I believe that objectivity would be defined as follows: The world exists
as a certain whole...as a scientific strategy we partition that whole
into two parts: the objective and the subjective. The subjective is
what we know or understand...the objective is what is "out there",
independent of our subjectivity. I view objectivity as the assumption
(or belief) that any subjective understanding of the objective world
can be explained solely in terms of the objective world...that is, it
is possible to learn about the world (creating that part of our
subjectivity) by only dealing with the objective (by not actually
using anything subjective). This is what the empiricists claim to do.
It is always possible to form mental images based on other mental
images in such a way that the result can not be re-derived from things
purely objective. An objectivist would probably call this fantasy and
not part of science. An objectivist would say that the objective (the
out there) can be explained scientifically by our mental constructs
(the subjective) as long as each mental construct used was grounded
back in the objective. Intuitively, I think of a mechanism (or
mechanistic explanation) as being such a grounded mental construct.
It is also possible, if we choose, to build an external device or
program a computer that yields behavior consistent with that mental
construct (mechanism).
So I think of the concept of objectivity as being independent of us...
where we (our subjectivity) can be taken out of the loop...where what
we determine from the objective world is a property only of the
objective world and not of our manipulation. We may manipulate the
world to understand it, but if we are objective, we do that
manipulation in such a way as to be transparent to the knowledge we
discover. That is, we were objective if our own involvement
(manipulation, or experiment) was irrelevant to what we discovered.
Objective knowledge is not an artifact of the way we obtain the
knowledge. Objective knowledge is independent of method...it is truth
about the world independent of us (the subjective)
This (objectivity) may be a complete fantasy (I think it is), but it
is (I think) the dominant viewpoint in the scientific community...
even if most people have not really thought about it...
Practically, though, we all mix what I defined to be the subjective
and objective together all the time. Rosen tries to explain this
(I beleive) in his modeling relationship with the encoding and
decoding arms.
The above is my current definition of ojectivity. I plan to read
Rosen's book FUNDAMENTALS OF MEASUREMENT soon... I may explain
things a bit differently after that. We'll see.
Jeff Prideaux