http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-objectivity/
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okay, let's see what we've got here. aka notes.
18.1.2015
1. intro
1.1. first of all, if you can decide whether to spend 3 hours of your spare time watching the dead poets society or reading this article, do not hesitate, make the right choice - watch the movie.
1.2. why will be this article useful for you?
1.2.1. you can improve your vocabulary. you can then woo women (or men).
1.2.2. you lack of acronyms. you can add vfi, vnt, and vlt.
1.2.3. you are fortunate enough to find somebody to personally talk about objectivity. you will be able to guide the conversation.
1.2.5. you can conclude, that it's worth reading some Kuhn or Weber, or even Feyerabend.
1.2.6. the article is free from androcentrism. what is more, it seems to be gynocentric as it often refers to scientists in general as she, instead of he or they.
1.2.7. "science are not, or should not be influenced by particular perspectives, value commitments, community bias or personal interests - as the author states at the beginning - "The ideal of objectivity has been criticized repeatedly in philosophy of science, questioning both its value and its attainability" you will see that on this the article does not change a thing either.
1.3. what you gain reading the notes?
1.3.1. you'll have a 7 pages summary instead of 34 pages.
1.3.2. my notes favor the ideas of Weber, Kuhn and Feyerabend. If you also think they are the most important actors in this field, you can save time by reading only the following.
1.3.3. along with text you will see some nice picture.
1.3.4. the highlighted version of the full article will soon be available.
3.15. you can put in context my add-on to the article. which is WTF. It comes already with 2 meanings. A. the solution for the acronym is double-value added terms freeing. you will read about thick and thin terms. now, suppose you have thick term, like cruel. it contains normative and descriptive content. you want to deprive it from its descriptive content. now, using the wtf you can do so. how? you change the word! to a word similar in meaning, but not containing descriptive content. you use for example wrong. you do not say she is cruel. you say her actions are wrong. B. double-value laden theory freeing. you see poor Kuhn. he invented vlt and now comes wtf. wtf means in this that the theory is not only value-laden but there is already two value. a contextual and an epistemic one. thus, with wtf you can easily liberate your theory. be aware, quick decision needed. how. you put it down, that you use wtf. and it is that simple. if you use wtf do not forget to write it in your paper. and name the source.
2. NOTES
2.1. you can learn that "objectivity is a value (and) it comes in degrees". and there is product - and process objectivity. the first concerns scientific products. the second meaning "that scientific processes and methods that characterize it (the science) neither depend on contingent social and ethical values, nor on the individual bias of a scientist".
2.2. and there are 4 conceptions:
2.2.1. faithfulness to facts
important element: the view from nowhere (=absolute conception).
this covers: "Humans experience the world from a perspective. (and) There is a conception of objectivity that presupposes that there are two kinds of qualities: ones that vary with the perspective one has or takes, and ones that remain constant through changes of perspective. The latter are the objective properties." Why is this good? We've got an answer: "A (...) reason to find the view from nowhere attractive is that if the world came in structures as characterized by it and we did have access to it, we could use our knowledge of it to ground predictions. (because) explanations and predictions grounded in what's really there rather than in a distorted image of it."
objectivity ≠ generalization as "all swans are white are directly learned from observations (say, of the color of swans) but they do not represent the view from nowhere (for one thing, the view from nowhere doesn't have colors)".
So can the results of scientific measurements and experiments be aperspectival?
The short answer is no. In Collins' words "in order to know whether an experimental result is correct, one first needs to know whether the apparatus producing the result is reliable. But one doesn't know whether the apparatus is reliable unless one knows that it produces correct results in the first place and so on and so on ad infinitum." (this is called experimenter's regress)
Other theorists think that "all human knowledge is at base human knowledge and is therefore necessarily perspectival. Not only is perspectivality the human condition, it is also a good thing to have." Some say that scientific knowledge is essentially a social product. Thus, in response to the failures of attempts to define objectivity as faithfulness of theory to facts, Longino concludes that "social criticism fulfills crucial functions in securing the epistemic success of science." She differentiate contextual and transformative empiricism and sees objectivity rather in the idea that many and competing voices are heard. The criticism on this is quite obvious: "how many and which voices must be heard for science to be objective? (and) The condition of equality of intellectual requires only “qualified” practitioners to equally share authority—but who qualifies as “qualified”?"
Therefore " There is no guarantee that democratized science leads to true theories, or even reliable ones."
2.2.3. absence of personal bias
Let's face the Value-Free Ideal, aka vfi. Weber tells us which values affect science: "(i) the choice of a scientific research problem; (ii) the gathering of
evidence in relation to the problem; (iii) the acceptance of a scientific
hypothesis or theory as an adequate answer to the problem on the basis of the
evidence; (iv) the proliferation and application of scientific research results." Continuing with the critics of the vfi - ", the gap between evidence and theory must be
filled in by scientific values. (e.g.) Simplicity and accuracy are both scientific values. (...) for
instance, econometricians have a preference for solving curve-fitting problems
by means of linear regression, thereby valuing simplicity over accuracy". And "Kuhn claims that
epistemic values define the shared commitments of science, that is, the
standards of theory assessment that characterize the scientific approach as a
whole. (there are) subjective differences in ranking and applying
epistemic values" - as emphasized by Kuhn. However "In most views, the objectivity and authority of science is not threatened by epistemic, but only by contextual (non-cognitive) values. Contextual values are moral, personal, social, political and cultural values such as pleasure, justice and equality, conservation of the natural environment and diversity" For example, the "preference bias is defined by Wilholt as the infringement of conventional standards of the research community, with the aim of arriving at a particular result, is clearly epistemically harmful".
And now we have the the definitions of our favourite acronyms: VFI: "Scientists should strive to minimize the influence of contextual values on scientific reasoning, e.g., in gathering evidence and assessing/accepting scientific theories. and VNT, that deals with wether the vfi is attainable - Value-Neutrality Thesis (VNT): Scientists can—at least in principle—gather evidence and assess/accept theories without making contextual value judgments."
And the answer is NO. as stated in VLT, that is, scientists cannot gather
evidence and assess/accept theories without making contextual value judgments. We have epistemic values on the one hand and contextual
values on the other.The use of language in descriptions of scientific
hypotheses and results also poses a challenge to VNT. As in "Putnam's example,
the word “cruel”. The statement “Susan is a cruel teacher” entails certain
statements about Susan's behavior towards her pupils. It has descriptive content. But it also expresses our moral disapproval of
Susan's behavior. To call someone cruel is to reprehend him or her. The term has therefore also normative
content. Thick
ethical terms are terms that, like cruel, have a mixed descriptive and
normative content. They contrast with “thin” ethical terms that are
purely normative: “good”/“bad”, “ought”/“must not”, “right”/“wrong” and so
on." And according to John Dupré "thick ethical terms are ineliminable from science" Moreover, he thinks that "there are many scientific statements that are value-free but they are value-free because their truth or falsity does not matter to us". Also, "ethical judgments and contextual values enter the scientist's core activity of accepting and rejecting hypotheses, and the VNT stands refuted."
How to overcome this? Maybe the scientist should just refrain at all from the essentially
pragmatic decision to accept or reject a hypothesis and restrict herself to
gathering and interpreting the evidence. But, like Levi conclude after thorough observation: "scientists commit themselves to
certain standards of inference when they become a member of the profession. The community standards as conventional standards may eliminate any room
for contextual ethical judgment on behalf of the scientist: they determine when
he/she should accept a hypothesis as established."In the pursuit of the TRUTH - In the opinion of Kitcher "science, then, doesn't aim at truth simpliciter but rather at something more narrow: truth worth pursuing from the point of view of our cognitive, practical and social goals. Any truth that is worth pursing in this sense is what he calls a “significant truth”.
"Lacey distinguishes three
components or interpretations of the VFI: impartiality, neutrality and
autonomy. Impartiality implies that theories are solely accepted or
appraised in virtue of their contribution to the epistemic values of science,
such as truth, accuracy or explanatory power. In particular, the choice of
theories is not influenced by contextual values. Neutrality means that
scientific theories make no value statements about the world: they are
concerned with what there is, not with what there should be. Finally,
scientific autonomy means that the scientific agenda is shaped by the
desire to increase scientific knowledge has been argued that the VFI is not desirable at
all, and that contextual values have no
place in scientific method."
Criticism towards vfi:
- at a descriptive level, it is clear that autonomy of science ften fails in practice due to the presence of external interests, e.g., funding agencies and industry lobbies.it has been argued that the VFI is not desirable at all.
- Feminist philosophers have argued that science often carries a heavy androcentric values, for instance in biological theories about sex, gender and rape
Douglas (2009: 7–8) proposes that the epistemic authority of science can be detached from its autonomy by distinguishing between direct and indirect roles for values in science. she calls this detached objectivity. What is this? She distinguishes between values as “reasons in themselves”, that is, treating them as evidence or defeaters for evidence (direct role, illegitimate) and as “helping to decide what should count as a sufficient reason for a choice” (indirect role, legitimate)
Along with Weber's and Kuhn's idea Feyerabend point of view seems to be the most correct, when he speaks about the tyranny of the method. "He vociferously denies the VFI and also the VNT by his claim that Western science is loaded with all kinds of pernicious values." He thinks, that "science must be protected from a “rule of rationality”, identified with strict adherence to scientific method: such rules only suppress an open exchange of ideas, extinguish scientific creativity and prevent a free and truly democratic science."
MORE FROM FEYERABEND
"In his classic “Against
Method” Feyerabend elaborates on this criticism by examining
a famous episode in the history of science: the development of Galilean
mechanics and the discovery of the Jupiter moons. In superficial treatments of
this episode, it is stressed that an obscurantist and value-driven Catholic
Church forced Galilei to recant from a scientifically superior position backed
by value-free, objective findings. But in fact, Feyerabend argues, the Church
had the better arguments by the standards of 17th century science. Their
conservatism regarding their Weltanschauung was scientifically backed:
Galilei's telescopes were unreliable for celestial observations, and many
well-established phenomena (no fixed star parallax, invariance of laws of
motion) could at first not be explained in the heliocentric system. Hence,
scientific method was not on Galilei's side, but on the side of the Church who
gave preference to the old, Ptolemaic worldview. With hindsight, Galilei
managed to achieve groundbreaking scientific progress just because he
deliberately violated rules of scientific reasoning, because he stubbornly
stuck to a problematic approach until decisive theoretical and technological
innovations were made. Hence Feyerabend's dictum “Anything goes”: no
methodology whatsoever is able to capture the creative and often irrational
ways by which science deepens our understanding of the world. (...) 
Feyerabend sums up his view as
follows:
a
community will use science and scientists in a way that agrees with its values
and aims and it will correct the scientific institutions in its midst to bring
them closer to these aims. 
Let's quantify! According to Lord Kelvin's dictum: "when you cannot express it in
numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the
beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to
the stage of science, whatever the matter may be." "What has
been measured and quantified has been verified relative to a standard. (Nevertheless) the
truth, say, that the Eiffel Tower is 324 meters tall is relative to a standard
unit and conventions about how to use certain instruments, so it is neither
aperspectival nor free from assumptions, but it is independent of the person
making the measurement. (...) Moreover, making sense of measurement results
requires interpretation"
Now, we have the notion: mechanical objectivity. "The artist Salvador Dalí, no
doubt unwittingly, describes his surrealist paintings as a product of mechanical
objectivity in Daston and Galison's sense: In
truth I am no more than an automaton that registers, without judgment and as
exactly as possible, the dictate of my subconscious: my dreams, hypnagogic
images and visions, and all the concrete and irrational manifestations of the
dark and sensational world discovered by Freud."
In his book Trust in Numbers, Theodore
Porter writes, "measurement instruments and quantitative procedures
originate in commercial and administrative needs and affect the ways in which
the natural and social sciences are practiced, not the other way around.(...) Administering large territories or controlling
diverse people and processes is not always possible on the basis of personal
trust and thus “objective procedures” (which do not require trust in persons)
took the place of “subjective judgments” (which do). Second,
he argues that quantification is a technology of distrust and weakness, and not
of strength. It is weak administrators who do not have the social status,
political support or professional solidarity to defend their experts'
judgments."
A great step forward - "The National Academy of Sciences has accepted the
principle that scientists should declare their conflicts of interest and
financial holdings before offering policy advice, or even information to the government." In fact, "Measurement and quantification help to reduce the
influence of personal biases and idiosyncrasies and
they reduce the need to trust the scientist or government official, but often
at a cost.".
As for the statistics: "the Bayesian approach to confirmation and evidence (...) is outspokenly subjective: probability is
used for quantifying a scientist's subjective degrees of belief in a
particular hypothesis." With regard to the the philosophical motivation, and different
understanding of confirmation judgments - the Bayesian express a genuinely subjective
uncertainty judgment. In the same way that deductive logic does not judge
the correctness of the premises but just advises you what to infer from them, Bayesian
inductive logic tells you how to change your own attitudes as soon as you
encounter evidence. Bayesian
statisticians almost uniformly use the Bayes factor, that is, the
ratio of prior to posterior odds in favor of a hypothesis. In the case of two parametric hypotheses H0:θ∈Θ0 vs. H1:θ∈Θ1, the
Bayes factor can be written as: B01(x):=p(H0∣x)p(H1∣x)⋅p(H1)p(H0)=∫θ∈Θ0p(x∣θ)p(θ)dθ∫θ∈Θ1p(x∣θ)p(θ)dθ(3)
That above is nice, isn't it. meets all the requirements - long enough, difficult enough, usable enough.
Okay, above, it is really nice, but what about the statistical significance: "the famous 5% threshold for statistical
significance is clearly arbitrary and anything but objective. There is no
intersubjectively compelling justification why this or any other particular
standard of evidence should be used in order to quantify the concept of
significance. (...) even in the absence of a causal relation between
two quantities, one may find a significant (and therefore publishable) result
by pure chance. The probability that this
happens by accident is equal to the statistical significance threshold (i.e.,
5%). (...) Ioannidis (2005) therefore concludes that most
published research findings are false—an effect partially due to the
frequentist logic of evidence. That's it. As stated in the text: "Summing up our findings, no statistical theory of
evidence manages to eliminate all sources of personal bias and idiosyncrasy."
And of course, we do not miss Weber here. His idea are still held. Such as the following: "unlike the natural sciences whose aim it is to
establish natural laws and which proceed by experimentation and causal
analysis, the social sciences seek understanding (“Verstehen”) of social
phenomena, the interpretive examination of the meanings individuals attribute
to their actions. (...) All knowledge of cultural reality, as may be seen,
is always knowledge from particular points of view." Why? He continues - "The reason for this is twofold. First, social
reality is too complex to admit of full description and explanation. So we have
to select. (...) second, in the social sciences
we want to understand social phenomena in their individuality, that is, in
their unique configurations that have significance for us. What tool to use to resolve this situation? "Values solve a selection problem. They tell us what
research questions we ought to address because they inform us about the
cultural importance of social phenomena".
Weber makes it clear - "scientific truth is precisely what is valid for all
who seek the truth." He uses the word “Werturteilsstreit, that is, "given a policy goal, a social scientist could make
recommendations about effective strategies to reach the goal; but social
science was to be value-free in the sense of not taking a stance on the
desirability of the goals themselves. This leads us to our conception of
objectivity as freedom from values."
Rational Theory Choice
Paternotte stresses out, "that an agent is rational from [rational choice theory]'s point of view
does not mean that the course of action she will choose is objectively optimal. Desires do not have
to align with any objective measure of “goodness”. (...)Optimality is determined by the agent's desires, not the converse." Also, "economics cannot distinguish between choices that
maximize happiness, choices that reflect a sense of duty, or choices that are
the response to some impulse. Moreover, standard economics takes no position on
the question of which of those objectives the agent should pursue."
2.2.4. instrumentalism
In addition to this, "There is no reason to think that sciences that represent the world from a perspective, in which non-epistemic values play important roles in scientific decision-making and in which personal elements affect outcomes cannot be trusted by the public. Scientific objectivity in the instrumentalist conception is thus both valuable, as gives us something worth pursuing, and attainable." Sounds good, but what are the cons? "Suppose we have a domain of science which, at a particular place and time, fares very well with respect to promoting public trust. How are we to tell which features of these scientific practices are responsible for the success? It is obviously impossible to run experiments. Just observing and comparing historical episodes is not likely to clinch results as there will always be numerous differences between any two domains, historical episodes and places.
Or suppose that a science loses public trust (say, as macro and financial
economics did after the
Financial Crisis after 2007). What might be effective strategies to regain it?
Arguably, instrumentalism raises more questions than it answers."
2.2.5 In the conclusion part of text the author highlights the opinion of Popper (need of thorough critical attitude concerning claims and findings) and Longino (many voices are heard, equally respected and subjected to accepted standards). That is, we did not come closer to find a common sense in the field of objectivity-researches. Nonetheless, the final words are interesting and seem to be right: "it should come as no surprise that finding a positive characterization of what makes science objective is hard. If we knew an answer, we would have done no less than solve the problem of induction (because we would know what procedures or forms of organization are responsible for the success of science).
This will really be a great achievement.
image credits:
streets.mn ; divinecafe.co.uk; highlandohservices.co.uk ; belle-phrase-et-question.skyrock.com ; NN 3,5,7-14
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