One of the most commonly held conceptions of scientific objectivity can be summarized by the following two sentences: Scientific objectivity consists in approaching. Each scientific question “on its own merits” without “any presuppositions.”
What success scientists have in getting at the truth depends on the extent to. Which their actual practice approximates this ideal of objectivity. Despite its clear intuitive attractiveness, on a closer examination it becomes clear that scientific objectivity. As construed in this way cannot possibly correspond to what the concept really means. The reason why this is the case is related to the concept of auxiliary hypotheses. And their role in allowing us to extract testable predictions from scientific theories.
An auxiliary hypothesis can be roughly defined. As an assumption about the way the world works that needs to made in order for another hypothesis. Usually called the test hypothesis, to be able to generate a prediction. That can be later either confirmed or falsified by experimental evidence. For example, let’s assume that one wanted to test whether Newton’s Third Law is able to provide an accurate description of how a certain aspect of interactions between two or more objects occurs in nature. A fairly straightforward formulation of the law is as follows: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
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Now, of course, this statement is meaningless if one does not define what the words “action”, and “reaction” mean. To appropriately do this, one needs to introduce the concept of “force”. Which in turn involves presenting Newton’s Second Law, which leads to Newton’s First Law, and other concepts that are associated to them. In other words, in order to extract an observational prediction from Newton’s Third Law. It is necessary to take for granted certain auxiliary hypotheses that are related to the test hypothesis but nonetheless are not necessarily true.
This poses a problem to the first statement, as presented above, about what scientific objectivity is, because it implies that it is not possible to approach a scientific question without at least making some background assumptions, or presuppositions, in the form of auxiliary hypotheses. With this in mind, the second statement, the one about scientists’ chances of being successful in their search for truth, becomes implausible. If it is actually not possible to test a scientific question without making some background assumptions, then how exactly is it that the probability of scientists being successful in their search for truth is correlated with their approaching scientific questions without presupposing anything?
In other words, the second statement claims that the amount of presuppositions made by scientists when approaching a scientific questions is correlated negatively with their possibility of finding out the correct answer to the question. But because background assumptions are a necessary part of any scientific investigation, then this implies that correct answers in science are either not possible, or at the very least extremely hard to find, as they will be limited to very simple questions that can be examined using few and uncontroversial auxiliary hypotheses.
References
- National Center for Biotechnology Information: Objectivity in Scientific Research
- PLOS Computational Biology: Towards a More Objective Science
- Frontiers in Psychology: Overcoming the Subjectivity/Objectivity Dilemma in Interpretative Research
- National Center for Biotechnology Information: Objectivity and Subjectivity in Scientific Research
