of study in philosophy and science today. Students and scholars alike will value this balanced guide to a hotly contested, and vitally important, topic.

Part I
The Intelligible World

1
Objectivity and “First Philosophies”

1.1 The Origins of Objectivity

Interest in the concept of objectivity is a legacy of modern philosophy, which can be traced back to a new way of understanding the starting point of philosophical reflection, an “epistemological turn” that attended the development of New Science in the early modern period. These origins are an indication that what a thinker takes as the starting point of philosophical reflection deeply affects how he or she approaches key philosophical concepts, including truth, knowledge, and objectivity. Of the different analyses of objectivity we survey in this chapter, some are ultimately based in metaphysics, others in epistemology, and still others in axiology or value theory. Each way of approaching the concept of objectivity reflects a different set of basic assumptions and exhibits a different relationship to philosophical modernism.

Even before Greco-Roman thought gave way to the Christian era, the Western tradition tended to favor what Charles Peirce called the method of authority in order to fix belief, and until the seventeenth century no genuine scientific approach or even law-like view of the physical world had yet been codified. The method of authority is often justified by the assumption that “metaphysics is first philosophy.” The idea that metaphysics comes first makes it easier to support a religious worldview based upon received tradition, or to support a search like that of the pre-Socratics for the arche—the first source or true nature of all that exists—in contrast with the world of human conventions and customs. The Aristotelian characterization of metaphysics as first philosophy still connects it with the pre-Socratic desire for a science or principle of the world beyond nature. But whether it can be approached through introspective means or can be discovered only “after the physics” is one of the key differences between Plato, with his rationalistic Theory of Forms, and Aristotle's more empirical approach.

Philosophy's role in 1600 was still, as it had been during most of the Christian era, that of a handmaiden of theology, even though interest in Islamic and early Greek science or “natural philosophy” had brightly rekindled across much of Europe. Interest in astronomy was keen, including by the Vatican, but there was as yet no real distinction between what we call science and what at the time was simply called natural philosophy. The Church and its Scholastic methods still being authoritative over matters of education, early modern philosophers like Galileo and Descartes feared restrictions on the work of natural philosophy, as well as unnecessary tensions between the new science and basics of their religious faith. Both Galileo and Descartes proposed new ways to divide the roles of theology and natural philosophy: ways they hoped would be acceptable to the Church, while also giving place to the aims, methods, and theories of the New Science.

Perhaps the most famous of such proposed compromises between the Church and the New Science was Galileo's. He readily advocated that the “book of the world” was written in mathematical language, a view that he thought comported well with recognition of divine order even if it demanded empirical study of the world in ways that the older Scholastic method and intellectual climate of Christianized Aristotelianism did not. But in commenting on the charges brought against him in 1633 for his role in publishing in defense of the Copernican or heliocentric model (in contrast to the Church's stance favoring the traditional geo- or earth-centered universe), Galileo wrote, “The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how heaven goes.” Religion has a different magisterium—a different realm of teaching competence, than natural philosophy. The Bible is not a book about nature or natural processes, and the Church, Galileo argued, should not take sides on cosmological theories developed by natural philosophers, which are subject to change in light of new findings.

The rationalist philosopher Descartes proposed a somewhat different compromise with the Church based on his “real distinction” between physical or extended substance and immaterial soul, while similarly presenting his physical theory as one that a good Catholic could propose and accept. But despite Descartes dedicating his Meditations on First Philosophy to the powerful Faculty of Sacred Theology of Paris and claiming that philosophy can serve the Church by proving mind–soul dualism, offering “true demonstrations” so firm that no skeptic or atheist could deny them, his most important books were ill received by authorities and placed alongside Kepler's New Astronomy on Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the list of heretical books. The Church would later reevaluate Galileo's scientific empiricism and Descartes's rationalism more positively. But the growing interest in scientific methods of inquiry meant that philosophy would not be limited to the role of handmaiden to theology it had accepted in the centuries before the rise of modern science.

Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy applied rigor to the problem of skepticism by introducing a new conception of method, one based upon careful observation, analysis, and logical inference. His anti-skeptical philosophy takes skepticism seriously but attempts to sidestep or refute them and to affirm our capacity for knowledge and understanding. Ancient Greco-Roman skeptical treatises were known and studied with some interest in Descartes's time. Indeed, the value of doubt and uncertainty regarding the claims of theologians and philosophers were actually heralded by early modern thinkers like Erasmus, Montaigne, and Pascal. These thinkers believed that skepticism discouraged dogmatism and theological conflict, while promoting greater tolerance for cultural differences, along with other humanist values. Descartes's lifetime was a time of great strife, including the Witch Craze and the worst of the pan-European wars fought between Catholics and Protestants. But Descartes's approach to resolving these calamities differed sharply from that of the humanists, even if his values did not. For Descartes believed that Europe's political and religious conflicts would subside only when secure methods of knowledge were established, and skeptical challenges decisively refuted by theological and scientific proofs. Since Descartes's time, the reintroduction of skeptical problems has triggered corresponding waves of rigor among anti-skeptical philosophers.

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment period saw the further extension of the concept of objectivity into the philosophical lexicon, especially in the work of the rationalist German philosopher Immanuel Kant.¹ Kant's philosophy represents another wave of anti-skeptical rigor, developed partly in response to the “scandal to philosophy and to human reason” that Kant took David Hume's skepticism to be.² The methods of natural science had been codified by the end of the seventeenth century under Isaac Newton's laws of motion and gravity. Philosophers by and large didn't need to worry as much about consistency of their work with Christian theology, although the Index was active until 1966 and did include Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The complex relationship that book develops between epistemology and metaphysics was indeed revolutionary—so much so that it is often referred to as having initiated a “Copernican revolution” in philosophical thought. But analogously to Galileo and Descartes, Kant was more conservatively proposing another new partition that he thought should allow science and religion to pursue their work more harmoniously. His Critique in part tries to establish what questions belong to faith, to philosophy, and to science, and how to conceive the boundaries between these endeavors. He develops an account which “makes room for faith” while also showing how we can have objective knowledge of the empirical world.

The epistemological turn in philosophy during the early-modern era initiated a shift away from concern with questions of theology and metaphysics, emphasizing instead the need to study our own sensible and mental faculties and to recognize on this basis the limits of what we can justifiably claim to know. So the epistemological turn was attended by appeals to dispassionate assessments of reason and evidence, and by heightened regard for intellectual caution, honesty, and integrity as signs of those who value truth for truth's sake. For example, in trying to stem religious intolerance by contrasting religious “enthusiasm” with a sober trust of reason, the early modern empiricist John Locke wrote, “Whatsoever credit or authority we give to any proposition more than it receives from the principles and proofs it supports itself upon, is owing to our inclinations that way, and is so far a derogation from the love of truth as such.”³

Objectivity, as we have seen, was not really a known or valued concept prior to the epistemological turn, and Stefan Gaukroger even argues that, for the early modern philosophers, objectivity replaced truth in the role of primary cognitive guidance. These philosophers, in his words, held that

what we need…is something that guides arguments by making sure they start and proceed in the right way, as opposed to finishing in the right way.…If truth guided argument by showing where arguments should end, objectivity took the opposite route, constraining how arguments should begin and proceed.…Objectivity was deemed to be able to play this role through the qualities of impartiality, freedom from prejudices, lack of bias, and lack of partisanship.⁴

So the primary sense of objectivity, the sense grounded in the epistemological turn, identifies it as an epistemic concept, a concept more specifically that measures the fittingness of our strategies of inquiry. Cognitive objectivity concerns the means by which we come to know something; it concerns our epistemic praxis—our norm-governed practices of evaluation and guidance-giving. Objectivity is associated with the fittingness of methods to objects of inquiry, but still more to practices of giving and asking for reasons. Like justification and rationality, which on this view are its closest cousins, objectivity is a prime contributor to the acquisition of true beliefs; it is an achievement concept, but even when achieved, it falls short of a guarantor of truth.

1.2 Reality and Mind

The epistemological turn in philosophy, where the theory of knowledge (epistemology) rather than metaphysics becomes the starting place for warranted assertions about what is real or true, was motivated not only by the rationalist but also by the empiricist branch of philosophic modernism. Yet these two main branches of modern philosophy are also, somewhat ironically, sources both of new skeptical problems and of sometimes quite opposed attempts to answer these problems. Empiricism grounds ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Valuable but Contested Concept
• Part I: The Intelligible World
• Part II: Beyond the “Science Wars”
• Part III: Critical Reconstructions of Objectivity
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement