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Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Objectivity

Since I’m on a book-finishing, light-posting schedule this week, I thought I’d offer something I’ve already published—one of my entries from New Keywords, which appeared this past June and is edited by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris.  I figure it’s perfect for blog material, insofar as it deals with the history of the meaning of the word “objectivity” in just under one thousand words.  Almost as much fun as Hideous Oldies, and sure to generate as many comments!

Particularly assiduous readers of this harried blog will remember that I mentioned New Keywords about four months ago and even linked to Blackwell’s .pdf of my entry for “experience.” New Keywords is intended, as its name suggests, as an update on Raymond Williams’ nearly-lifelong project.  And, of course, I present this little snippet here as part of my nearly-lifelong project of trying to demonstrate to skeptical onlookers that “cultural studies” does not consist exclusively of close readings of Madonna and Die Harder.

With that, then, here’s some objectivity (and I really did try to be objective about this):

Objectivity, together with its cognates, objective, objectively, and objectivism, has what might seem to contemporary observers a placid history. There is widespread agreement that the term “objectivity” is synonymous with such things as neutrality, impartiality, and disinterestedness; the objective observer, for instance, is able to give a reliable account of events precisely because she or he has no interest in the outcome and is able to make statements and render judgments regardless of their consequences. Apparently, we have managed to agree about what an objective observer is, even though we usually disagree about whether this or that person has in fact served as an objective observer in any given case.

These disagreements are most noticeable in politics—and, to a lesser degree, in journalism—where charges of partisanship and bias are so common as to give the ideal of objectivity something of a quaint air. Indeed, many politicians seem to work with a definition of “politics” in which “politics” itself is antithetical to “objectivity”; thus it is customary to hear that a “political” consideration puts party and partisan interest above all else, rendering objective assessments irrelevant or unavailable. In this sense of the “political,” one party will oppose something simply because another party has proposed it, without regard for the (“objective”) benefits or drawbacks of the proposal itself.

In journalism, by contrast, most parties agree that reporters should be bound by a code of professional objectivity. But in the US, with its weak public sector and its private ownership of most media, left-leaning critics of the media have long insisted that journalism is in practice conservative insofar as it is owned and operated by large corporate interests, whereas right-wing critics have insisted in return that journalists themselves are tainted by a liberal bias that prevents them from reporting objectively on such matters as race, sexuality, and religion (Chomsky and Herman, 1988; Goldberg, 2001).

What’s curious about the widespread agreement as to the meaning of objectivity in these debates is that the word is one of those rare specimens whose philosophical meaning was once directly opposed to its current meaning. In medieval philosophy the terms “objective” and “subjective” respectively meant what “subjective” and “objective” have denoted in Western philosophy since the C17, and especially since the eC19: the “subjective” denoted those features proper to what we would now call an object and that could be said to exist independently of perception, and the “objective” corresponded to the features of an object as they presented themselves to what we now call the subjective consciousness of an observer. With René Descartes, however, Western philosophy began to associate subjectivity with a perceiving “I”; and since Immanuel Kant, most Western thinkers have agreed to parcel the world into objective phenomena that exist independent of mind, and subjective phenomena that are in one way or another mind-dependent (such as injustice) or wholly attributable to mindedness (such as anxiety).

Subjectivity, then, has come to be aligned with the partisan and the partial, and objectivity with all that pertains to objects as in themselves they really are (in Matthew Arnold’s phrase). One of the central questions for the philosophy of mind in the C19-C20 has accordingly been how to construe the boundary between objective and subjective phenomena, particularly with regard to matters such as color (which may or may not exist independently of our perception of them). Similarly, one of the central questions for moral philosophy has been how to parse out the potential domain and applicability of moral truth-claims, such that sentences like “it is wrong to torture another human being” might be understood to be grounded differently—that is, more objectively—than sentences like “it is wrong to eat pastrami with mayonnaise.” The idea here is that the latter judgment is a mere “subjective” matter of taste, since the eating of pastrami with mayonnaise presumably affects no one but the person eating the sandwich, however much it may offend the sensibilities of everyone else in the delicatessen. The practice of torture, by contrast, is widely felt not to be a simple matter of taste, but rather a serious moral issue calling out for intersubjective forms of agreement that will allow us to condemn torture “objectively,” without regard to who is being tortured or why.

Since the mC19, but especially in recent decades, social theorists have debated whether the standard of objectivity pertinent to the natural sciences, which pertains to things such as quasars and quarks, is appropriate to the social sciences, which involve things like kinship rituals, torture chambers, and parliamentary procedures. Proponents of objectivity in the social sciences claim that neutral, disinterested scholarship is the only medium by which we can obtain reliable knowledge in such fields as history, economics, anthropology, and sociology. Critics of objectivity counter-argue that no observation of human affairs can escape the inevitably human parameters of the observation itself, and that invocations of objectivity with regard to human affairs are therefore (knowingly or not) veils for partisan agendas that do not recognize their own partisanship. Not all critics of objectivity, however, are wont to accuse their opposite numbers of bad faith; some argue more moderately that “objectivity” is merely the wrong term for complex intersubjective forms of agreement. Richard Rorty, for example, has argued in a series of books beginning with Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) that utterances designated as “true,” whether in the realm of the natural sciences or in the realm of moral philosophy, should be understood not as accurate descriptions of mind-independent objects but as useful claims that have managed over time to “pay their way” (R. Rorty, 1982), thus providing pragmatic grounds for broad agreement among human investigators.

Some moral philosophers claim that Rorty’s position on objectivity amounts to a shallow relativism in which all value judgments are of equal standing. Be this as it may, it can be safely—and perhaps objectively—said, at the very least, that while most people agree that objectivity is akin to impartiality, philosophers continue to disagree strenuously as to whether objectivity is merely another name for human agreement.

Posted by Michael on 10/19 at 10:48 AM
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