Chapter VII: Objectivity | The Philosophy Of Science by Steven Gussman [1st Edition]

        “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

        – Philip K. DickI


        Objectivity is the view that there must be one absolute, correct answer to a given question, one way in which the world really is (this object, the cosmos, is the ontology you read about briefly in the introduction, and which will be the topic of the second volume of this work).  One must conduct their epistemology with a realistic view of what the ontology is like, if they want it to be properly revealed. Relativism (or pluralism), is the view that the same question may have multiple answers, or that any given answer is about as good as any other. I think this is most often endorsed not genuinely, but practically—the belief that one must “go along to get along”.  But it is dangerous and wrong when it is taken on as-if it is an actual belief.  It is true (as America's wise founding fathers enshrined in the first amendment) that a small-L liberal society should tend to be tolerant of differing opinions (in fact, this is a crucial prerequisite political environment for any serious scientific process to take place),II but this does not mean that, for example, every religious claim is actually correct, even if the claims of different religions directly contradict.  It also does not mean that, as has become popular in elite secular society, 'a member from one culture may not compare his culture to, or criticize, another's culture.'  At some point along the line, we forgot what the general function and spirit of the first amendment is; in addition to its main principle of protecting the basic liberties of conscience, thought, belief, and speech, it is integral for allowing the discovery of objective truth.  If the scientific evidence comes down as conclusively as possible in favor of the evolutionist's view that homo sapiens evolved around 300,000 years ago,III and that The Holy Bible is wrong that humans and other species were created as distinct kinds directly by the Judaeo-Christian god about 8,000 years ago,IV the first amendment does not imply that both of these claims are true, it simply implies that the Christian (and any other religious person, and many scientists with a differing view on the topic) is at liberty to be wrong without punishment (in part because they may, however unlikely, turn out to be right)!  It is as if we have forgotten the most obvious explanation for differences in belief: that one is incorrect while the other is correct; instead we think it somehow enlightened to profess sophistry about how, 'there is more than one way of knowing,' or that, 'matters of morality are subjective.'  This stops us from answering questions like classical philosophers did (or indeed, as all great scientists have), because it pretends no such answers exist, so why search?  And how?  Many a time, I have found myself in a conversation where my interlocutor and I are bringing evidence to bare about our opposing claims before he suddenly insists that my argument is, 'just my opinion.'  If whether or not the female genital mutilation in some regions of the Middle-Eastern and Africa is understood to be a mere matter of opinion, for example, something is terribly wrong with our thinking.V

        Surely, you say, some questions must be subjective—that is, they must have arbitrary answers.  What about, “what is the best flavor of ice cream?”  To see how this can be squared with the objective world-view, consider the nature of the question (with particular attention to the fact that it's not a particularly well-formed question, given the objective nature of reality).  What does it mean for a flavor to be “best”?  It means that it is most pleasing, among all flavors, to the tongue.  But which tongue?  Most would agree that we are narrowing down to the human tongue when we encounter this question.  Even so, the obvious point of the subjectivist is that some people will prefer vanilla, and others chocolate (and some people will not like ice cream at all!), and that it is anyway fairly inconsequential in the grand scheme of things which flavor an individual picks.  But ask again, what does this mean, what is this preference?  Clearly, the human mind is a complex function, and the ice cream is an input into it (there are also many other inputs—perhaps this person's personal history, the time of day, the season, what they have recently eaten, etc., all have an effect on their answer to this simple question, but I think reasonable people can agree people do have fairly stable favorites).VI  So the issue with this question (and allegedly “subjective” questions like it) is that it pretends all human beings are exactly the same, rather than a class of approximately similar objects.  You can ask “how many fingers do human beings have?” and give “ten” as a convincing answer, because it is clearly the intended blueprint and the proportion of people with alternative edge-cases (say, nine fingers) is very low.  But one needs to re-interpret the question about the ice cream flavor to get a meaningful answer; perhaps a simple representative poll of people's favorite ice cream flavors wherein one can see if there is a statistical winner?  In fact, there is a recent YouGov poll of 14 flavors (including “other”) in which vanilla (15%) and chocolate (17%) were quite close!VII  If they had been wildly divergent, it might be tempting to call the clear winner the “best”, but this misses the subjectivist's point that even the minority opinion is valid and real—it is not as though these people are lying about their minority position on their favorite flavor.  To understand how this does not preclude an objective world-view, return again to the idea that each human mind is different in some way from others.  It is an obviously objective question to ask “what is Steve Gussman's favorite flavor?” (or any other individual's).  Why? Is it because people and flavors are inherently subjective facets of the world?  No!  The easiest way to measure an individual's favorite flavor is indeed to ask them, but when you do so, what are you actually measuring?  The ephemeral free-willed opinion of some kind of soul?  Of course not.  In any given instance, there is in-principle a physical state of the individual's brain that encodes the answer to the question about ice cream (or the answers to any other question; this is the physical manifestation of the function in the mind which answers these questions—in other words, the information content of one's answers must be physically encoded in the structure of their brain in some way).  No individual could have answered any other way, no matter how much it feels like they could have (this includes lying)—the physical nature of the neural network that is their brain prefers the flavor it prefers because of the particulars of that physical system.  This is the same reason people can lie; give different-but-honest answers under different conditions; be wrong; or even imagine things that aren't so: if I claim to be imagining a chair in the middle of an empty room, what is real and what is not?  The chair is not real: it simply isn't there in the middle of the room for me or anyone else to actually see; there exists no group of fundamental particles arranged into a chair at that location in space-time.  But the imagined chair is real: it is my conscious experience of the correlated physical makeup of the neural network that is my brain, imagining a chair (an imagined chair is then highly distinct from a real chair, given it is a wildly different physical manifestation).  There is both objectively not a chair in the room, and objectively a mind in a state of imagining a chair in the room.VIII  Properly understood, all seemingly subjective or arbitrary “opinions” are merely the objective answers to questions about individual minds rather than about external objects.  So with the favorite flavors question, one is not asking about ice cream (or at least not only about ice cream) so much as one is asking about the differences between brains.

        I suspect that this is one of many basic facets of philosophy of science that actually comes pretty naturally to us, and is removed only with the kind of sustained over-education (and mis-education, at that) all too common in universities and elite culture, today.


Footnotes:

0. The Philosophy Of Science table of contents can be found, here (footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2022/04/table-of-contents-philosophy-of-science.html).

I. See the entry for this quote on GoodReads (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/646-reality-is-that-which-when-you-stop-believing-in-it); the quotation originates in I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon by Philip K. Dick (St. Martin's Press) (1985 / 1987) (though I have not read this book).

II. Look forward to the “History And Politics” chapter in the "Ontology" volume.

III. See Who We Are And How We Got Here: Ancient DNA And The New Science Of The Human Past by David Reich (Vintage Books) (2018 / 2019) (pp. 24).

IV. See the “Young Earth Creationism” entry on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism), which further cites the lecture slide-deck “The Age of the Earth And The Formation Of The Universe” by Timothy H. Heaton (University Of South Dakota) (2005) (http://apps.usd.edu/esci/creation/age/creationism_young_earth.html) and The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism To Intelligent Design by Ronald L. Numbers (Harvard University Press) (2006) (though I have read none of these).

V. See The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris (Free Press) (2010) (pp. 27, 42-46, 213-214, 221-222) which further cites the “Moral Relativism” entry in The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy (Stanford University) (2004 / 2021) (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/) (though I have not read this entry) and anthropologist Donald Symons by way of The Blank Slate by Pinker (pp. 273).

VI. This appeal to reason is the same as is often used by lawyers, whose concerns are very practical: they speak of the standard of “a reasonable man.” For more on this concept, look forward to the “History And Politics” chapter in the “Ontology” volume.

VII. See “This is the most popular ice cream flavor among Americans” by Jamie Ballard (YouGov) (2020) (https://today.yougov.com/topics/consumer/articles-reports/2020/07/14/popular-ice-cream-flavor-poll-survey-direct).

VIII. I actually did get into this very argument with a friend in college, once. Then-philosophy-student Andy Moffett used the example of the “imagined chair” in an attempt to thwart my argument for scientific realism (if I remember correctly, the rebuttal made here did lead to his concession on at least this example).

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