Objectivity
Objectivity
OBJECTIVITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY
Objectivity in the sciences, especially the social sciences, is paired implicitly or explicitly with its opposite, subjectivity. Less obvious yet commonplace pairings with the term objectivity are partiality, relativity, and the arbitrary. This entry deals primarily with objectivity in opposition to subjectivity. Subjectivity is associated with the modern concept of the self. The shift to the notion of the modern self occurred concurrently with the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.
DESCARTES AND HIS CRITICS
René Descartes (1596–1650), who is considered the father of modern philosophy, claimed to be able to doubt systematically the existence of anything except the fact that he was doubting. Because doubt is a species of thought, he asserted, “cogito ergo sum,” which usually is translated as “I think therefore I am” or “I think therefore I exist.” Even Descartes’s body did not survive his systematic doubt; only his mind—“a thinking substance”—did. He argued that upon this rationally defended certainty rested all other claims regarding the existence of objects outside the mind. In that absolute divide the mindful inside became the subjective state and anything on which the mind exercised its cognitive power was an object. Thus, objectivity came to refer on the one hand to the subject’s ability to consider or represent external objects without being influenced by subjective feelings, opinions, or prejudices and on the other hand to the description of those mind-independent objects. Despite Descartes’s many detractors, modern philosophy made bringing subjective thought into concordance with objects of external reality its signal challenge.
Descartes’s critics in his day and soon afterward could be divided into two camps: the idealists and the empiricists. Despite their differences, they held in common with Descartes the idea that the senses play a part in objectivity. The idealists described sensation variously as a species of thought but one that is unclear and indistinct, inferior, and unreliable or merely as confused thinking. Among those critics were Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).
Conversely, British empiricists reinstated the sensory perception of objects in experience as the source of all reliable knowledge and the basis of objectivity. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) described thought as merely the faint remains left behind by sense impressions, and John Locke (1632–1704) argued that all ideas about the external world arise from sensation and reflection; if not for the sensory input made available by the senses in experience, the mind would be a blank tablet. For David Hume (1711–1776) thought was nothing but the faint copies of “impressions” left behind by the senses. In Hume’s understanding, claims to objectivity are based not on reason but on habits of expectation that are developed from accumulated sense experiences.
CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY
The response to the early British empiricists can be seen as twofold: critical philosophy on one hand and the philosophy of science on the other hand. The origin of critical philosophy most commonly is identified with Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant did not see objectivity-subjectivity as a proportionately inverse relation. They were distinct, and so one could not be considered an inferior form of the other or vice versa even though only together could they make objectivity possible.
Kant’s concept of the object, however, was very subtle, and he used three different terms for it: Ding, Gegenstand, and Objekte. Ding referred to the metaphysical thing-hood, as in ding an sich, the unknowable thing in itself, making the question of objectivity moot. For even minimal experience to be possible, the contents of experience (“sensory data”) must be ordered and limited in certain ways. These ways are not determined by what is given to the senses but by the synthetic activity of the faculty of intuition that possesses certain principles of form—space and time—that constitute the synthetic unity of sensory apperception. For what is given is, as Hume held, nothing but a flux of sensations and images. The synthesis of this manifold of sensory data is an a priori and necessary feature of experience and not empirical. This object of appearance that is experienced in this synthesis is the Gegenstand. The Gegenstand, this experience of appearance as object, is only a representation. It is transformed into an object of recognition, thought, or knowledge by virtue of it being subsumed by the universal categories of understanding, and thereby it becomes an objekt. Kant described the objekt as “that in the concept— of the understanding—of which the manifold of a given intuition is united.” (Kant [1787] 1965, p. B137). It is this objekt of knowledge about which the subject of the experience can make judgments that are true or false. By objectivity, then, Kant meant the object of a true judgment. However, this is not the judgment of an individual subject but that of a transcendental subject.
In the triumvirate of the great sociologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Max Weber (1864–1920) is the most (neo-) Kantian of the three.
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Whereas critical philosophy was a reaction to British empiricism, the philosophy of science was its progeny. Among the many strands in the history of the philosophy of science, positivism has been the most conspicuous. Auguste Comte (1798–1857), who invented the term positivism, was an admirer of Hume and with Hume held that there is no objectivity beyond human objectivity. However, unlike Hume, he did not begin with an empiricist account of the contents of the mind but instead with a history of human development. According to that history, inquiry begins with theology, which is transformed into metaphysics, which is replaced by positive science.
For Comte objective science and observational science were near synonyms. Science, he held, should restrict itself to the observation of appearances and stop looking for or speculating about hidden “causes.” He believed that hypotheses must be based only on phenomena that can be grasped by the cognitive and sensory faculties and be open to positive verification; this alone could guarantee objectivity. Comte saw the social world as unified with the physical and subject to laws that were identifiable by natural observation, hence sociology, the science of society. Émile Durkheim (1857–1917), the French sociologist and precursor of structuralism, considered his sociology to be in the positivist tradition and antipathetic to Kantian metaphysics, which nevertheless saturated his most important work, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.
In the twentieth century the prioritization of the sensory was channeled into logical positivism with its focus on language and logic. In logical positivism the objective world is considered a world not of things but of facts. Objectivity describes the capacity to express verifiable facts—the truth or falsity of which can be determined— in meaningful sentences. A meaningful sentence is seen as one that in some way can be related to a foundational sense experience or analytically true statements. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) thought that he could derive the world from experience by means of symbolic logic. Rudolph Carnap (1891–1970) was determined to prove the world’s verifiability, even though Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1889–1951) Tractatus clearly signaled the ultimate failure of that attempt. However, logical positivism persisted until it ran its course almost a decade before Carnap’s death in 1970.
Georg W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) led Kantian insights even further from empiricism. For Hegel, objectivity was a matter of degree and an integral part of knowledge in which the subject is confronted with two types of objects: the external thing it desires to know and its own consciousness. In the Phenomenology of Spirit ([1807] 1977) Hegel’s aim is to show that all claims to knowledge are best understood as historically and socioculturally situated. Empiricists hold that not only is objective knowledge—that is, knowledge that is independent of social practices—possible but that it is the only form of knowledge worthy of its name. The candidates that are proposed as being able to secure such knowledge, independent of any historically specific social practice, are “sense-certainty,” “perception,” and the “force of understanding,” in that order. Hegel demonstrates that all three fail to provide, on their own terms, the kind of knowledge that their proponents’ claim for them. In fact, under the “force of understanding” the reader is forced to acknowledge that it is our recognition of a thing that makes it real. But who is this subject that does the recognizing? While it is true that both Hegel and Kant presuppose a unified self or subject that is capable of knowing, for Kant such a self is a given, whereas for Hegel it is we who presuppose or construct this self. But how do we construct a self without recognizing it? This is where the “other” becomes necessary, for it is only the other who can recognize and construct one, and thereby makes one real. Moreover, the other must not take me to be a mere object of his or her self-consciousness but as a self-conscious knowing subject in my own right. It is at this point that Hegel uses his, by now famous, master-slave parable to begin the dialectical argument of why the objects of our knowledge are inter-subjectively and socioculturally constructed and known. Thus a reflective socialized and historicized self-consciousness works its way dialectically through reason and spirit, toward absolute knowledge in an ever-expanding and increasingly shared point of view that leads toward a universal point of view, which would at least theoretically serve as the standpoint from which pure objectivity, both moral and epistemological, would be possible.
Hegel was the first philosopher to historicize objectivity and chart its growth in the dialectic of history. Unlike Kant, he did not base objectivity on the abstract analysis of its conditions but on the human sociohistorical subject. Even so, Karl Marx (1818–1883) accused him of positing a method of coming to know, which lost its way in the clouds of ideas and ideologies. If human history is to be seen in its reality, Marx claimed, it is necessary to look at human labor and relations of production and domination. This is the road to objectivity in history. Paradoxically, Marx may be considered to be the closest to Hegel among the great sociologists, even if the object and the objective are viewed materially rather than ideally by Marx.
OBJECTIVITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY
The influence of Kant’s and Hegel’s understandings of objectivity are vast and varied, sometimes reemerging under different labels. In the pragmatism of the American philosopher Charles Peirce (1839–1914), Kantianism, Hegelianism, and British empiricism are modified and compounded. Here experiences are more than what the senses report; they include anything that is forced upon one’s acknowledgment, real or ideal, including sensory and cognitive surprises. Experiences are only perceptual judgments and therefore can be true or false but never infallible; they are authoritative only because people are compelled to accept them, if not in the short run, then in the long run.
For Peirce, the so-called outer and inner worlds are only vicinities with no boundaries. Therefore, neither metaphysical theses nor so-called analytic statements are immune from empirical evidence; their truth, and hence their objectivity, depends on their ordinary observable consequences, not on their experiential origins. A correspondence theorist of truth would hold that a proposition or belief is true only if it corresponds to a mind-independent reality and as a corollary would insist that a hypothesis can be true even when its truth has no consequences for belief. A pragmatist would hold that such a view, insofar as it has no consequences, is spurious. Objectivity must be connected with the hypothesis that will survive the test of inquiry, experiment, experience, and life. As for truth, it is nothing more than the best inquiry can do.
Inquiry must begin against a background of beliefs held with or derived from a community, and therefore its objectivity can be fixed only by a community of inquirers committed to its truth, a truth that is capable of having consequences. In Peirce’s theory of the Sign, the object is one of three correlates that constitute the Sign, the other two being the representamen and the interpretant. Objectivity is a significant act of which the interpretant (of which the interpreter is a subset) is an indispensable component.
The view of knowledge as human understanding that was initiated by Hegel’s dialectic of self-consciousness admitted “interpretation” into the human sciences in a major way. If in Edmond Husserl’s (1859–1938) early Cartesian writings there appeared aspects of sensory objects that an empiricist or positivist could have recognized as such, by the time he wrote his last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, consciousness had become his prime, if not sole, object of inquiry. In his phenomenology of human experience in the world Husserl saw no way of getting around the fact that consciousness is always someone’s consciousness, and so he proposed that the process of investigating human capacities and faculties had to begin with the rigorous self-examination of one’s self. Husserl called this the standpoint of transcendental solipsism. This methodological solipsism, however, leads one to the recognition of intersubjective communal grounding of the knowing activity as well as the ethical dimension of that intersubjectivity, how the “I” stands in the “we.” He came to see objectivity as the achievement of intersubjective confirmation and acceptance in the “life-world,” a pre-theoretically experienced world. The influence of Husserl’s phenomenology in sociology can be seen mainly in the writings of Alfred Schutz (1899–1959), who combined that phenomenology with the interpretive sociology of Max Weber.
Among the philosophers considered thus far, objectivity was seen as possible because objects are recognizable. Heidegger, Dilthey, and later Gadamer became interested in understanding the unique and unrepeatable—and hence unrecognizable—in history and culture. Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) held fast to the possibility of scientific objectivity with the proviso that the method for achieving objectivity in the human sciences was different from that employed in the natural sciences. Both Weber and Dilthey had a strong influence on the interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz (1926–2006). Heidegger and Gadamer rejected the very notion of objectivity and the subject-object model as a vestige of Cartesianism. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) saw understanding as an aesthetic experience of history and as being quite different from but no less valid than that of the natural sciences. Indeed, the natural sciences were no less value-free in his opinion and no less free of the art of interpretation.
NIETZSCHE AND FOUCAULT
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) spoke about objectivity in a manner that was consonant with all the historical-hermeneutic sciences. He believed that to understand objectivity as a “contemplation without interest” was nonsensical and absurd. “[L]et us be on guard,” he cautioned:
against the dangerous old fiction that posited a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject”; let us be on guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason,” “absolute spirit,” “knowledge in itself.” … There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can lend to the thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity,” be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this, what would that mean but to castrate the intellect. ([1887] 1967, p. 119)
In this view, if Hegel’s hope for an absolute knowing that could synthesize a range of perspectives must come to naught, the rejection of objectivity by Heidegger and others who employ the hermeneutic method is premature:
“Objectivity” [ought to be understood] as the ability to have one’s For and Against under control and to disengage them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge. ([1887] 1967, p. 119)
Nietzsche’s subject is embodied and governed by desire and passion more than by thought, but it is still Cartesian in that it is the arbiter of being and value. Nietzsche’s influence has been especially strong in the writings of Michel Foucault (1926–1984).
SEE ALSO Empiricism; Geertz, Clifford; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Hume, David; Intersubjectivity; Kant, Immanuel; Knowledge; Locke, John; Nietzsche, Friedrich; Objectivism; Phenomenology; Philosophy; Philosophy of Science; Positivism; Pragmatism; Science; Social Science; Social Science, Value Free; Subjectivity: Analysis; Subjectivity: Overview; Weber, Max
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Descartes, Rene. [1641] 1998. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Dilthey, Wilhelm. [1862] 1996. Hermeneutics and the Study of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Durkheim, Émile. [1895] 1958. The Rules of the Sociological Method. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1984. What Is Enlightenment. In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, 32–50. New York: Pantheon.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1975. Truth and Method. New York: Cross Road Press.
Gertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Harper Collins.
Hegel, Georg W. F. [1804] 1977. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Heidegger, Martin. [1927] 1962. Being and Time. San Francisco: Harper.
Hume, David. [1777] 1977. An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Husserl, Edmund. [1931] 1977. Cartesian Meditations. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Kant, Immanuel. [1787] 1965. The Critique of Pure Reason. New York: St. Martin’s.
Locke, John. [1689] 1996. Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Marx, Karl. The German Ideology. [1845] 1998. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
Nietzsche, Friederich. [1887] 1967. On the Genealogy of Morals. New York: Random House.
Peirce, Charles S. 1992–1998. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. Carl Houseman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Schutz, Alfred. (1970). On Phenomenology and Social Relations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Weber, Max. ([1922] 1949) The Methodology of Social Sciences. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Winch, Peter. 1958. The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
E. Valentine Daniel
Objectivity
OBJECTIVITY.
Objectivity is the idea that the truth can be known independently of viewpoint, perspective, or bias. For example, "Gustav Mahler completed nine symphonies," is an objectively true statement, independent of the person who utters it. "Gustav Mahler was the greatest composer in history" is not an objective truth—some people would agree, others would disagree, depending on their subjective aesthetic values. Objectivity has often been presented as diametrically opposed to subjectivity, the idea that people's beliefs and value judgments reflect their individual situation and interests; historicism, the consideration of people's opinions as reflections of the historical era in which they live; and relativism, which considers all points of view to be equally correct and inevitable.
History of the Term
The terms subjective and objective were introduced in European medieval philosophy. Their meanings then were nearly the reverse of their current use: subject meant that which exists, whereas object referred to what is perceived in consciousness. These uses of the terms persisted at least until George Berkeley in the eighteenth century. Lorraine Daston suggests that the current use of the terms was introduced in 1856 by Thomas De Quincey, although the concept of objectivity as knowledge based on fact had already been made in the seventeenth century. Previously, the Aristotelean tradition considered factual knowledge, historical knowledge of specific events, or knowledge of anomalies and novelties inferior to knowledge of "essences" and generalities. Daston attributes to Francis Bacon the novel promotion of facts to a level worthy of natural philosophy. These facts are the precursors of objective knowledge.
Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787) is probably responsible more than any other single thinker for spurring a debate about objectivity by "splitting" the world into "things for us" and "the thing in itself" (Ding an Sich ). Kant analyzed human cognition and concluded that for anything to appear in our consciousness, it must fit into certain innate internal categories such as temporality and causation. It is impossible for us to perceive any phenomenon but within the matrix of these categories. For example, all phenomena must appear in time and be caused by other phenomena. Kant concluded that it is impossible to have knowledge of the world as it is, independent of human observers, beyond our categories, or to use later terminology, objectively.
Much of subsequent philosophy attempted to rise to the Kantian challenge. Phenomenology has attempted to reunite the world by eliminating the distinction between subject and object. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) sought to unite them as aspects of an ideal world spirit that we can know by an act of self-consciousness, because we are parts of this world rather than distinct from it. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) designed his phenomenology to study pure consciousness through the method of epoche, the suspension of belief in subject-object distinction. Husserl claimed that prior to cognitive processes, such as scientific abstraction, that distinguish the objective from the subjective, we live in an immediate asubjective "life-world." Husserl and his immediate and remote intellectual progeny (Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas) attempted to recapture this lost preobjective life-world. However, their analysis resulted in a new chasm between what they considered to be universal immediate human consciousness and the objective scientific world view.
Conversely, the nineteenth-century school of positivism (Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill) and the twentieth-century school of logical-empiricism (Ernst Mach, the early Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolph Carnap) claimed that the scientific method offers objective knowledge of the world, and therefore philosophy should explicate this method, and other disciplines would do well to use this philosophic blueprint to reform themselves. The logical empiricists shared an analysis of language as composed of distinct units that correspond with distinct chunks of reality. The objective meaning of words or propositions is then their empirical truth condition, a state of affairs in the world. For example "the cat is on the mat" is objectively true if and only if indeed the cat is on the mat.
The objectivity of our beliefs has been criticized by traditions that descend from Karl Marx (1818–1883)and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Marx thought that the material conditions of production are the objective aspect of society. Systems of belief merely reflect economic interests. Nietzsche tended to reduce beliefs to power relations. Karl Mannheim (1893–1947), the founder of sociology of knowledge, and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), one of the founders of the Frankfurt School, concentrated on economic or political influences over apprehensions of reality. Horkheimer argued that it is impossible to produce a metatheory to transcend the limits of a temporal worldview. Later, Michel Foucault (1926–1984) and Bruno Latour showed the dependence of research on social power relations, on what Foucault called discourses.
Contemporary Debates
Since the 1960s the debate about the objectivity of knowledge in English-speaking countries concentrated on explaining the history of science. Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) and others demonstrated that there are no simple objective scientific facts because scientific concepts are always embedded in conceptual frameworks, and so are confirmed holistically. After Kuhn, those who believe that science offers objective knowledge attempt to explain scientific change by referring to internal scientific reasons, the interaction between theory and reality. Those who claim that science is at least in some cases not objective, including sociologists of knowledge of "the strong program" (which is based on a critique of traditional philosophy of science), feminists (such as Helen Longino, Miriam Solomon, and Kathleen Okruhlik), and postcolonial thinkers explain scientific change by external social factors. They may be divided into moderates who argue that in many cases science did not adhere to its objective criteria, and radicals who claim that the very ideas of objectivity and rationality reflect the biases of male, heterosexual, and white European scientists.
These debates led contemporary philosophers like Nicholas Rescher to attempt to understand objectivity without referring to the world or truth conditions, to reduce objectivity to universal impersonal reason that should lead to the same cognitive output given the same informational or evidential input. Objectivity then is a general human point of view, avoiding the idiosyncratic.
One of the most influential twentieth-century discussions of objectivity was introduced by Thomas Nagel. He considered objective–subjective propositions to have different degrees of reliance on an individual's makeup and position in the world. Since there is no "view from nowhere," a point of view is inevitable. The subjectivity of consciousness is irreducible to its physical properties (the brain). In ethics, moral subjectivism considers moral principles personal; moral objectivism argues that moral judgments are defensible rationally and moral values exist objectively. Nagel considered the good to be subjective and irreducible, since we cannot act impersonally. According to Nagel the problem facing contemporary philosophy is the integration of our subjective-personal and objective-impersonal views of ourselves in the same worldview.
See also Idealism ; Paradigm ; Phenomenology ; Positivism ; Relativism ; Science, History of .
bibliography
Megill, Allan, ed. Rethinking Objectivity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994.
Nagel, Thomas. The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Natter, Wolfgang, Theodore Schatzki, and John Paul Jones, eds. Objectivity and Its Other. New York: Guilford, 1995.
Rescher, Nicholas. Objectivity: The Obligations of Impersonal Reason. Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1997.
Aviezer Tucker
Objectivity
OBJECTIVITY
In the phenomenology of E. husserl, the characteristic of an object of awareness, by virtue of which it can be grasped as the same by distinct acts of apprehension. By this definition, aspects of both physical bodies and essences, as well as psychological realities such as memories, are "objectivities," insofar as they can be so understood. The acts of perceiving, thinking, and remembering, by which such ideas are grasped, are, on the other hand, subjective and transient. Husserl customarily distinguishes between Gegenständlichkeit and Objektivität, the former term referring to the status of things in the physical world, the latter to the meaningful aspects through which these things, as well as all other targets of awareness, are given to man. The second term, therefore, refers to a realm of objectivities that encompasses both the "interior" and the "exterior" worlds of epistemology, and for this reason it is more fundamental.
Objective vs. Subjective. As it is commonly used, objectivity means not only a phenomenal, or descriptive, characteristic, but also a principle of value. Objective means that whatever the case, it is true for all subjects. In this sense it is the opposite of subjective opinions and preferences, that is, to judgments and evaluations distorted by a subject's emotions, stereotypes, biases, and the like. When used as a pejorative term, it indicates that there are factors wrongly influencing judgments and evaluations. An objective judgment or an objective evaluation is, therefore, one in which a resolution is determined essentially by the object's intrinsic meaning and value, by "the way things are," rather than by the way a particular person or group (subject) thinks they are or prefers them to be.
Criteria of Objectivity. One problem, of course, is how to decide what is true for everyone. The first spontaneous criterion could be that of common consent exemplified by language or action. There may be an assumption that whatever is objective is independent of an individual's assessment; hence, that whatever idea is common to everyone is not the effect of psychological or cultural predispositions. Reference to unicorns, fairies, phlogiston, and the ether are good examples of the limitations to this criterion. To say that it has limitations, however, is not to say that it is useless when properly confined and controlled. Although common consent at a given time is clearly not sufficient ground for concluding that an idea is objective, it could be considered to be at least a necessary condition. The lack of common consent in matters of morality, however, is remarked on by many philosophers, from Socrates to the present, who nevertheless admit the possibility of objective moral norms.
In the study of nature as well, the criterion of common consent has prooved to be insufficient, and has been supplemented by the controlled method of verification, a method that attempts to minimize or eliminate the influence of subjective elements. The so-called "scientific method," by reason of its success in promoting consensus among its practitioners and in extending one kind of understanding of nature, has resulted in "scientifically established" almost becoming a synonym for objective. In fact, some schools of philosophy have defended that synonymy, at the price of relegating secondary qualities and values to the realm of the subjective. If the rules for following the scientific method could, in fact, function as an unambiguous procedure for formulating and testing the truth of a judgment, it would constitute a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for objectivity. Here too, however, the history of scientific innovators such as L. pasteur, N. copernicus, I. kant, and G. Cantor shows, in retrospect, that no system of rules can prescribe the way in which the rules are to be employed. Once again, this only notes a limitation to a method of verifying objective conditions, and does not dismiss a given method as worthless.
Phenomenology's Reaction. The answer to the fundamental question regarding the objectivity of a point of view relies upon that point of view being independent of an individual attitude and therefore, at lease in principle, accessible to all; it must also be established by a fixed method. Phenomenology suggests that this is impossible and lists the reasons why these criteria are limited. Phenomenoloy's fundamental premise is that objectivity is only possible with the "cooperation" of the subject. That which is disclosed by experience is essentially related to the noetic attitude or intentionality of the subject toward the world. For example, the scientific attitude is a way of understanding the meaning and being of the world that casts some things into relief and others into shadow. Other levels of meaning—the aesthetic, the religious, the social—may be rendered inaccessible if this attitude is predominant. The aim of phenomenology is, then, to describe and correlate various intentionalities, all of which are potentially revealing, some more fundamental than others, to achieve true objectivity.
In traditional terms, these observations point toward a difference between de jure and de facto objectivity, the former virtually accessible to all, the latter actually so accessible, at least to those with the requisite faculties and training. A final question is raised by those who contend that, in some instances, objectivity is accessible only to a unique individual. Gabriel Marcel has argued that this concept passes beyond the realm of the publicly verifiable, but does not lose touch with objectivity (see existentialism). Such an apparent exception tests the general rule in an important way because they can be applied to religious affirmations.
Bibliography: s. strasser, Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (Pittsburgh 1963). g. marcel, The Mystery of Being, tr. g. s. fraser, 2 v. (Chicago 1950–51). m. polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago 1958). y. simon, Introduction à l'ontologie du connaître (Paris 1933).
[f. j. crosson]