Philosophy of Objectivity Research Paper

1. Metaphysical Objectivity

An entity (or a class of entities) is metaphysically objective if its existence and character is independent of the human mind. This ‘independence requirement’ is central to metaphysical objectivity (Brower 1993, Sober 1982), though its proper interpretation raises two important questions: first, in what way must a metaphysically objective thing be ‘independent’ of the human mind; and second, how much independence of the relevant kind is required?

1.1 What Kind Of Independence?

The existence and character of some entity might be independent of the human mind in three senses: causally, constitutionally, and cognitively. Only the last two will matter for metaphysical objectivity.

An entity is causally independent of the human mind as long as the causal trajectory producing it did not involve the human mind. Shoes, for example, are causally dependent on the human mind because the existence and character of any particular pair of shoes depends causally on a cobbler having had certain beliefs and desires (e.g., a desire to make a particular kind of shoe, and true beliefs about what needed to be done to produce such shoes). By contrast, the existence and character of the earth is causally independent of the human mind: no human intentions played a causal role in bringing about the existence of the earth or its specific character. Metaphysical objectivity, however, does not require causal independence. Even entities that are causally dependent on the human mind can be mind-independent in one of the other two senses (below), and thus still be metaphysically objective.

An entity is constitutionally independent of the human mind if its existence and character is not constituted by or identical with the mind. Certain historical forms of philosophical ‘idealism’ (such as those of Bishop Berkeley and Hegel) held that the world was constitutionally dependent on the mind (the human mind, or perhaps the mind of God). Conversely, the claim that some entity is metaphysically objective almost always involves denying its constitutional dependence on the mind. The exception is for psychological entities (e.g., beliefs, desires, emotions, etc.): such things cannot be constitutionally independent of the mind since they just are facets of the mind. Yet surely psychological facts may also be metaphysically objective. If so, it must be in the final sense of ‘independence’ from the mind.

An entity is cognitively independent of the human mind if its existence and character does not depend on any cognizing state of persons, for example, belief, sensory perception, judgment, response, etc. (A ‘cognizing’ state is one which is receptive to features of the world and thus is a potential source of knowledge of the world.) A metaphysically objective thing is, accordingly, what it is independent of what anyone believes or would be justified in believing about it (or what anyone perceives it to be or would perceive it to be under certain conditions, etc.). On this account, psychological facts about a person are metaphysically objective in virtue of not depending on what an observer of that person believes or would be justified in believing about that person’s psychological state. (This assumes that mental content is ‘narrow,’ not ‘wide,’ a technical debate in the philosophy of psychology that must be set aside here.)

Any kind of metaphysically objective fact (except for psychological facts) must necessarily be constitutionally independent of the mind. All metaphysically objective facts must also be cognitively independent. The common-sense picture of the natural world presumes that its contents are metaphysically objective in this sense: ordinary people think that atoms and zebras and sulfur are not simply identical with the mind and that they are what they are independent of what people may believe or be justified in believing about them. Science, then, aspires to epistemological objectivity by trying to accurately depict the way things (objectively) are.

1.2 How Much Independence?

There can be degrees of cognitive independence, and thus degrees of objectivity that may be distinguished; not everything that is objective may prove to be objective in the sense in which common sense understands the constituent elements of the natural world to be objective. The crucial notion for cognitive independence is independence from the cognizing states of persons: beliefs, sensory perceptions, judgments, responses, and the like. Thus, this notion of objectivity supposes that there is always a difference between what ‘seems right’ about some state of affairs and what actually ‘is right.’ For example, it may seem right to John (based on a sensory perception) that there is a table in front of him, but it may not be right that there is a table there: it could be an optical illusion. The table, then, is objective in some sense since its existence is independent of what ‘seems right’ to John.

It is possible, then, to distinguish four kinds of claims about objectivity. According to subjectivism, what seems right to the cognizer determines what is right. According to minimal objectivism, what seems right to the community of cognizers determines what is right. According to modest objectivism, what seems right to cognizers under appropriate or ideal conditions determines what is right. According to strong objectivism, what seems right to cognizers never determines what is right. Subjectivism and strong objectivism represent the two classical and opposed philosophical positions of antiquity: Protagoras held that ‘man is the measure of all things’ (subjectivism) (Plato, Theaetetus *152a, *166a–*8b), while Plato embraced a kind of strong objectivism (Plato, Phaedo *741–*75b, Republic *475–*80, *508d-e). The Protagorean position denies the objectivity of the world and everything in it: whatever each individual takes to be the case is the case (for that individual), and thus the existence and character of any particular thing depends (epistemically) on the (individual) human mind. By contrast, the Platonist affirms the complete and absolute objectivity of the world: What really is the case about the world is never fixed by what any person or all persons believe, has (or have) reasons to believe, or could have reasons to believe. Mistake, on a global scale, even under ideal epistemic conditions, is a possibility for the Platonist. This latter position is often described as ‘realism’ (or ‘metaphysical realism’).

Minimal objectivism and modest objectivism occupy conceptual space between these two familiar, historical positions. Minimal objectivism holds that whatever the community of cognizers takes to the case is the case. This view, like its pure Protagorean cousin, issues in a kind of relativism (what is the case is relative to a particular community of cognizers), but by abstracting away from the subjectivity of the individual cognizer, it introduces a minimum amount of objectivity. It is also a kind of objectivity with some useful domains of application. What is and is not fashionable, for example, is probably minimally objective. What seems right to John about what is fashionable can be objectively wrong: John may be out of sync with the styles of his community, and thus it would be correct to say, ‘John is mistaken in thinking that a plaid shirt and striped pants go well together.’ But it does not seem that the entire community can be wrong about what is fashionable: in that sense, what seems right to the community determines what really is fashionable.

In most domains, however, minimal objectivity would be viewed as too close to subjectivism for comfort. Modest objectivity thus abstracts even further away from dependence on actual cognizers, individual or communal. Something is modestly objective if its existence and character depends only on what cognizers would believe under certain idealized conditions for cognition, conditions like full information and evidence, perfect rationality, and the like. (By hypothesis, under ideal conditions, all cognizers would come to the same belief about things.) Everyone on the planet can be wrong in his or her beliefs about a modestly objective entity; beliefs formed under ideal epistemic conditions, however, can never be wrong. This latter point is what differentiates modest from strong objectivity.

Some philosophers have defended the idea that the truth about the world is at best modestly objective (e.g., the doctrine Putnam calls ‘Internal Realism’ in Putnam 1981): what is true in any domain is simply whatever inquirers would agree upon under epistemically ideal conditions. Versions of this idea have since been subjected to withering criticisms (e.g., Johnston 1993), and it has few adherents. Still, modest objectivity, like the other conceptions, may be particularly apt in certain domains. Consider, for example, facts about color. It seems natural to say that there are (modestly) objective facts about color even though the color of an object is not fully independent of the human mind. For example, we might say that something is red if and only if normal perceivers under normal viewing conditions would be disposed to see it as red. Color, on this account, depends on the human mind—on human response or perception—but only on human response under appropriate conditions. One important recent idea is that evaluative facts might be modestly objective in a similar way (e.g., Pettit 1991): evaluative facts would depend on human responses to morally significant situations under appropriate conditions. In both cases, however, it is important to specify the conditions under which human response fixes the reference of a concept in a nonquestion begging way. It obviously will not do, for example, to define ‘normalcy’ of perceivers and of viewing conditions by reference to their getting the right result (i.e., seeing all and only the red things as red). Some philosophers doubt whether the conditions can be specified in a nonquestion-begging way (e.g., Wright 1992).

2. Epistemological Objectivity

The demand for epistemological objectivity is the demand to be free of bias and other factors that distort cognition, that prevent the things being cognized from presenting themselves as they really (metaphysically) are. More precisely, epistemological objectivity requires that the cognitive processes and mechanisms by which beliefs about the world are formed be constituted in such a way that they at least tend toward the production of accurate representations of how things are. Notice that epistemological objectivity does not require that cognitive processes always yield true representations: that would demand more than is attainable and more than is even expected. Epistemological objectivity obtains when either of the following is true: (a) the cognitive processes at issue reliably arrive at accurate representations, or (b) the cognitive processes are free of factors that are known to produce inaccurate representations. The obstacles to epistemological objectivity will vary with the domain under consideration. In the sciences generally, and the social sciences in particular, ‘values’ are often thought to present a special obstacle to epistemological objectivity insofar as they influence the choice of research topics and, most seriously, the selection and evaluation of evidence (Weber 1949). As one contemporary author explains: ‘Values are thought to damage inquiry epistemically because they are held to be subjective—they come from us, not the world. Therefore, to allow values to influence inquiry into the nature of the world is to allow such inquiry to be subject to a control other than the world itself’ (Railton 1985, p. 818).

Epistemic values or norms, for example, norms about when evidence warrants belief, must of course play a role in all scientific inquiry; the worry is about nonepistemic values or norms, like the political ideology of the inquirer or the political climate in which inquiry takes place. Yet even here the effect on objectivity depends on the context and the precise role values plays in inquiry. For example, where the political climate is hostile to the discovery of certain kinds of objective truths, only those inquirers motivated by a contrarian political ideology themselves are likely to pursue those objective truths (Miller 1991). Here, of course, values supply a motive for allowing ‘the nature of the world’ to control the course of inquiry, rather than interceding and distorting cognition.

More generally, one ‘need not require freedom from all value and bias in order to have objective inquiry’ since ‘there may yet exist mechanisms of belief formation that incorporate feedback from the object to the inquiring subject’ (Railton 1985, p. 818). The mechanism at issue is causal: metaphysically objective things make themselves felt causally, whatever our theoretical preconceptions and values. This, however, is merely an external criterion for objectivity, and does not yet show how inquirers could determine whether or not their inquiry is epistemologically objective. Here, however, inquirers might look for certain familiar markers of epistemological objectivity, like the existence of intersubjective agreement in judgment, the publicity of evidence and standards of proof, and the reproducibility of the evidence for a judgment by different inquirers: ‘when these conditions are met, subjective contributions and biases will be excluded as far as possible’ (Railton 1985, p. 818). That physics constitutes a cross-cultural, global community of inquirers strongly suggests that it is epistemologically objective: if it were not, then one would expect local differences (in interests, ideology, and the like) to lead to markedly different discourses of physics. Of course, the absence of intersubjective agreement does not by itself demonstrate lack of epistemological objectivity; the question is always what the best explanation for lack of such agreement is supposed to be. In the case of the social sciences, where objective truths may conflict with entrenched interests, it should hardly be surprising that there should be no agreement about certain social scientific questions. In other cases, though, the suspicion will be strong that it is entrenched interests and values that distort cognition of the social world and warp scientific inquiry accordingly.

3. Semantic Objectivity

Semantic objectivity is a property of statements, rather than things or cognitive mechanisms. Philosophers in the Anglo-American traditions of the twentieth century, who approach most philosophical problems by framing them first as problems about language and its relationship to the world, have been most concerned with questions of semantic objectivity. Typically, philosophers are concerned with a class of statements characteristic of a particular branch of discourse: say, physics or psychology or ethics or aesthetics. Some branch of discourse enjoys semantic objectivity when its statements are generally apt for evaluation in terms of their truth and falsity. (Not every statement in the discourse need be determinately true or false—the property of ‘bivalence’—since few discourses outside pure mathematics are bivalent.) Cognitivism is the doctrine that some branch of discourse is semantically objective. (Wright 1992 disputes whether truth-aptness is the relevant criterion for demarcating objective discourses; most discourses satisfy the minimum syntactic requirements to make use of the truth-predicate appropriate. The issue about the objectivity of the discourse must be located elsewhere according to Wright.)

Thus, for example, the discourse of natural science is presumed to be a cognitive discourse: scientific statements about the natural world are generally either true or false. But what of statements in ethics like, ‘That distribution of resources is unjust,’ or ‘Harming a defenseless animal is morally wrong?’ Many philosophers have thought that there are, as a metaphysical matter, no facts in the world corresponding to the ‘injustice’ of a distribution or the ‘moral wrongness’ of an action (Gibbard 1990, Mackie 1977, Stevenson 1944). Most philosophers who deny the metaphysical objectivity of morality claim that its semantics is noncognitive: rather than stating facts (that are either true or false), ethical statements, according to noncognitivism, express attitudes or feelings of various kinds (Stevenson 1944, Gibbard 1990 are the most sophisticated versions of this view). Noncognitivists bear the burden, then, of explaining away the surface grammar and logical structure of ethical discourse which makes it indistinguishable from ordinary empirical discourse (compare: ‘This distribution is unjust,’ with ‘That chair is red’).

A minority of philosophers, however, agree that morality is not metaphysically objective, but nonetheless maintain that the surface grammar of ethical discourse should be taken at face value: ethical discourse purports to state facts, and is thus a cognitive discourse. It is, unfortunately, a cognitive discourse almost all of whose statements are false (since there are no metaphysically objective moral facts in the world). (The only true ethical statements, on this view, will be negations of ethical judgments: ‘No, slavery is not really morally wrong.’) This doctrine is known as ‘error theory’ (Mackie 1977). Error theories about any discourse make it puzzling, however, why the discourse should persist, let alone occupy the central role that ethical discourse does in human lives: why would people continue to engage in a putatively fact-stating discourse that never succeeds in stating any facts? Noncognitivism, as a semantic doctrine, at least identifies an important role for ethical discourse: namely, the expression of feelings and attitudes about matters of real moment to human beings and their social existence.

Most philosophers who accept that ethical discourse is cognitive do so because they also believe that morality is metaphysically objective (in some sense) (Brink 1989, Brower 1993, Pettit 1991, Railton 1986): if there are metaphysically objective moral facts, then moral statements will not be systematically false as error theory has it. How could there be such facts? For those who think moral facts are strongly objective (e.g., Brink 1989, Railton 1986), the central idea is that moral facts are simply identical with (or supervenient upon) natural facts. For example, perhaps the property of being ‘morally right’ is just identical with the property of ‘maximizing human well-being,’ where the latter may be understood in purely psychological and physiological terms. In that case, whether an action X is morally right is a strongly objective matter, since it is simply a scientific question whether action X will in fact maximize the relevant kinds of psychological and physiological states in the world. The crucial claim, plainly, is that moral facts are to be identified with certain kinds of natural facts. Again, many philosophers are skeptical that this claim can be defended (e.g., Gibbard 1990).

4. Other Directions

A minority of philosophers recently have disputed whether the traditional ways of conceptualizing objectivity are adequate (Dworkin 1996, McDowell 1997, Nagel 1997). In particular, these philosophers have raised two kinds of doubts about the preceding kinds of characterizations of objectivity. First, these philosophers (especially McDowell) question whether the conception of metaphysical objectivity (especially strong metaphysical objectivity) does not presuppose a vantage point on the way things ‘really’ are to which we can have no access. Second, these philosophers wonder whether the conception of metaphysical objectivity as mind-independent is not a paradigm too closely tied to a picture of the objectivity of the natural world, and thus either does not make sense or should not be applied with respect to the objectivity of domains like ethics or aesthetics. In these evaluative domains, it makes no sense to ask about whether there are evaluative facts ‘out there’ ‘in the world.’ The objectivity of evaluative discourse is simply a matter of its susceptibility to reasons, of our ability to subject ethical positions to rational scrutiny and discussion. These revisionary views of objectivity have not, to date, found much favor among philosophers, and they have also been extensively criticized (Wright 1992, Leiter 2001, Svavarsdottir 2001).

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