The Loss of Objectivity

Thomas Kuhn was not the only person in the post-WWII intellectual community which was responsible for undermining the Logical Positivist project. Consider for instance the claim put forth by Michael Polanyi that scientific knowledge was the production of a community and that this community required the internalization of a significant amount of value judgments and tacit knowledge by its neophytes. Similarly, Russell Hanson argued that objective observation free of all theory ladenness and value judgment was absolutely impossible due to the fact that people rather than eyes made observations. These ideas are all very much in line with those of Kuhn and for this reason it makes sense to speak of the Kuhn-Polanyi-Hanson critique of scientific knowledge.

The purported overthrow of the objectivity of scientific knowledge was not welcomed, not surprisingly, with open arms. The thrust behind this resistance can be seen in the views of Israel Scheffler who argued that such an overthrow would so much more than the scientist’s claim to platonic truth. What was at stake was rationality itself, the Enlightenment tool which had come to serve as the only effective antidote to dogmatism, factionalism and subjective belief in general. It was by means of rationality and science that the West had come to resolve disagreements without blood and violence. If objectivity does not exist, there seemed to be no non-coercive way to compel the assent of others. For Scheffler, it was as if Kuhn, Polanyi and Hanson were literally attempting to destroy mankind’s greatest hope for peace and unity.

While the choice which Scheffler described between platonic knowledge/rationality and medieval anarchy seems exaggerated from our perspective, if one considers the claims of “radical” Kuhn, one sees the source of his seeming hysteria. The idea that two scientific paradigms were utterly incommensurable as well as mutually incorrigible along with the idea that a scientist could only switch by means of a purely non-rational gestalt shift does seem to entail many of the consequences which Scheffler warns against.

Nevertheless, even a more moderate version of Kuhn does not leave much room for hope that platonic knowledge/rationality will ever be held as an attainable goal again. Indeed, Scheffler’s arguments simply seem to ignore the claims of the moderate Kuhn. This is unfortunate, for even if Kuhn’s ideas concerning paradigms or incommensurability are not clear or convincing, his criticisms of the view of science which Scheffler advocates are very compelling.

Scheffler’s fear that objectivity was being undermined found its greatest realizations in the thinking of individuals other than Kuhn. In the mid 1970’s Paul Feyerabend argued that not only does science not proceed rationally, as Kuhn and others had argued, but that rationality was not the last and only word in terms of knowledge. Rather, science involved irrational moves both in terms of discovery as well as justification. Thus, even if there was an objective truth to be found by science, there was simply no objective path to it nor was there an objective way to establish when or if it had been found.

Nevertheless, Feyerabend’s ideas were not as radical as some might have thought, for just because there is no one true and final rationality does not mean, as Scheffler might have thought, that anything goes. We would do well to remember Poincare’s distinction between science as a merely conventional description of reality and science as a convenient description of reality. What Feyerabend rejected was the rationality of classical philosophy by arguing that rationality could only be judged relative to a particular context. An absolute point of reference, framework or God’s-eye point of view, even if it did exist, was not the point of reference within which the scientist or philosopher worked. Consequently, what we mean by “Truth”, or platonic truth as I have called it, simply does not exist out in the world. Additionally, Feyerabend saw ambiguity and contradiction as inescapable features of human reasoning and rationality and even went as far as arguing that the law of non-contradiction was an assumption rather than a law in human reasoning. But again, this conception of truth and science does not at all entail the anarchy which Scheffler feared.

Rather, this fear was realized in the form of the French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Foucault’s attack on objectivity came in the form of a genealogical description of objectivity. Similar to Fleck, he argued that the classifications schemes by which we organize experience, reasoning and knowledge are not universal and timeless. Rather, Foucault argued, there is a cultural rootedness to such classification schemes, and as such, they change over time. Thus, the very notion of objectivity is simply a concept which only exists relative to our contingent cultural classification schemes. Foucault, however, was equally critical of the idea that such schemes were utterly subjective as well. While there was no universal dictionary which one could appeal to in order to define “objectivity” objectively, such definitions can and are indexed to a shared context and shared classification scheme.

Derrida’s critique of objectivity came at an even more fundamental level. Derrida took de Saussure’s theory of language as a closed system of differences and not argued that language was thus intrinsically and inescapably equivocal, but also went further in generalizing this claim to all meaning. Since meaning is constructed by an ever changing process of interpretation and reinterpretation, fixity in meaning is an unattainable ideal for the reader or even the author of a text. Thus we see the famous phrase “the author is dead.”

Derrida then extended the concept of text to include everything, bridges, building, automobiles, etc. The entire world became text which could only be interpreted according to our continually evolving experience and just as two interpretations of a book cannot be held up against any objective standards, so too, two interpretations of the natural world cannot be held up against any objective standards of truth, objectivity, rationality, etc.

This attack at objectivity in science goes far beyond anything imagined by even the radical Kuhn. The necessary response, it seems clear to me, is not to attempt to salvage Platonic rationality and truth, but rather to attempt to defend a modified form of objectivity which does not lend itself so easily to the criticisms which were brought against the former. In a future post we will see how many attempted to do this very thing.