Objectivity, Subjectivity and the Gospel Truth

         
“Truth, justice and the American way.” Superman’s Creed

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator…” 
Thomas Jefferson

"I should like you to consider that these functions (including passion, memory, and imagination) follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels."  
Rene' Descartes

“… For in psychology, there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion.”  Ludwig Wittgenstein

 “You can fool some of the people some of the time -- and that's enough to make a decent living.” W.C. Fields

What is it to be objective? How is this in contrast to the subjective?  People want their science to be objective and to carry the authority of truth and not a matter of opinion, optional and changeable the way opinions change. Objectivity carries authority. You can take it to the bank. But is the objective all that different from the subjective? Is it a matter of degree or logical type? 

What does any of this have to do with truth? Is truth objective? 

Is it enough to say that the objective involves facts, free of bias, the subjective, a matter of opinion, and truth, what I honestly believe to be the case? What confounds this are the varied roles these concepts have in the communities where they are employed and the belief systems where they are embedded. 

In what sense can any of this be universal, the Gospel Truth so to speak? Does science have its Gospel Truths?

Notice I wrote, "people want their science...." A reminder:  every idea is someone’s idea, and this holds for all facts and claims even if what one person believes is what every person believes. Objective, subjective, and truth are concepts that people use and not something they discover empirically in nature.  Concepts are tools used for various purposes.  Concepts guide the social practices of a community.

Concepts are the tools we use to identify and sort out the facts. The facts are claims of what is both true and empirically the case. The role bias plays in shaping how the facts are discovered and used has consequences.  I may be more interested in some facts than others. My bias might distort what I take to be the case and it might shape what I allow in the discussion.

Facts, even if somehow free of bias, are still developed and employed within a community of interest. There is no science without a scientific community. There is no religion without a community of faith. How could it be otherwise?

I grew up in a community of chemists and chemical engineers and did a short stint teaching laboratory physiology.  As a psychologist I have performed and supervised experiments, so I know something about how workaday scientists talk regarding their sense of being objective unbiased observers and reporters. I also grew up in the Bible Belt South and am acquainted with enforced truth. 

A fundamentalist's revealed truth and a scientist's faith in determinism, reductionism and causality have common features. Both may inhibit discovery and comprehension. (And both involve an acceptance of "how it is and how it must be").

Some considerations:

Speaking for myself in contrast to speaking as a representative of a community is one way to get oriented. When I am objective, I am speaking as a representative of “us”, maybe as expert, using the agreed upon standards of our community. Objectivity, practically speaking, requires acting on agreed upon standards and having the competence and sensitivity to act on those standards. Competence and sensitivity are fundamental to what it takes to make an “objective” judgment, assessment, or measurement. When I am being subjective, I am only making the claim that I speak for myself.  But even speaking just for myself, I may reasonably claim to be objective. It depends on the sort of claim. Measurability and other appraisals deemed objective are a stand in for "anyone in the appropriate position can see that...." or "anyone who cannot see that X is the case has gone wrong in the following way:" But what happens when there is a built-in limit to what is allowed as the framework for reporting and organizing the observed? 

A paradigm of an objective scientific act: It is very easy to get an agreement that her temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit since that requires very little skill. I look where the mercury ends and

read off a number. If you are standing nearby, you can see it the way I do, too.  If you think my eyesight is poor or that it hasn’t been in her mouth long enough you can double-check. This is easy. Now contrast reading a thermometer to something that requires more refined sensitivity and judgment. I recall in chemistry lab the messiness of doing titrations and thin-film chromatography and how desperately I hoped my results would resemble those of my bench partner. That’s why we have inter-judge reliability statistics. This requires community. This also relegates the objective to the consensual and the consensual can mask shared bias.

Objectivity is a matter of what a community agrees they can reliably assess, measure, appraise or judge and teach others to similarly accomplish. Not everyone in a community will have the required competence and sensitivity.  Not everyone in a community will be in a position to properly observe. There may be disagreements about how much variation is tolerated.  Different judges can disagree about acceptable variations and how judgment is enforced.  This involves the distribution of power and is inherently political and potentially coercive.

Objectivity has a "more or less" quality in the manner that sensitivity and competence are also matters of more or less. What will be considered objective is uncertain when standards and competencies are in flux, are under development or review, or subject to within community disagreement. This is amplified when judgment is hard to achieve because technically difficult to accomplish. This is especially problematic if what is treated as appropriate for objective standards involves practices that by their very nature are developing, in flux or inseparable from vested interests. Vested interests, whether philosophical, professional, sexual, religious, political, tribal, or national are the stuff of bias, conflict and control. Standards involve controls. Standards set agendas for action. What is treated as objective when set in stone has consequence.

The more or less quality of the objective overlaps with the subjective. The overlap increases hazard when what is considered objective is equated with universal Truth; when only in a position to speak for myself, I speak for others. Personal bias is especially problematic when it creates distortion or constrains what is acceptable to acknowledge.  I may not be aware of my bias. It might not be in my interest to examine it or to disclose it to you. If I have sufficient power, I might keep such examination off the agenda. The unexamined is hard to confront when the powers to set the agenda control what can be examined. Community is both the problem and the solution made all the more significant when the objective is equated with the universal.

Can an entire community share an overarching and distorting bias? Is there a consensual bias at the heart of conventional science? Does the specter of determinism and reductionism still haunt social and behavioral science? This, I believe, is a mind closing dilemma made dangerous when there is coercive authority to enforce standards, competencies, and what is acceptable for framing discussion. 

It is obviously problematic if we treat the appraisal of virtue like the measurement of temperature. But it also problematic if we claim a person is only an extraordinarily complex machine or that action and meaning are reducible to performance and brain. It is mind closing if we require that science accepts this stance as a given. 

Taking our community's standards as a measure of universal truth is mind closing when we confuse our map with the possible terrain. It occurs when we foreclose on the possibilities a priori. It occurs when we confuse complexity with logical type. 

Objectively, I might show that 37% of all Oompa Loompas prefer Neapolitan above other flavors of ice cream. I can also say objectively that I don’t like Neapolitan, since I am in the best position to make that call. I believe unadulterated strawberry tastes best. I don't mix flavors and believe such mixing of flavors is plain wrong. (I feel queasy at the thought). I have come to think my good taste is a virtue. In fact, I think it is the way it should be for everyone which is why my children will not be exposed to Neapolitan or the other inferior flavors. 

Here, speaking for myself in contrast to speaking for others matters, especially if I have the power to enforce the standards of flavor, mix and taste. I buy the groceries.  

Judgment imagined as objective has consequence. Judgment constrained by an unquestioned or under-examined world view has consequence. Judgment deemed objective may serve many a master. 

Motto: You buy your ticket, and you take your chances. Read the fine print. 

Upon reading the above my friend and colleague, Joe Jeffrey Ph.D,  sent me this corrective reminder that I have slightly edited.  I need community to help think things through.

"It looks to me like "objective" is critic language for "This description has not gone wrong by asserting an opinion as fact, by asserting that an individual-value-based appraisal is a community-value-based one, or that in general what is visible from a certain perspective is what is visible from all perspectives."

Here's an example of objective truth in social science:  consider an experiment in which a person goes to a therapist for a time and comes out ostensibly different in certain ways.  Let's make it a bit more specific: a woman goes to a therapist to deal with conflicts over her traditionalist religious upbringing and her desires and feeling of conflict. After treatment, the simple question would be to ask, "Is she different, and is it a positive difference?"  A much better question is to ask, "To whom (i.e. to persons in which postions) does this person appear different in a positive way?" The experimental procedure you'd use to investigate that is  a blue-ribbon panel methodology: you gather a blue-ribbon panel of people representing all the relevant perspectives, say feminist, standard-normal-upper-middle-class American woman, standard-normal-lower-middle-class man, traditional religious, etc. Then you gather answers to your questions, and record the perspective from which the questions are answered.  Then (and here's the key point) your answer to, "Is she different and is it a positive difference?" is NOT, "Y+Y," "Y+N," etc.; it is: "From perspective P1, Yes and Yes; from perspective P2, Yes and No," etc.  In short, you don't commit the intellectual sin of having what CJ Peek refers to as "the imperial perspective," i.e., presenting the results as though the "real" answer were the answers given from a particular perspective.

This formulation, and methodology, are taken directly from Tony Putman's Ph.D. dissertation. I claim no credit. But I take all the blame if I've made errors in presenting it."


A further response from Tony Putman who refers directly to Peter Ossorio's  Meaning and Symbolism:

"Meaning and Symbolism" entitled Objectivity and Agreement -- pp. 67-73. Here's a most cogent excerpt:

"What would it have been for H’s description to have been objective? The description would have been objective if H had in fact not gone wrong in any of the ways in which he might possibly have gone wrong. Thus, the contrast between “objective” and “biased” or “subjective” depends on there being the possibility of going wrong and on there being ways of judging whether one had gone wrong or not. Procedures of checking and negotiating are highly developed social practices. That is the substance of “there being ways of judging whether one had gone wrong or not.” Which is to say that there was nothing about H’s description that made it objective, any more than there was something about S’s behavior that made it hostile. We do not arrive at correct conclusions because we have procedures and perspectives which are ‘objective’. Rather, our ability to criticize a judgment as “not objective” reflects our competence to decide what conclusion was the correct conclusion to draw." M&S p.69

And another, longer one:

"The objective nature of the situation is categorically unlike any person’s view of it. Because of this, it would be categorically impossible to ascertain or even approximate the objective nature of the situation by adopting some one view of it, e.g., a view which is shared by a set of “trained observers”, or by a set of observers which includes that important special case of “me”. Far from being a way of achieving objectivity, our standard requirement of observer agreement is a way of evading the problem by restricting our efforts in such a way that objectivity is not an issue between us. Methodologically, this shares most of the characteristics of a hypothetical procedure in which H and M would agree to decide the question of S’s hostility conclusively by flipping a coin. A question which is decidable in this way is no longer the question about S’s hostility. And in general, the importation of a decision procedure for deciding a question for which no decision procedure exists only succeeds in changing the subject.

"There are two heuristic analogies which may be exploited in connection with the notion of objectivity. The first is the contrast between the visual appearance of an object and the shape of an object. We know that an object like a beer mug or an automobile will have a different appearance, depending on the point of view. The object has only one shape, but an infinite set of appearances, not all of which need be unlike. Most importantly, none of its appearances approximates the shape, for there is a categorical difference between the shape it has and the way it appears. Yet we can only see the object from some viewpoint and when we do, we do see the object directly. There is no special viewpoint from which the real shape is identical with its appearance. Nor is the shape a transcendental kind of appearance that would be visible to a hypothetical, transcendental, ‘objective observer’.

Nevertheless, the shapes of objects have a comfortingly concrete character, and our competence with matters of visual perspective is such that we perceive shaped objects and do not calculate shapes from their appearances. We have standard terminology for shapes and objects, not their appearances. Thus, the second heuristic analogy is more pointed, for here we lose this feature. This analogy is the case of relative motion. We cannot characterize the motion of an object except by reference to some other object or set of objects. The motion will be differently characterized depending on which set of objects we use as a frame of reference. What is the ‘objective motion’ of the object? That must be given by a set of correspondences among motion descriptions within particular frames of reference. This can be done, of course, but again, there is a categorical difference. The rule of correspondence is not itself a motion and the set of corresponding motions is neither a motion nor in motion. (Note the resemblance here to “reality is not a set of objects, processes, events, and states of affairs.”)"

One of the anticipated themes for the 36th Annual Meeting of the Society for Descriptive Psychology, October 23-26, 2014, in Golden, Colorado is the place of community in science. 

And this, in the 1/21/14 New York Times, on reproducible results in science, "New Truths that Only One Can See".

This posting is a continuation of themes developed in On Indoctrination and Freedom (An Outline). Thanks to Joe Jeffrey, Anthony Putman and Pat Aucoin for useful suggestions and critique and for bearing with my struggle to try to get something clear.