Ideas, information, concepts, narratives, all come from people who bring with them their “views from somewhere”.
Knowledge is generally anonymized to us for a long time as we learn from childhood, as we don’t generally have access to knowledge origins. If we are lucky, we might remember the name of a teacher or parent that told us something and when, where and how, but it’s difficult to follow a chain any further up from there. Maybe study the textbooks they learn from? Try to remember the conditions in which we learned a “piece of knowledge”?
Somewhere in all of this we’ve learned what “objectivity” supposedly is. It’s a view from nowhere, floating somewhere in some mythological “platonic realm” that we gained for free as being part of our western civilization apparently and coded in our language in the very word “idea”.
At first, when we discover the notion of relativity, it can be mind blowing: what if everything is a matter of perspective and nothing is objective?
But as Donna Haraway points out, these are two sides of the same coin, both expressions of ideas of universal absolutes, invoking notions of everythings and nothings that apply to all and everybody without distinction. Everything is relative! Nothing is relative!
Longino adds a nice wrinkle; Perhaps objectivity is possible in a systemic fashion where the universalism of sciences that attempt to work towards objectivity needs to find some equilibrium between all of the tensions that form from all the different social groups that have a stake in a notion of objectivity. The various processes of this tension perhaps actively forms what’s considered objectivity in an ongoing, ever changing basis, living on the plucked strings as they vibrate and not on the pegs at the ends of the instrument.
A taste of Haraway’s situatedness, I gave in my account of the difficulty of sourcing our own knowledge as most of what we learn is anonymized, which often masquerades as objective “facts” when lacking a source and later as relativistic “opinions” when the world suddenly seems all relative. But if you can source as much of your own knowledge as you can, taking responsibility for your own “partial perspective”, then you can at least participate in some FORM of objectivity because at the very least, you have grounded your OWN stance.
So for me, I think it’s possible to treat the notion of “a totality of objectivity” as a mythological striving that’s both incredibly absurd and crucially important. As primates, as Haraway reminds us humorously we are, we need our meanings stabilized. Sense-making and myth-making might occupy the same space, a cooperative alignment – a performative dance of “we are creating/doing/using objectivity” that has pragmatic usefulness.
Adding to the absurdity, for scientific knowledge to function as an active set of process, it seems we primates must also doubt the very notion of objectivity while also believing in it in a swirling, iterative, communicative fashion, belief and doubt forming an ever moving yin-yang as it were where the paradoxical point of stability is change and change the only stability.
So yes, scientific objectivity matters, even if we must occasionally laugh at the absurdity of our own belief in its mythology at all when laying in bed at 3AM. It is useful on a practical and theoretical level and it is in our natures to believe and do, so we continue striving as we must.
Shared meaning propels us forward, ever evolving and collective. Our partial perspectives grounded in honest dialogue with self and other create this shared meaning in an ongoing basis; such is objectivity.
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