Argument

Objectivity (science)

Overview

In science, objectivity refers to attempts to do higher quality research by eliminating personal biases (or prejudices), irrational emotions and false beliefs, while focusing mainly on proven facts and evidence. It is often linked to observation as part of the scientific method. It is thus related to the aim of testability and reproducibility. To be considered objective, the results of measurement must be communicated from person to person, and then demonstrated for third parties, as an advance in a collective understanding of the world. Such demonstrable knowledge has ordinarily conferred demonstrable powers of prediction or technology.

The problem of philosophical objectivity is contrasted with personal subjectivity, sometimes exacerbated by the overgeneralization of a hypothesis to the whole. For example, Newton's law of universal gravitation appears to be the norm for the attraction between celestial bodies, but it was later refined and extended—and philosophically superseded—by the more general theory of relativity.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Objectivity (science) is discussed.

So far, indeed, is it from being true that objectivity is a matter for special determination antecedently to action that by common testimony the conviction of objectivity comes to us quite irresistibly. The object forces itself upon us, as we say, and "whether we will or no" we must recognize its presence there before us and its independence of any choice of ours or of our knowledge.
John Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory
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The defect in such a view is that because intellectual substantiality, while represented as end and aim for the subject, as a condition that has to be produced in the interest of the subject, even though it be most objective, is yet only quite abstractly objective; and hence the essential form of objectivity is wanting to it. That intellectual substantiality that thus remaining in abstraction, has as its existence…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
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far as I can see, which gives to right and wrong that kind and degree of fixity and impartiality which they actually are felt to possess, and which is what people are thinking of when they talk of their "objectivity." Here, too, therefore, to talk of the characteristic meant as "objectivity" is just as great a misnomer as in the other cases; since though it is a characteristic which is incompatible with any kind of…
G. E. Moore, Philosophical Studies
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Thoughts, according to Kant, although universal and necessary categories, are _only our_ thoughts--separated by an impassable gulf from the thing, as it exists apart from our knowledge. But the true, objectivity of thinking means that the thoughts, far from being merely ours, must at the same time be the real essence of the things, and of whatever is an object to us.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
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And as these reasonings appear to fit the world of our sensations, we think we may infer that these reasonable beings have seen the same thing as we; thus it is we know we have not been dreaming. Such, therefore, is the first condition of objectivity; what is objective must be common to many minds and consequently transmissible from one to the other, and as this transmission can only come about by that 'discourse'…
Henri Poincaré, The Foundations of Science
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Objectivity (science)

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Objectivity (science)

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