Объективность в науке: попытки познания истины и проблемы реализации.

the concept of objectivity as it is used in science
Type of attempt to uncover truths
Objectivity in science is an attempt to uncover truths about the natural world by eliminating personal biases, emotions, and false beliefs. It is often linked to observation as part of the scientific method. It is thus intimately related to the aim of testability and reproducibility. To be considered objective, the results of measurement must be communicated from person to person, and then demonstrated for third parties, as an advance in a collective understanding of the world. Such demonstrable knowledge has ordinarily conferred demonstrable powers of prediction or technology. The problem of philosophical objectivity is contrasted with personal subjectivity, sometimes exacerbated by the overgeneralization of a hypothesis to the whole. For example, Newton's law of universal gravitation appears to be the norm for the attraction between celestial bodies, but it was later refined and extended—and philosophically superseded—by the more general theory of relativity.

The scientific method was argued for by Enlightenment philosopher Francis Bacon, rose to popularity with the discoveries of Isaac Newton and his followers, and continued into later eras. In the early eighteenth century, there existed an epistemic virtue in science which has been called truth to nature. Judgment and skill were deemed necessary in order to determine the "typical", "characteristic", "ideal", or "average". However, objectivity in measurement can be unobtainable in certain circumstances. Even the most quantitative social sciences such as economics employ measures that are constructs (conventions, to employ the term coined by Pierre Duhem).

Next to unintentional and systematic error, there is always the possibility of deliberate misrepresentation of scientific results, whether for gain, fame, or ideological motives.

A critical argument on scientific objectivity and positivism is that all science has a degree of interpretivism. In the 1920s, Percy Bridgman's The Logic of Modern Physics and the operationalism presented was centered in such recognition. When observational data arises which appears to contradict or falsify a given scientific paradigm, scientists within that paradigm historically have not immediately rejected it, as Karl Popper's philosophical theory of falsificationism would have them do. Instead they have gone to considerable lengths to resolve the apparent conflict without rejecting the paradigm. Through ad hoc variations to the theory and sympathetic interpretation of the data, supporting scientists will resolve the apparent conundrum. In extreme cases, they may ignore the data altogether. Thus, the failure of a scientific paradigm will go into crisis when a significant portion of scientists working in the field lose confidence in it. The corollary of this observation is that a paradigm is contingent on the social order amongst scientists at the time it gains ascendancy.

In Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective (1988), Donna Haraway argues that objectivity in science and philosophy is traditionally understood as a kind of disembodied and transcendent "conquering gaze from nowhere." She argues that this kind of objectivity, in which the subject is split apart and distanced from the object, is an impossible "illusion, a god trick." She demands a re thinking of objectivity in such a way that, while still striving for "faithful accounts of the real world," we must also acknowledge our perspective within the world. She calls this new kind of knowledge making "situated knowledges." Objectivity, she argues, "turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment and not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility". This new objectivity, "allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see."