Objectivity

Judgement that does not depend on who is making it - and the question of whether anything is like that.

Theme: Knowledge, truth and reason
Tradition: Western
Term fixed: 1781

In plain terms

An objective judgement is one that would come out the same whoever made it. That is the aspiration, and it is worth keeping even though nobody reaches it.

The reason it is hard is that every judgement is made from somewhere, by someone with a history, and there is no position outside all positions from which to check. That does not make objectivity impossible, but it does mean it cannot be achieved by trying harder to be neutral - which is the one method that reliably does not work.

What does work is structural: removing the information that produces the bias, deciding the criteria before seeing the case, and having people who disagree check each other. Objectivity turns out to be a property of procedures more often than a property of individuals.

As a philosopher would put it

Kant's objectivity is validity for any rational subject, secured by the categories rather than by contact with a mind-independent world - which is why his position is both a defence of objectivity and a form of idealism. Nagel's view from nowhere poses the problem sharply: objectivity is achieved by stepping back from one's own perspective, and each step gains generality while losing something that was really there.

Daston and Galison's history complicates the ideal. Mechanical objectivity - the suppression of the observer's judgement in favour of the instrument - emerged in the nineteenth century as a specific scientific virtue and displaced an earlier ideal of trained judgement. It is a practice with a date, not a timeless standard.

Feminist epistemology sharpened the critique into something constructive. Harding's strong objectivity argues that the appearance of neutrality often conceals an unexamined standpoint, and that examining standpoints improves rather than undermines objectivity. Longino's version locates it in community: objectivity is a property of a knowledge-producing community with effective mechanisms for criticism, not of an individual mind.

Where you meet it

Before the 1970s American orchestras auditioned in the open and were overwhelmingly male. Screens were introduced so that the committee could hear a player without seeing them, and in some orchestras carpet was laid so that footsteps would not give away shoes.

Goldin and Rouse published an analysis in 2000 finding that blind auditions substantially increased the proportion of women advancing through the rounds, and the study became one of the most cited pieces of evidence for procedural fixes to bias. It has since been re-examined, and statisticians have questioned whether the sample supports effects of the size reported.

Both halves of that are the point. The intervention was structural rather than exhortative: nobody was asked to be fairer, and the information producing the effect was simply removed. And the evidence for it has been subjected to exactly the scrutiny it recommends, by people who mostly support the practice - which is what objectivity as a property of a community, rather than of a judge, actually looks like in operation.

What is actually disputed

Whether objectivity requires a view from nowhere.

The traditional ideal treats it as detachment from all perspective, which invites the objection that no such position exists and that claiming it is how a particular standpoint passes itself off as universal. The standpoint reply is that objectivity is improved by making perspectives explicit rather than by pretending to have none.

Critics of that reply worry it slides into relativism, since if every claim is from a standpoint then the standard for comparing them is unclear. Longino's answer - that objectivity is a feature of communities with working criticism - avoids the slide and pays a price: it makes objectivity depend on social arrangements, so a field with poor criticism produces less objective knowledge no matter how careful its individuals are. That is either an important insight or a category error, and the argument is live.

Commonly confused with

being right An objective procedure can produce a wrong answer, and a biased one can stumble on the truth. Objectivity is about how the judgement was reached.

Defined against

Subjectivity The pair is the axis on which most epistemology since Kant is arranged, and the terms are defined entirely against each other

Philosophers

Immanuel Kant Objectivity as validity for any rational subject
Friedrich Nietzsche The attack on the eye turned in no direction
Judith Butler The critique of a neutrality that conceals a position
Paul-Michel Foucault Knowledge as produced within arrangements of power

Works

Critique of Pure Reason Where the modern sense is fixed
On the Genealogy of Morals The critique of disinterested knowing
The Order of Things Knowledge as historically structured
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Where theory choice is shown to involve judgement
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature The attack on knowledge as accurate representation

Schools

German Idealism Where objectivity is grounded in the subject
Vienna Circle Where it is identified with intersubjective testability
Post-Structuralism Where the claim to neutrality is treated with suspicion
Classical Pragmatism Where it becomes a matter of what enquiry converges on
Frankfurt School (Critical Theory) Where the ideal is examined as a social product

Related concepts

Subjectivity 1846 · Truth c. 330 BC · Justification 1641 · Intersubjectivity 1913 · Experience c. 330 BC

The modern sense - a claim valid for any subject rather than one about objects - is Kant's; the word before him meant almost the reverse, as it did for the scholastics.