Connor Burri, Patrick O’Mullan, Matthew Spofford, Alexander Young
Each profession is equipped with a set of knowledge and their own view of objectivity. To truly understand objectivity, we must understand the connection between objectivity and the history of professional fields. Each interpretation of objectivity has developed an expert community with separate lenses. That being said, pure objective knowledge does not exist; the only way it would require understanding the knowledge behind every aspect of reality and how that knowledge is relevant to all fields. Since we can’t ever grasp this infinite knowledge, pure objective knowledge is unattainable and might as well not exist.
Objectivity is not consistent throughout all disciplines of knowledge. Objectivity is associated with expertise and lack of bias in a respective discipline. This leads to varying degrees of what is considered objective procedure in different fields. “History, politics, literature, documentary film, journalism—each of these and others too have had their own objectives”(Galison 56). As explained by Galison, each expert community has its own goals to complete in order to reach what they would consider an objective truth. For historians, in this example, their objective truth may be understanding what caused the birth or death of a civilization, whereas, for a scientist, their objective truth involves understanding how atoms interact with one another under separate conditions. Both ideas are true in their own fields but require their own individual processes to reach. The development of these processes distinctly shaped the history of the professions as incompatible with one another. The method the scientist uses would not result in an objective truth from the historian, and vice versa. As more and more observations are made about reality, these observations form theories which in turn set a paradigm that affects how the history of the profession is shaped as well as how expert communities operate.
To allow every field of work to become perfectly separated from bias and personal gain, maintaining pure objectivity within an expert community seems to be the only way. However, this logic is only applicable within a certain expert community. When an observation must be translated to another expert community or to society in general, certain aspects of its reality are contextually lost in translation. This makes the observation unable to be objective in both expert communities at the same time, proving objective truth cannot exist. According to Theodore Porter in his book Trust in Numbers, “rules are a check on subjectivity: they should make it impossible for personal biases or preferences to affect the outcome of an investigation.” (Porter 4) Porter is giving a reason for rules, implying that if everyone follows the rules then all biased observations will disappear. Stephen Hilgartner, in Science on Stage, starts by saying that scientists need to “display themselves and their work in ways that make them appear to conform to ‘identity norms’” (Hilgartner 14) to present themselves as truly objective in the eyes of the public. He says that by detaching individuals from their true selves, they can limit the controversy between them and their recipients. However, he states later that controversy can help to “[shed] light on the mechanisms that produce a scientific agreement” (Hilgartner 29) and scientific agreement maintains objectivity within an expert community. By removing controversy to preserve what expert communities may deem objective, you omit the process which proves its objectivity to the outside community. Thus rendering it impossible for that knowledge to be objective in both contexts.