A History of Objectivity

I've been remiss in not linking to Benjamin Cohen's incredibly interesting series of posts on scientific objectivity.

The mere fact that objectivity *has* a history is revealing. It's more typical that the timeless, ahuman connotation of "objectivity" renders it the precise sort of thing that does not change throughout history. Subjectivity certainly does, since people change. But objectivity would seem to be ahistorical.

It is not.

In their 1992 article, by looking across scientific atlases and forms of visual representation across the nineteenth century and to the mid-twentieth, they showed that what it took to be objective shifted, that objectivity as a concept and staple of scientific practice is historically contingent. To be more academic about it, they argue (p. 83), specifically, "that [the mechanical, noninterventionist] form of scientific objectivity emerged only in the mid-nineteenth century and is conceptually distinct from earlier attempts to be "true to nature" in its methods (mechanical), its morals (restrained), and its metaphysics (individualized)."

We might learn from their work that how we conceptualize "objectivity" today is also historically contingent.

It sounds like an incredibly trite observation, but my own experience in a lab gave me a deep appreciation for how deeply embedded this mechanical model of objectivity is in the modern scientific process. We automatically assume that the best data is a by-product of impersonal machines, with the gold-standard being the latest technical innovation. Ten years ago, it was PCR, so that every neuroscience paper was built around a series of hazy gray and black lines.

Now, it's the DNA microarray and fMRI. A hundred years ago it was machines that measured nerve reaction times. Who knows what it will be next year? My point, though, is that it's incredibly easy to forget that our descriptions of the mind and brain are framed by these mechanical techniques. The PCR machine doesn't see reality as it is - it sees reality in the only way it knows how, which is as a series of short snippets of DNA. The limitations of these "objective" machines - I put objective in sarcastic quotes because my own experience with PCR left me convinced that the machine hated me - too often end up limiting the types of questions that we consider scientific. In other words, when we pretend that objectivity must be mechanical - William James ridiculed this approach way back in the 19th century as "brass instrument psychology" - we let our technical advances in lab methods become substitutes for critical thought. We confuse measurement with understanding. We pretend that the most pristine form of objectivity is adding enzymes and primers to a microcentrifuge tube and waiting for the PCR cycles to run their course.

Obviously, we'll always need experimental tools and techniques. But it's important to remember that every new technique, even as it opens up new realms for investigation, comes with a set of blinders.

For more, check out the new book, "Objectivity," by Peter Galison and Lorraine Datson.