Objectivity: Philosophical Aspects

Objectivity: Philosophical Aspects Paolo Savoia, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This article is a revision of the previous edition article by B. Leiter, volume 16, pp 10793–10797, Ó 2001, Elsevier Ltd.

Abstract This article is an overview of philosophical conceptions of objectivity, and it is divided into three parts. First, it describes metaphysical objectivity, which concerns the extent to which the existence and character of some class of entities depends on the states of mind of persons. Second, it describes epistemological objectivity, which concerns the extent to which we are capable of achieving knowledge about those things that are objective. Finally, it shows that metaphysical and epistemological considerations of objectivity are also the focus of sharp critiques by post-positivist and feminist philosophers, who focus on the procedural nature of objectivity, and of an emergent historical–epistemological way of analyzing objectivity that claims to be of primary philosophical relevance.

Traditionally, there are two main kinds of philosophical questions about objectivity, mostly debated in Anglo-American philosophy, which in turn takes up some of the classical features of that notion: metaphysical and epistemological. Metaphysical objectivity concerns the extent to which the existence and character of some class of entities depends on the states of mind of persons (i.e., their knowledge, judgment, belief, perception, or response). Epistemological objectivity concerns the extent to which we are capable of achieving knowledge about those things that are metaphysically objective. But metaphysical and epistemological considerations of objectivity are also the focus of sharp critiques by postpositivist and feminist philosophers, who focused on the procedural nature of objectivity; more recently, a historical– epistemological way of analyzing objectivity also emerged that claims to be of primary philosophical relevance. Various streams of contemporary thought thus put into question the metaphysical and traditional notion of objectivity following a variety of purposes: some of them want to substitute it with a more humble and ‘communitarian’ concept of objectivity; some want to destroy it; some want to understand how it historically came into being.

Metaphysical Objectivity An entity (or a class of entities) is metaphysically objective if its existence and character are independent of the human mind. This ‘independence requirement’ is central to metaphysical objectivity (Brower, 1993; Sober, 1982), though its proper interpretation raises two important questions: first, in what way must a metaphysically objective thing be ‘independent’ of the human mind; and second, how much independence of the relevant kind is required?

What Kind of Independence? The existence and character of some entity might be independent of the human mind in three senses: causally, constitutionally, and cognitively. Only the last two will matter for metaphysical objectivity. An entity is causally independent of

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the human mind as long as the causal trajectory producing it did not involve the human mind. Shoes, for example, are causally dependent on the human mind because the existence and character of any particular pair of shoes depends causally on a cobbler having had certain beliefs and desires (e.g., a desire to make a particular kind of shoe, and true beliefs about what needed to be done to produce such shoes). By contrast, the existence and character of the earth is causally independent of the human mind: no human intentions played a causal role in bringing about the existence of the earth or its specific character. Metaphysical objectivity, however, does not require causal independence. Even entities that are causally dependent on the human mind can be mind-independent in one of the other two senses (discussed later), and thus still be metaphysically objective. An entity is constitutionally independent of the human mind if its existence and character are not constituted by or identical with the mind. The claim that some entity is metaphysically objective almost always involves denying its constitutional dependence on the mind. The exception is for psychological entities (e.g., beliefs, desires, emotions): such things cannot be constitutionally independent of the mind because they just are facets of the mind. Yet surely psychological facts may also be metaphysically objective. If so, it must be in the final sense of ‘independence’ from the mind. An entity is cognitively independent of the human mind if its existence and character does not depend on any cognizing state of persons, for example, belief, sensory perception, judgment, response, and so forth. (A ‘cognizing’ state is one that is receptive to features of the world and thus is a potential source of knowledge of the world.) A metaphysically objective thing is, accordingly, what it is independent of what anyone believes or would be justified in believing about it (or what anyone perceives it to be or would perceive it to be under certain conditions, etc.). On this account, psychological facts about a person are metaphysically objective in virtue of not depending on what an observer of that person believes or would be justified in believing about that person’s psychological state. Any kind of metaphysically objective fact (except for psychological facts) must necessarily be constitutionally independent of the mind. All metaphysically objective facts must also be cognitively independent. The common-sense picture of

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Objectivity: Philosophical Aspects

the natural world presumes that its contents are metaphysically objective in this sense: ordinary people think that atoms and zebras and sulfur are not simply identical with the mind, and that they are what they are independent of what people may believe or be justified in believing about them. Science, then, aspires to epistemological objectivity by trying to accurately depict the way things (objectively) are.

How Much Independence? There can be degrees of cognitive independence, and thus degrees of objectivity that may be distinguished; not everything that is objective may prove to be objective in the sense in which common sense understands the constituent elements of the natural world to be objective. The crucial notion for cognitive independence is independence from the cognizing states of persons: beliefs, sensory perceptions, judgments, responses, and the like. It is possible, then, to distinguish four kinds of claims about objectivity. According to subjectivism, what seems right to the cognizer determines what is right. According to minimal objectivism, what seems right to the community of cognizers determines what is right. According to modest objectivism, what seems right to cognizers under appropriate or ideal conditions determines what is right. According to strong objectivism, what seems right to cognizers never determines what is right. Subjectivism and strong objectivism represent the two classical and opposed philosophical positions of antiquity: Protagoras held that “man is the measure of all things” (subjectivism) (Plato, Theaetetus *152a, *166a–*8b), while Plato embraced a kind of strong objectivism (Plato, Phaedo *741–*75b, Republic *475–*80, *508d-e). The Protagorean position denies the objectivity of the world and everything in it: whatever each individual takes to be the case is the case (for that individual), and thus the existence and character of any particular thing depends (epistemically) on the (individual) human mind. By contrast, the Platonist affirms the complete and absolute objectivity of the world: what really is the case about the world is never fixed by what any person or all persons believe, has (or have) reasons to believe, or could have reasons to believe. Mistake, on a global scale, even under ideal epistemic conditions, is a possibility for the Platonist. Platonists are often called ‘idealists,’ but they believe in the absolute reality of Ideas, so this latter position can be described as ‘realism,’ or better, ‘metaphysical realism.’ Minimal objectivism and modest objectivism occupy conceptual space between these two familiar, historical positions. Minimal objectivism holds that whatever the community of cognizers takes to be the case is the case. This view, like its pure Protagorean cousin, issues in a kind of relativism (what is the case is relative to a particular community of cognizers), but by abstracting away from the subjectivity of the individual cognizer, it introduces a minimum amount of objectivity. It is also a kind of objectivity with some useful domains of application. What is and is not fashionable, for example, is probably minimally objective. What seems right to John about what is fashionable can be objectively wrong: John may be out of sync with the styles of his community, and thus it would be correct to say, “John is mistaken in thinking that a plaid shirt and striped pants go well together.” But it does not seem that the entire community

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can be wrong about what is fashionable: in that sense, what seems right to the community determines what really is fashionable. In most domains, however, minimal objectivity would be viewed as too close to subjectivism for comfort. Modest objectivity thus abstracts even further away from dependence on actual cognizers, individual or communal. Something is modestly objective if its existence and character depends only on what cognizers would believe under certain idealized conditions for cognition, conditions like full information and evidence, perfect rationality, and the like. (By hypothesis, under ideal conditions, all cognizers would come to the same belief about things.) Everyone on the planet can be wrong in his or her beliefs about a modestly objective entity; beliefs formed under ideal epistemic conditions, however, can never be wrong. This latter point is what differentiates modest from strong objectivity. Some philosophers have defended the idea that the truth about the world is at best modestly objective (e.g., the doctrine Putnam calls ‘internal realism’ in Putnam, 1981): what is true in any domain is simply whatever inquirers would agree upon under epistemically ideal conditions.

Alternative Metaphysical Conceptions In the so-called continental tradition, the philosophical movement that had the greatest impact on the contemporary philosophy of objectivity, also by establishing a solid base for various forms of criticism of scientific objectivity, is phenomenology. Phenomenology gave birth to a variety of ways of thinking, but its founder is commonly recognized as Edmund Husserl. The starting point of phenomenology was the debate on the status of the objects of thought and logic between those who thought them to be purely logic – objective – entities (Frege) and those who believed them to be psychological – subjective – entities (Brentano). Husserl criticized the psychology-oriented position, but maintained that concepts and objects have their origin in the ‘intentional’ activity of the mind: every object must correspond to the conscience of it. In other words, Husserl’s problem was to conciliate the universal and objective nature of logical objects with the subjective experience of the cognizing mind. Husserl’s phenomenology of the experience of the mind did not want to reduce objects to psychological states, nor to separate objective contents from the concrete activity of the mind, and he claimed that what had to be investigated was the ‘phenomenon’ itself, not conceived as opposed to a thing in itself (Kant), but as the way in which reality manifests itself in the mind. In order to do so, Husserl proposed a method he called epoché, consisting in freeing oneself from all the psychological and logical assumptions and describing the pure experience of objective reality as it appeared in the mind, thus embracing a strong idea of objectivity as a description of the original and essential correlation between the mind and the external world. In the view of its founder, phenomenology had to provide the foundation of all scientific thought (Husserl, 1970). Husserl’s philosophy later took the path of an extreme transcendentalism, embracing the absolute reality of the mind as a sort of renewed Cartesian cogito, while his early works

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became the basis for the development of Heidegger’s ontology. But by the 1930s almost all the members of the phenomenological school shared the view that objective knowledge, in the form of ‘science’ – often called ‘objectivism’ – became a mere technical activity more and more separated from the essence of philosophy and of authentic knowledge. Influenced by historicist thinkers such as Willhelm Dilthey, and by Heidegger’s early existential analysis, Husserl and the phenomenologists elaborated the concept of the ‘lifeworld,’ a world of intersubjective concrete experience of reality that is the background, and the source, of all human activity (science and objective knowledge included). This preconceptual historical and social world of original and shared intersubjective experiences and activities is the basis of scientific objectivity, and as such it allowed phenomenologists to criticize science for detaching itself from the lifeworld and becoming a hollow and dangerous technological dominion over the natural and human world. Before becoming the explicit focus of natural science, the world is this set of shared horizons of meanings and experiences; objectivity was possible only insofar it remained connected to the intersubjective exchanges it came from (Husserl, 1970a). This does not mean that phenomenological thought has been antiscientific, but rather that it opened the way to procedural conceptions of scientific knowledge and objectivity, which could also be thought of in social, historical, and political terms.

Epistemological Objectivity The demand for epistemological objectivity is the demand to be free of bias and other subjective factors that distort cognition, that prevent the things being cognized from presenting themselves as they really (metaphysically) are. More precisely, epistemological objectivity requires that the cognitive processes and mechanisms by which beliefs about the world are formed be constituted in such a way that they at least tend toward the production of accurate representations of how things are. Notice that epistemological objectivity does not require that cognitive processes always yield true representations: that would demand more than is attainable and more than is even expected. Epistemological objectivity obtains when either of the following is true: (1) the cognitive processes at issue reliably arrive at accurate representations, or (2) the cognitive processes are free of factors that are known to produce inaccurate representations. The obstacles to epistemological objectivity will vary with the domain under consideration. In the sciences generally, and the social sciences in particular, ‘values’ are often thought to present a special obstacle to epistemological objectivity insofar as they influence the choice of research topics and, most seriously, the selection and evaluation of evidence (Weber, 1949). As one author explains: “Values are thought to damage inquiry epistemically because they are held to be subjective – they come from us, not the world. Therefore, to allow values to influence inquiry into the nature of the world is to allow such inquiry to be subject to a control other than the world itself ” (Railton, 1985: p. 818). Epistemic values or norms – for example, norms about when evidence warrants belief – must of course play a role in all scientific inquiry; the worry is about nonepistemic values or

norms, like the political ideology of the inquirer or the political climate in which inquiry takes place. Yet even here the effect on objectivity depends on the context and the precise role values play in inquiry. For example, where the political climate is hostile to the discovery of certain kinds of objective truths, only those inquirers motivated by a contrarian political ideology themselves are likely to pursue those objective truths (Miller, 1991). Here, of course, values supply a motive for allowing ‘the nature of the world’ to control the course of inquiry, rather than interceding and distorting cognition. More generally, one “need not require freedom from all value and bias in order to have objective inquiry” since “there may yet exist mechanisms of belief formation that incorporate feedback from the object to the inquiring subject” (Railton, 1985: p. 818). The mechanism at issue is causal: metaphysically objective things make themselves felt causally, whatever our theoretical preconceptions and values. This, however, is merely an external criterion for objectivity, and does not yet show how inquirers could determine whether or not their inquiry is epistemologically objective. Here, however, inquirers might look for certain familiar markers of epistemological objectivity, like the existence of intersubjective agreement in judgment, the publicity of evidence and standards of proof, and the reproducibility of the evidence for a judgment by different inquirers: “when these conditions are met, subjective contributions and biases will be excluded as far as possible” (Railton, 1985: p. 818). That physics constitutes a cross-cultural, global community of inquirers strongly suggests that it is epistemologically objective: if it were not, then one would expect local differences (in interests, ideology, and the like) to lead to markedly different discourses of physics.

Epistemological Critiques The epistemology of objectivity has proved to be a fruitful field for critiques and different approaches aiming at reforming, correcting, or destroying the metaphysical notion of objectivity. In the first place, metaphysical thinking seems to imply as its epistemological correlative, a ‘view from nowhere’ (Nagel, 1997). Secondly, objectivity has been conceived as a point of attraction of a series of values and attitudes like detachment, impartiality, neutrality, lack of biases, and so forth, which should guide science toward truth via objectivity. Third, objectivity has been conceived in this way as coinciding with an ahistorical core of truth, rationality, and reality. Post-positivistic philosophy put into question all these assumptions: the idea of the dual structure of knowledge (scheme and reality, or language and empirical observation); the ahistorical nature of objective knowledge (knowledge is a historical process and as such it does not follow a linear line of progress); and the supposed moral neutrality of objective knowledge (objective knowledge is an intersubjective process, constitutively biased, dependent upon social and cultural assumptions). Already in the 1930s the French philosopher and historian of science Gaston Bachelard put into question these three assumptions. In a series of very influential texts, he wrote a ‘psychoanalysis of objective knowledge’ that conceived objectivity in historical, dynamic, and procedural terms. The

Objectivity: Philosophical Aspects word ‘psychoanalysis’ should not mislead us here, because it did not refer to the empirical process of the knowing individual mind, but rather to a collective psychology of knowledge itself. According to Bachelard, the epistemological problem of objective knowledge had to be raised in terms of obstacles. These ‘epistemological obstacles’ are not external obstacles that impose themselves upon knowledge (such as human fallibility) but are internal to the act of knowing itself, as its necessary inertia. The obstacles against objective knowledge are not simply errors that a progressively more perfect and objective knowledge rectifies, but are one of the conditions of the possibility of objective knowledge itself: indeed, there is no possible knowledge that is not in a dialectic relation with a previous obstacle. Influenced by phenomenology, Bachelard also believed that such a philosophy was insufficient because it was too abstract and it ended up underestimating the material and procedural aspects of objectivity, and thus he spoke of a ‘phenomenotechnics’ of objective knowledge. There are four main epistemological obstacles that scientific knowledge has to overcome in order to be objective. The first one is common opinion or common sense, with which objective knowledge has to break. The second is the notion of an original and first experience, which culminates in the notion, or better the myth, of the ‘given’ (equally put into question by postanalytic philosopher Wilfred Sellars) as the natural data upon which objectivity would be built; on the contrary, objective experimental science constructs its results upon nature and sometimes against it. The third major obstacle is the ‘realist obstacle,’ exemplified by the concept of substance, which is the naive way of conceiving the reality of the world. Bachelard did not advocate relativism, but tried to highlight the fact that reality was a process and that objectivity was a result of a complex interaction between subjects and objects. Finally, there was the ‘animist obstacle,’ which consisted in attributing magic and self-explanatory power to the concept of life, the valorization of the notion of life and ‘the vital’ in the pursuit of objective knowledge. Objective knowledge was in this picture the result of a historical process of intellectual catharsis and selfdiscipline (Bachelard, 2002). The so-called French tradition of epistemological history picked up this idea of procedural objectivity and, purified of its more psychological features, applied it mostly to the analysis of the life sciences and the human sciences. In the Anglo-American context, the philosophy of Popper has been a transitional step toward more radical epistemological critiques. Popper believes that the problem of objectivity has to be approached from the point of view of that of realism, the simple idea that the world exists independently of the human mind and action. As such, science and knowledge presuppose realism. Popper’s theory of the three worlds starts from this assumption. According to it there exist: (1) the world of physical objects and physical states; (2) the world of conscious or mind states; and (3) the world of ‘objective contents of thought,’ especially scientific and poetic thought. World (1) is the world of everyday objects, like tables and trees; it is objective because other people can experience it, and it is autonomous because their existence is not dependent upon us. World (2) is that of all our psychological experiences, like emotions, memories, and so forth; it is subjective because every such state is different from that of other people, and it is not

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autonomous, because it depends upon the mind of the humans. World (3) is the world of scientific and more generally intellectual human activity. Other kinds of objects do not fall within these two worlds: words, propositions, laws, symphonies, theories, numbers, and so forth. These are not material objects, but they are nonetheless objective; even if they are produced by the human mind, once created, they produce effects that were not predictable, nor included in the subjective intentions of their producers. Language plays a decisive role in this process, because it makes public, communicable (intersubjective) an object of the private world (2) (Popper, 1972: pp. 153–165). From this theory derives that there are two kinds of knowledge: subjective and objective. Subjective knowledge is a state of mind or a disposition to behave in certain ways; objective knowledge consists in problem, theories, and argumentations as such. Traditional epistemology is mistaken because it takes scientific knowledge to be an object of world (2), thus focusing on the problem of justification, of how a private state of mind can be considered objective knowledge. Popperian epistemology wants, on the contrary, focus on problems and arguments as such, as a process of conjectures and confutations. Objective knowledge is an ever-evolving natural product of humans, and it grows through this continuous interactions of the world (3) with our subjective world (2) (Popper, 1972: pp. 106–115). A central feature of this process is a sort of continuous public rational criticism that scientists apply to their production of objective knowledge. Popper rendered more dynamic the traditional problems of metaphysics and epistemology of objectivity, but this conception of rational criticism has been criticized by postanalytic philosophers and historians of science. Starting from the 1950s, the temporal dimension entered the realm of philosophical investigations of objectivity. Kuhn saw it as belonging only to the rare periods of revolution in the science, but inapplicable to the procedures of ‘normal science,’ while scientists are engaged in conforming previously shared assumptions (Kuhn, 1962). Feyerabend (1975) went beyond Kuhn in fighting every notion of scientific method that would guarantee a more objective knowledge. Imre Lakatos developed a more rationalistic and less relativistic notion of objectivity, embodied in his ‘research programs’ theory, which wanted to harmonize Popper’s fallibilism and the critiques by Kuhn and Feyerabend. According to Lakatos, the development of the history of science is always characterized by the competition of two or more alternative research programs, built around a metaphysical core assumed as preliminary valid and not subject to criticism. Objective knowledge is not a simple process involving nature on the one hand, and scientists on the other, but a more complex one involving the historically changing research programs (Lakatos, 1978). Some of these issues have been picked up by more recent thinkers (Dworkin, 1996; Nagel, 1997). In particular, these philosophers have raised two kinds of doubts about the preceding kinds of characterizations of objectivity. First, these philosophers question whether the conception of metaphysical objectivity (especially strong metaphysical objectivity) does not presuppose a vantage point on the way things ‘really’ are to which we can have no access. Second, these philosophers

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wonder whether the conception of metaphysical objectivity as mind-independent is not a paradigm too closely tied to a picture of the objectivity of the natural world, and thus either does not make sense or should not be applied with respect to the objectivity of domains like ethics or aesthetics. In these evaluative domains, it makes no sense to ask about whether there are evaluative facts ‘out there in the world.’ The objectivity of evaluative discourse is simply a matter of its susceptibility to reasons, of our ability to subject ethical positions to rational scrutiny and discussion. Picking up and putting together the various threads of postanalytic philosophy, someone like Richard Rorty has been able to consider objectivity as a useless, or worse a dangerous, concept, and proposed to substitute alternative notions that include social, or intersubjective, practices. The traditional ideal of objectivity as the true knowledge of what is real in the external world is put into question by denying that a distinction between human interests and practices and knowledge takes place. ‘Objectivity’ can only be a settlement on the best beliefs and reasons that human beings can give to each other and share, and thus it can only be based on the consensus of the scientific community. Thus Rorty conceives the sciences as aiming toward solidarity rather than metaphysical and epistemological objectivity: scientific knowledge, with its remarkable capacity of prediction and control, is to be praised because it fulfills in the best possible way human interests, not because it attains an objective representation of the mind-independent ‘external world.’ In other words, objectivity is not transcendent with respect to the human world, but it is given by a pragmatic research for shared and applicable knowledge. Objectivity does not need to be grounded in a transcendent conception of the world and in an epistemology of representation, because objective knowledge is not an enterprise different from other human activities, and as such it is a matter of beliefs, desires, debating, and of what works better. Significantly, Rorty praises the scientific enterprise in terms of the moral virtues of the scientists, aiming at an ‘unforced agreement’ based on persuasion rather than coercion, on respect for the opinions of others, and on curiosity. By putting into question the fundamental separation between subjective interests and objective representations, some of the traditional epistemological features of objectivity – a notion he ultimately wanted to destroy – became in Rorty’s terms a moral and political model of virtues for the human community (Rorty, 1991: pp. 21–34). Another deeply influential set of epistemological criticisms toward the traditional way of conceiving objectivity comes from feminist epistemology and philosophy of science. Feminist epistemologists deal with how gender influences the processes of the production and justification of knowledge and science, and how the knowing subject, individual and collective, is shaped by gender. Feminist critique of objectivity focuses in particular on three points: (1) the idea of objectivity as absence of perspective, (2) the idea of objectivity as tied to value neutrality, and (3) the idea of metaphysical objectivity as the picture of what is really real on the world independently from the human (gendered) mind. Feminist conceptions of objectivity are thus explicitly pluralistic. Donna Haraway put into question the very fact that the scientific goal must be a single and unified vision of the world, which has historically been the vision of the dominant groups

in a given society. Thus she proposed to substitute ‘the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere’ with what has been called ‘situated knowledge.’ In this view, objectivity remains a valuable goal, but it is conceived in different terms: ‘objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits;’ it follows that only partial – gendered, embodied, socially determined – perspectives promise objective vision. Since the knowing self is limited in every possible way, objectivity cannot be anything else than a communal experience where subjects put together their perspectives without claiming to abolish them (Haraway, 1988). The emphasis on situated knowledge gave way to a general theory of knowledge called ‘standpoint knowledge,’ which argues that what happens in social relations both enables and limits, without rigidly determining, what we can know. Sandra Harding in particular has emphasized that a better vision of objectivity must not limit itself to criticize the naive individualism of traditional views, according to which objective knowledge can be attained by overcoming individual biases, but has to put into question the widely cultural assumptions held by scientific communities. Unlike ‘weak objectivity,’ relying only on an impossible neutrality, Harding proposed a ‘strong objectivity’ program focused on maximizing objectivity by detecting the values and interests that constitute the scientific projects, and by distinguishing those interests that enlarge from those that limit objectivity. Given the fact that the history of scientific practices and theories is dominated by androcentric values that benefited men, women are most likely to be critical of such values, because they have less to lose. The general conclusion is valid also for Eurocentric and bourgeois values of scientific communities: only by adopting a standpoint different from that of the dominant social groups can objectivity be maximized and more accurate empirical and theoretical accounts of the world provided. And this can in turn be obtained through ‘reflexivity,’ namely by making explicit all the partial standpoints of knowers and of the community of knowers, thus enhancing objectivity by avoiding a confusion of one’s own partial perspective with a comprehensive view, and by highlighting contingencies of representation (Harding, 1995). In a different but related vein, Helen Longino proposed a notion of objectivity as the result of the democratic life and discussion of a community of knowers, which has to have recognized places of criticism and shared standards, and must be responsive to criticism, with an equally distributed intellectual authority (Longino, 1990).

The Historical Epistemology of Objectivity ‘Objectivity’ tends to be conceptualized in terms of its opposite, ‘subjectivity.’ Subjectivity connotes variability and contingency, the perspective of an individual human subject, prey to local circumstances and molded by them into a distorting mirror. Objectivity is, by contrast, the ‘view from nowhere,’ with no local circumstances – and no perspective – to distort the mirror (Dear, 1992: pp. 619–620). In contemporary philosophy, objectivity has a ‘hybrid’ character. Lloyd (1995: p. 353) noted that ‘objective’ can mean detached, disinterested, unbiased,

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impersonal, not having a point of view; it also means public, publicly available, observable, or accessible (at least in principle); it means existing independently or separately from us: that which is really existing, Really Real, the way things really are. We can say that the first two meanings are epistemological and the third metaphysical. Historians had already emphasized the fact that objectivity is not a single idea, but rather “a sprawling collection of assumptions, attitudes, aspirations and antipathies” (Novick, 1988: p. 1; Shapin and Schaffer, 1985). In recent years, another approach to objectivity has emerged, which can be placed under the label of historical epistemology, the historical study of the scientific categories, or meta-concepts, that structure our present thoughts and organize our practices, a study that regards the history of concepts, practices, instruments, and ‘moral economies’ of sciences. The historical epistemology of objectivity is aware and takes into full account the criticism coming from feminist and postanalytic philosophy, and it starts from the fact that “before we can decide whether objectivity exists, and whether it is a good or bad thing, we must first know what objectivity is – how it functions in the practices of science” (Daston and Galison, 2007: p. 51). According to this approach, (1) objectivity has to be treated historically; (2) the history of objectivity is the history of the merging of discourses, practices, epistemologies, and moral values; (3) the history of objectivity indicates the existence of a plurality of different epistemic virtues; and (4) contrary to a purely philosophical approach, objectivity must be considered as something different from semantic, epistemological, or metaphysical conceptions of truth. Among historians of science, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison gave us the most systematic account of the history of the concept of objectivity. Their core thesis is that the epistemic virtue called objectivity became the dominant scientific norm during the second half of the nineteenth century, through the accumulation and crystallization of a series of heterogeneous elements (such as techniques, instruments, scientific institutions, the birth itself of an international scientific community), and in correspondence with a general change of meaning of the meta-concepts – that is, concepts that organize other concepts – of subjectivity and objectivity. From Kant on, they argue, these two terms underwent a sort of 180-degree inversion and quite quickly took the meaning that we are familiar with: roughly speaking, objectivity designates the matter outside the mind, and subjectivity the mental and inner sphere of thought. For example, in the late Middle Ages, thinkers such as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham (fourteenth century) believed that the meaning of the couple of adjectives objectivus/subjectivus was, respectively: things that are present in the mind/things as they are in themselves; traces of this meaning can be found even in Descartes. Since about the second half of nineteenth century, all the principal European dictionaries began to register a meaning very close to ours. The only thing that remains the same in the history of these concepts is the fact that they always are in a relationship of mutual opposition and mutual definition: objective is the nonsubjective, and vice versa. The history of the epistemic virtues related to objectivity is therefore linked to changing conceptions of subjectivity, which can be distinguished roughly as follows: the rational soul of the seventeenth century; the self as an aggregate of faculties of the eighteenth century; the post-Kantian self as a unity centered

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around the will of the nineteenth century; and finally, the vertical self, deep and unconscious, of the twentieth century (Daston and Galison, 2007: pp. 29–31). If one wishes to understand the emergence and the importance of objectivity as sets of epistemic virtues and as a scientific meta-concept, then one has to oppose it to the parallel notions of subjectivity. Daston and Galison start from two presuppositions: the self is historically determined; and it is shaped by a series of practices and exercises. In order to answer the question about the emergence of the meta-concept of objectivity one needs to look at the meta-concept of subjectivity, but starting ‘from below:’ who is the scientific self? The scientific self is anyone who becomes so as a result of the application of particular technologies of the self, deemed necessary to be a scientist. An epistemic virtue is then a melting between ethics and epistemology realized through instruments and technologies of the scientific self, regulated by an ethico-scientific ideal (Daston and Galison, 2007: pp. 198–199). Daston and Galison take up from Foucault the concept of techniques of the self and they apply it to the formation of the scientific self with special reference to the second half of the nineteenth century and to what they call ‘mechanical objectivity.’ The techniques of the self corresponding to mechanical objectivity are practices such as the training of the senses in scientific observation, the keeping of laboratory notes, the monitoring of one’s hypotheses and opinions, the canalization of one’s attention, the control of one’s beliefs and fantasies, and the suppression of the spontaneous forms of the will; the scientist applies these techniques to the scientific self and thus obtains, at the very same time, objective results, objective knowledge. In order to capture the peculiarity of nineteenthcentury mechanical objectivity, Daston and Galison make a historical comparison with other epistemic virtues, insisting on the fact that every emergence of a new epistemic virtue is not a mere substitution of the existing ones, but rather a reorganization of the field of possible scientific practices and ideals. Among them, they call ‘truth-to-nature’ the epistemic virtue dominant in the eighteenth century, characterized by the scientist’s ability of selecting and synthesizing, grasping and stylizing the essence of natural phenomena; and ‘trained judgment,’ which emerges in the first years of the twentieth century, a virtue marked by the scientist’s use of unconscious intuitions and interpretative techniques about natural phenomena (Daston and Galison, 2007: pp. 42–50).

See also: Continental Philosophy of Language; Historical Explanation, Theories of: Philosophical Aspects; Phenomenology: Philosophical Aspects; Relativism: Philosophical Aspects; Science, History of; Self: Philosophical Aspects.

Bibliography Bachelard, Gaston, 2002 [1938]. Formation of the Scientific Mind. Clinamen Press, Manchester. Brower, Bruce W., 1993. Dispositional ethical realism. Ethics 103, 221–249. Daston, Lorraine, Galison, Peter, 2007. Objectivity. Zone Books, New York. Dear, Peter, 1992. From truth to disinterestedness in the seventeenth century. Social Studies of Science 22, 619–631.

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