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… Read more Op-Ed: The Lenses of Objectivity
Gabriel Dudlicek, Phillip Durgin, Angela Ferro, Adam Goldsmith Objectivity is defined as a lack of bias or an accurate representation of reality. Under the assumption all knowledge is “situated” and therefore dependent on context, it is impossible or very difficult to have absolute truth. We cannot be confident that any knowledge is objective since it… Read more Objectivity: A Subjective Social Construct
By Colin Reynolds, Andrew Yatsuhashi, and Dominic Ferro *all authors contributed equally to this work* Science, with its strict rules and calculations, is meant to be impersonal and unbiased. On the contrary, the basic definition of objectivity reveals that there is no such thing as impersonal or unbiased science. While scientists have made great strides… Read more Is Science truly Unbiased and Impersonal?
By: David Van Sickle, Steven Chelak, Maylee Gagnon, Cristopher Lafortune, James Copeland *All authors contributed equally to this work Too few people question the origin of scientific “truth.” Where did the science come from? Why did the scientist publish what they published? It has become a societal norm to define scientists as people of veracity and discovery, an… Read more Constructed Truths and Human Nature
By: Kailana Wang, Jack Tatirosian, Miya Judy, and Ian Campbell *All authors contributed equally to this work* How do we know what is “true nature?” The objective reality, the very truth of nature, as Theodore Porter calls it, is often warped. The aim of science is to present objective truths, that… Read more Standardizing the Quantification of Objectivity
By: Emma Bailey, Joshua O’Grady, Andrew Panneton, Matt Stevens *All authors contributed equally to this work Scientific truth can be defined as objective and dynamic knowledge that is constructed from scientific practice through standardized processes. Despite the dynamic quality of scientific truths, they are always developed from the scientific method, using standardized measurements and experimentation to… Read more Scientific Truth: Components & Construction
Related to today’s discussion, here the link to the classic Thomas Kuhn, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”
The authors of the introduction to the fourth edition of the Handbook of Science and Technology Studies offer an overview of some fundamental paradigms in the STS field today. The “co-production of epistemic, technological, and social orders” and the “situatedness of knowledge” are two major aspects of how STS scholars think about how science, technology,… Read more Studying Science and Technology in Context