Science and Subjectivity

by Israel Scheffler

That the ideal of objectivity has been fundamental to science is beyond question. The philosophical task is to assess and interpret this to ask how, if at all, objectivity is possible. This task is especially urgent now, when received opinions as to the sources of objectivity in science are increasingly under attack. The notion of a fixed observational given, of a constant descriptive language, of a shared methodology of investigation, of a rational community advancing its knowledge of the real world - all have been subjected to severe and mounting criticism from a variety of directions.... A philosophical examination, not only of the current criticisms, but of the epistemological bases of a viable objectivism, is thus a matter of first importance. In the following lectures, I outline some efforts to contribute to such an examination. --- excerpts from book's Preface

Genres: Philosophy, Science

132 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1967

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

Insofar as this book is a "pro-science" defense of objectivity that takes relativist premises seriously, it's exactly what I'd been looking for but couldn't find in the Science Wars literature. But insofar as it refuses to accept the validity of subjectivism itself, it finds itself forced into odd semantic arguments that reinforce my impression that there is no valid argument for this position. Like so many of the self-styled pro-science writers, it takes the absurdity of subjectivism for granted while refusing to dismiss the validity of all the arguments the support it.

So the book ends up being a long and tortured attempt to explain objectivity within a subjective framework. That's a neat and interesting question and one that I think sort of comes with the territory of subjectivism. If science has always been subjective, the role of philosophers of science is precisely to explain how science can be done in that epistemological environment because it has always been done in that environment. But the problem is that Scheffler refuses to admit he's working in a subjective framework, so none of the terms and concepts of that framework can be brought to bear.

These problems are compounded by the fact that he's a dense, wordy writer and his points can be hard to extract from his prose, hard to even focus on most of the time tbh. He also loves to engage extensively with previous authors. Their arguments are generally weak to nonsensical, and often overlap. And Scheffler addresses them on the same semantic ground they establish, which is annoying because those grounds are generally dumb. So a lot of the book feels like a take-down of ill-considered objectivist defenses by a subjectivist who won't admit that objectivity can't exist but won't let anyone really defend that idea. It feels, optimistically, like the last gasp of a dying philosophy of science, but since most of the Science Wars took place simultaneous to or after this book, it seems that Scheffler was not able to push a serious response to subjectivist ideas into the mainstream of discourse on his side.

[Andrew Calderon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I do not know as much about philosophy of science as I would like, so I can't contextualize my commentary in greater dialogue that this branch subsumes. That was part of my motivation for reading the book anyway: to gain a deeper understanding of philosophy of science.

This books provides an accessible review of history of science and philosophy of science while scrutinizing the prevailing theories of the time. It is not for entrants to philosophy, however. Scheffler conducts exacting analytical analyses that sometime verge on semantics, which is part and parcel of the discipline but frustrating to someone like me, who is practically and humanistically oriented. Certainly, I see the importance of being care with language, but I don't consider it the most convincing way of dismantling argument unless they elucidate a blatant or egregious contradiction.

In any event, Scheffler's account of subjectivity and science is quite compelling in that he pay reverence to the ineffable, to the features of cognition that we cannot pinpoint but undoubtedly play a role in the way we communicate, perceive, and interpret observations and theory. I appreciated that.

The only other philosophy I can recall who so assiduously does the dance of positivism without overworking her partner, linguistics.

I recommend this book. I'm looking at you Adam Kranz =]