CDZ No such thing as "objectivity"

[Grumblenuts]

Objectivity, or minimal subjectivity, is something desired in scientific study among other things. A wishful feature, aim, target, goal. Never presumed fully achievable.

This section addresses various accounts that regard scientific objectivity essentially as a function of social practices in science and the social organization of the scientific community. All these accounts reject the characterization of scientific objectivity as a function of correspondence between theories and the world, as a feature of individual reasoning practices, or as pertaining to individual studies and experiments (see also Douglas 2011). Instead, they evaluate the objectivity of a collective of studies, as well as the methods and community practices that structure and guide scientific research. More precisely, they adopt a meta-analytic perspective for assessing the reliability of scientific results (section 5.1), and they construct objectivity from a feminist perspective: as an open interchange of mutual criticism, or as being anchored in the “situatedness” of our scientific practices and the knowledge we gain (section 5.2).

I grew up in a family environment where this type of thing was constantly being discussed, mainly because my mom was still helping to hammer out many of the information science basics widely taken for granted today. The paper linked above provides a nice, nearly current, comprehensive summary of our vastly improved handling methods in this area. Fascinating stuff. From p1:

The ideal of objectivity has been criticized repeatedly in philosophy of science, questioning both its desirability and its attainability. This article focuses on the question of how scientific objectivity should be defined, whether the ideal of objectivity is desirable, and to what extent scientists can achieve it.