While modern science seems committed to the idea that seeking verifiable facts that are accessible to anyone is a good strategy for building a reliable picture of the world as it really is, historically, these two ideas have not always gone together. Peter Machamer describes a historical moment when these two senses of objectivity were coupled in his article, “The Concept of the Individual and the Idea(l) of Method in Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy.” [1]

Prior to the emergence of a scientific method that stressed objectivity, Machamer says, most people thought knowledge came from divine inspiration (whether written in holy books or transmitted by religious authorities) or from ancient sources that were only shared with initiates (think alchemy, stone masonry, and healing arts here). Knowledge, in other words, was a scarce resource that not everyone could get his or her hands (or brains) on. To the extent that a person found the world intelligible at all, it was probably based on the story that someone else in a special position of authority was telling.

How did this change? Machamer argues that it changed when people started to think of themselves as individuals. The erosion of feudalism, the reformation and counter-reformation, European voyages to the New World (which included encounters with plants, animals, and people previously unknown in the Old World), and the shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric view of the cosmos all contributed to this shift by calling old knowledge and old sources of authority into question. As the old sources of knowledge became less credible (or at least less monopolistic), the individual came to be seen as a new source of knowledge.

Machamer describes two key aspects of individuality at work. One is what he calls the “Epistemic I.” This is the recognition that an individual can gain knowledge and ideas directly from his or her own interactions with the world, and that these interactions depend on senses and powers of reason that all humans have (or could have, given the opportunity to develop them). This recognition casts knowledge (and the ability to get it) as universal and democratic. The power to build knowledge is not concentrated in the hands (or eyes) of just the elite — this power is our birthright as human beings.

The other side of individuality here is what Machamer calls the “Entrepreneurial I.” This is the belief that an individual’s insights deserve credit and recognition, perhaps even payment. This recognition casts the individual who has it as a leader, or a teacher — definitely, as a special human worth listening to.

Pause for a moment to notice that this tension is still present in science. For all the commitment to science as an enterprise that builds knowledge from observations of the world that others must be able to make (which is the whole point of reproducibility), scientists also compete for prestige and career capital based on which individual was the first to observe (and report observing) a particular detail that anyone could see. Seeing something new is not effortless (as we’ve discussed in the last two posts), but there’s still an uneasy coexistence between the idea of scientific knowledge-building as within the powers of normal human beings and the idea of scientific knowledge-building as the activity of special human beings with uniquely powerful insights and empirical capacities.

The two “I”s that Machamer describes came together as thinkers in the 1600s tried to work out a reliable method by which individuals could replace discredited sources of “knowledge” and expand on what remained to produce their own knowledge. Lots of “natural philosophers” (what we would call scientists today) set out to formulate just such a method. The paradox here is that each thinker was selling (often literally) a way of knowing that was supposed to work for everyone, while simultaneously presenting himself as the only one clever enough to have found it.

Looking for a method that anyone could use to get the facts about the world, the thinkers Machamer describes recognized that they needed to formulate a clear set of procedures that was broadly applicable to the different kinds of phenomena in the world about which people wanted to build knowledge, that was teachable (rather than being a method that only the person who came up with it could use), and that was able to bring about consensus and halt controversy. However, in the 1600s there were many candidates for this method on offer, which meant that there was a good bit of controversy about the question of which method was the method.

Among the contenders for the method, the Baconian method involved cataloguing many experiences of phenomena, then figuring out how to classify them. The Galilean method involved representing the phenomena in terms of mechanical models (and even going so far as to build the corresponding machine). The Hobbesian model focused on analyzing compositions and divisions of substances in order to distinguish causes from effects. And these were just three contenders in a crowded field. If there was a common thread in these many methods, it was describing or representing the phenomena of interest in spatial terms. In the seventeenth century, as now, seeing is believing.

In a historical moment when people were considering the accessibility and the power of knowledge through experience, it became clear to the natural philosophers trying to develop an appropriate method that such knowledge also required control. To get knowledge, it was not enough to have just any experience -– you had to have the right kind of experiences. This meant that the methods under development had to give guidance on how to track empirical data and then analyze it. As well, these methods had to invent the concept of a controlled experiment.

Whether it was in a published dialogue or an experiment conducted in a public space before witnesses, the natural philosophers developing knowledge-building methods recognized the importance of demonstration. Machamer writes:

Demonstration … consists in laying a phenomenon before oneself and others. This “laying out” exhibits the structure of the phenomenon, exhibits its true nature. What is laid out provides an experience for those seeing it. It carries informational certainty that causes assent.” (94)

Interestingly, there seems to have been an assumption that once people hit on the appropriate procedure for gathering empirical facts about the phenomena, these facts would be sufficient to produce agreement among those who observed them. The ideal method was supposed to head off controversy. Disagreements were either a sign that you were using the wrong method, or that you were using the right method incorrectly. As Machamer describes it:

[T]he doctrines of method all held that disputes or controversies are due to ignorance. Controversies are stupid and accomplish nothing. Only those who cannot reason properly will find it necessary to dispute. Obviously, as noted, the ideal of universality and consensus contrasts starkly with the increasing number of disputes that engage these scientific entrepreneurs, and with the entrepreneurial claims of each that he alone has found the true method.

Ultimately, what stemmed the proliferations of competing methods was a professionalization of science, in which the practitioners essentially agreed to be guided by a shared method. The hope was that the method the scientific profession agreed upon would be the one that allowed scientists to harness human senses and intellect to best discover what the world is really like. Within this context, scientists might still disagree about the details of the method, but they took it that such agreements ought to be resolved in such a way that the resulting methodology better approximated this ideal method.

The adoption of shared methodology and the efforts to minimize controversy are echoed in Bruce Bower’s [2] discussion of how the ideal of objectivity has been manifested in scientific practices. He writes:

Researchers began to standardize their instruments, clarify basic concepts, and write in an impersonal style so that their peers in other countries and even in future centuries could understand them. Enlightenment-influenced scholars thus came to regard facts no longer as malleable observations but as unbreakable nuggets of reality. Imagination represented a dangerous, wild force that substituted personal fantasies for a sober, objective grasp of nature. (361)

What the seventeenth century natural philosophers Machamer describes were striving for is clearly recognizable to us as objectivity -– both in the form of an objective method for producing knowledge and in the form of a body of knowledge that gives a reliable picture of how the world really is. The objective scientific method they sought was supposed to produce knowledge we could all agree upon and to head off controversy.

As you might imagine, the project of building reliable knowledge about the world has pushed scientists in the direction of also building experimental and observational techniques that are more standardized and require less individual judgment across observers. But an interesting side-effect of this focus on objective knowledge as a goal of science is the extent to which scientific reports can make it look like no human observers were involved in making the knowledge being reported. The passive voice of scientific papers — these procedures were performed, these results were observed — does more than just suggest that the particular individuals that performed the procedures and observed the results are interchangeable with other individuals (who, scientists trust, would, upon performing the same procedures, see the same results for themselves). The passive voice can actually erase the human labor involved in making knowledge about the world.

This seems like a dangerous move when objectivity is not an easy goal to achieve, but rather one that requires concerted teamwork along with one’s objective method.
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[1] “The Concept of the Individual and the Idea(l) of Method in Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy,” in Peter Machamer, Marcello Pera, and Aristides Baltas (eds.), Scientific Controversies: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives. Oxford University Press, 2000.

[2] Bruce Bower, “Objective Visions,” Science News. 5 December 1998: Vol. 154, pp. 360-362

In the last post, we talked about objectivity as a scientific ideal aimed at building a reliable picture of what the world is actually like. We also noted that this goal travels closely with the notion of objectivity as what anyone applying the appropriate methodology could see. But, as we saw, it takes a great deal of scientific training to learn to see what anyone could see.

The problem of how to see what is really there is not a new one for scientists. In her book The Scientific Renaissance: 1450-1630 [1], Marie Boas Hall describes how this issue presented itself to Renaissance anatomists. These anatomists endeavored to learn about the parts of the human body that could be detected with the naked eye and the help of a scalpel.

You might think that the subject matter of anatomy would be more straightforward for scientists to “see” than the cells Fred Grinnell describes [2] (discussed in the last post), which require preparation and staining and the twiddling of knobs on microscopes. However, the most straightforward route to gross anatomical knowledge -– dissections of cadavers -– had its own challenges. For one thing, cadavers (especially human cadavers) were often in short supply. When they were available, anatomists hardly ever performed solitary dissections of them. Rather, dissections were performed, quite literally, for an audience of scientific students, generally with a surgeon doing the cutting while a professor stood nearby and read aloud from an anatomical textbook describing the organs, muscles, or bones encountered at each stage of the dissection process. The hope was that the features described in the text would match the features being revealed by the surgeon doing the dissecting, but there were doubtless instances where the audio track (as it were) was not quite in sync with the visual. Also, as a practical matter, before the invention of refrigeration dissections were seasonal, performed in the winter rather than the warmer months to retard the cadaver’s decomposition. This put limits on how much anatomical study a person could cram into any given year.

In these conditions, most of the scientists who studied anatomy logged many more hours watching dissections than performing dissections themselves. In other words, they were getting information about the systems of interest by seeing rather than by doing -– and they weren’t always seeing those dissections from the good seats. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised that anatomists greeted the invention of the printing press by producing a number of dissection guides and anatomy textbooks.

What’s the value of a good textbook? It shares detailed information compiled by another scientist, sometimes over the course of years of study, yet you can consume that information in a more timely fashion. If it has diagrams, it can give you a clearer view of what there is to observe (albeit through someone else’s eyes) than you may be able to get from the cheap seats at a dissection. And, if you should be so lucky as to get your own specimens for study, a good textbook can guide your examination of the new material before you, helping you deal with the specimen in a way that lets you see more of what there is to see (including spatial relations and points of attachment) rather than messing it up with sloppy dissection technique.

Among the most widely used anatomy texts in the Renaissance were “uncorrupted” translations of On the Use of the Parts and Anatomical Procedures by the ancient Greek anatomist Galen, and the groundbreaking new text On the Fabric of the Human Body (published in 1543) by Vesalius. The revival of Galen fit into a pattern of Renaissance celebration of the wisdom of the ancients rather than setting out to build “new” knowledge, and Hall describes the attitude of Renaissance anatomists toward his work as “Galen-worship.” Had Galen been alive during the Renaissance, he might well have been irritated at the extent to which his discussions of anatomy -– based on dissections of animals, not human cadavers –- were taken to be authoritative. Galen himself, as an advocate of empiricism, would have urged other anatomists to “dissect with a fresh eye,” attentive to what the book of nature (as written on the bodies of creatures to be dissected) could teach them.

As it turns out, this may be the kind of thing that’s easier to urge than to do. Hall asks,

[W]hat scientific apprentice has not, many times since the sixteenth century, preferred to trust the authoritative text rather than his own unskilled eye? (137)

Once again, it requires training to be able to see what there is to see. And surely someone who has written textbooks on the subject (even centuries before) has more training in how to see than does the novice leaning on the textbook.

Of course, the textbook becomes part of the training in how to see, which can, ironically, make it harder to be sure that what you are seeing is an accurate reflection of the world, not just of the expectations you bring to your observations of it.

The illustrations in the newer anatomy texts made it seem less urgent to anatomy students that they observe (or participate in) actual dissections for themselves. As the technique for mass-produced illustrations got better (especially with the shift from woodcuts to engravings), the illustrators could include much more detail in their images. Paradoxically, this could be a problem, as the illustrator was usually someone other than the scientist who wrote the book, and the author and illustrator were not always in close communication as the images were produced. Given a visual representation of what there is to observe and a description of what there is to observe in the text, which would a student trust more?

Bruce Bower discusses this sort of problem in his article “Objective Visions,” [3] describing the procedures used by Dutch anatomist Berhard Albinus in the mid-1700s to create an image of the human skeleton. Bower writes:

Albinus carefully cleans, reassembles, and props up a complete male skeleton; checks the position of each bone in comparison with observations of an extremely skinny man hired to stand naked next to the skeleton; he calculates the exact spot at which an artist must sit to view the skeleton’s proportions accurately; and he covers engraving plates with cross-hatched grids so that images can be drawn square-by-square and thus be reproduced more reliably. (360)

Here, it sounds like Albinus is trying hard to create an image that accurately conveys what there is to see about the skeleton and its spatial relations. The methodology seems designed to make the image-creation faithful to the particulars of the actual specimen — in a word, objective. But, Bower continues:

After all that excruciating attention to detail, the eminent anatomist announces that his atlas portrays not a real skeleton, but an idealized version. Albinus has dictated alterations to the artist. The scrupulously assembled model is only a spingboard for insights into a more “perfect” representation of the human skeleton, visible only to someone with Albinus’ anatomical acumen. (360)

Here, Albinus was trying to abstract away from the peculiarities of the particular skeleton he had staged as a model for observation in order to describe what he saw as the real thing. This is a decidedly Platonist move. Plato’s view was that the stuff of our world consists largely of imperfect material instantiations of immaterial ideal forms -– and that science makes the observations it does of many examples of material stuff to get a handle on those ideal forms.

If you know the allegory of the cave, however, you know that Plato didn’t put much faith in feeble human sense organs as a route to grasping the forms. The very imperfection of those material instantiations that our sense organs apprehend would be bound to mislead us about the forms. Instead, Plato thought we’d need to use the mind to grasp the forms.

This is a crucial juncture where Aristotle parted ways with Plato. Aristotle still thought that there was something like the forms, but he rejected Plato’s full-strength rationalism in favor of an empirical approach to grasping them. If you wanted to get a handle on the form of “horse,” for example, Aristotle thought the thing to do was to examine lots of actual specimens of horse and to identify the essence they all have in common. The Aristotelian approach probably feels more sensible to modern scientists than the Platonist alternative, but note that we’re still talking about arriving at a description of “horse-ness” that transcends the observable features of any particular horse.

Whether you’re a Platonist, an Aristotelian, or something else, it seems pretty clear that scientists do decide that some features of the systems they’re studying are crucial and others are not. They distinguish what they take to be background from what they take to be the thing they’re observing. Rather than presenting every single squiggle in their visual field, they abstract away to present the piece of the world they’re interested in talking about.

And this is where the collaboration between anatomist and illustrator gets ticklish. What happens if the engraver is abstracting away from the observed particulars differently than the anatomist would? As Hall notes, the engravings in Renaissance anatomy texts were not always accurate representations of the texts. (Nor, for that matter, did the textual descriptions always get the anatomical features right — Renaissance anatomists, Vesalius included, managed to repeat some anatomical mistakes that went back to Galen, likely because they “saw” their specimens through a lens of expectations shaped by what Galen said they were going to see.)

On top of this, the fact that artists like Leonardo Da Vinci studied anatomy to improve their artistic representations of the human form spilled back to influence Renaissance scientific illustrators. These illustrators, as much as their artist contemporaries, may have looked beyond the spatial relations between bones or muscles or internal organs for hidden beauty in their subjects. While this resulted in striking illustrations, it also meant that their engravings were not always accurate representations of the cadavers that were officially their subjects.

These factors conspired to produce visually arresting anatomy texts that exerted an influence on how the anatomy students using them understood the subject, even when these students went beyond the texts to perform their own dissections. Hall writes,

[I]t is often quite easy to “see” what a textbook or manual says should be seen. (141)

Indeed, faced with a conflict between the evidence of one’s eyes pointed at a cadaver and the evidence of one’s eyes pointed at an anatomical diagram, one might easily conclude that the cadaver in question was a weird variant while the diagram captured the “standard” configuration.

Bower’s article describes efforts scientists made to come up with visual representations that were less subjective. Bower writes:

Scientists of the 19th century rapidly adopted a new generation of devices that rendered images in an automatic fashion. For instance, the boxy contraption known as the camera obscura projected images of a specimen, such as a bone or a plant, onto a surface where a researcher could trace its form onto a piece of paper. Photography soon took over and further diminished human involvement in image-making. … Researchers explicitly equated the manual representation of items in the natural world with a moral code of self-restraint. … A blurry photograph of a star or ragged edges on a slide of tumor tissues were deemed preferable to tidy, idealized portraits. (361)

Our naïve picture of objectivity may encourage us that seeing is believing, and that mechanically captured images are more reliable than those rendered by the hand of a (subjective) human, but it’s important to remember that pictures -– even photographs -– have points of view, depend on choices made about the conditions of their creation, and can be used as arguments to support one particular way of seeing the world over another.

In the next post, we’ll look at how Seventeenth Century “natural philosophers” labored to establish a general-use method for building reliable knowledge about the world, and at how the notion of objectivity was connected to these efforts, and to the recognizable features of “the scientific method” that resulted.
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[1] Marie Boas Hall, The Scientific Renaissance: 1450-1630. Dover, 1994.

[2] Frederick Grinnell, The Scientific Attitude. Guilford Press, 1992.

[3] Bruce Bower, “Objective Visions,” Science News. 5 December 1998: Vol. 154, pp. 360-362

In trying to figure out what ethics ought to guide scientists in their activities, we’re really asking a question about what values scientists are committed to. Arguably, something that a scientist values may not be valued as much (if at all) by the average person in that scientist’s society.

Objectivity is a value – perhaps one of the values that scientists and non-scientists most strongly associate with science. So, it’s worth thinking about how scientists understand that value, some of the challenges in meeting the ideal it sets, and some of the historical journey that was involved in objectivity becoming a central scientific value in the first place. I’ll be splitting this discussion into three posts. This post sets the stage and considers how modern scientific practitioners describe objectivity. The next post will look at objectivity (and its challenges) in the context of work being done by Renaissance anatomists. The third post will examine how the notion of objectivity was connected to the efforts of Seventeenth Century “natural philosophers” to establish a method for building reliable knowledge about the world.

First, what do we mean by objectivity?

In everyday discussions of ethics, being objective usually means applying the rules fairly and treating everyone the same rather than showing favoritism to one party or another. Is this what scientists have in mind when they voice their commitment to objectivity? Perhaps in part. It could be connected to applying “the rules” of science (i.e., the scientific method) fairly and not letting bias creep into the production of scientific knowledge.

This seems close to the characterization of good scientific practice that we see in the National Academy of Science and National Research Council document, “The Nature of Science.” [1] This document describes science as an activity in which hypotheses undergo rigorous tests, whereby researchers compare the predictions of the hypotheses to verifiable facts determined by observation and experiment, and findings and corrections are announced in refereed scientific publications. It states, “Although [science’s] goal is to approach true explanations as closely as possible, its investigators claim no final or permanent explanatory truths.” (38)

Note that rigorous facts, verification of those facts (or the information necessary to verify them), correction of mistakes, and reliable reports of findings all depend on honesty – you can’t perform these activities by making up your results, or presenting them in a deceptive way, for example. So being objective in the sense of following good scientific methodology requires a commitment not to mislead.

But here, in “The Nature of Science,” we see hints that there are two closely related, yet distinct, meanings of “objective”. One is what anyone applying the appropriate methodology could see. The other is a picture of what the world is really like. Getting a true picture of the world (or aiming for such a picture) means seeking objectivity in the second sense -– finding the true facts. Seeking out the observational data that other scientists could verify -– the first sense of objectivity -– is closely tied to the experimental method scientists use and their strategies for reporting their results. Presumably, applying objective methodology would be a good strategy for generating an accurate (and thus objective) picture of the world.

But we should note a tension here that’s at least as old as the tension between Plato and his student Aristotle. What exactly are the facts about the world that anyone could see? Are sense organs like eyes all we need to see them? If such facts really exist, are they enough to help us build a true picture of the world?

In the chapter “Making Observations” from his book The Scientific Attitude [2], Fred Grinnell discusses some of the challenges of seeing what there is to see. He argues that, especially in the realms science tries to probe, seeing what’s out there is not automatic. Rather, we have to learn to see the facts that are there for anyone to observe.

Grinnell describes the difficulty students have seeing cells under a light microscope, a difficulty that persists even after students work out how to use the microscope to adjust the focus. He writes:

The students’ inability to see the cells was not a technical problem. There can be technical problems, of course -– as when one takes an unstained tissue section and places it under a microscope. Under these conditions it is possible to tell that something is “there,” but not precisely what. As discussed in any histology textbook, the reason is that there are few visual features of unstained tissue sections that our eyes can discriminate. As the students were studying stained specimens, however, sufficient details of the field were observable that could have permitted them to distinguish among different cells and between cells and the noncellular elements of the tissue. Thus, for these students, the cells were visible but unseen. (10-11)

Grinnell’s example suggests that seeing cells, for example, requires more than putting your eye to the eyepiece of a microscope focused on a stained sample of cells. Rather, you need to be able to recognize those bits of your visual field as belonging to a particular kind of object -– and, you may even need to have something like the concept of a cell to be able to identify what you are seeing as cells. At the very least, this suggests that we should amend our gloss of objective as “what anyone could see” to something more like “what anyone could see given a particular conceptual background and some training with the necessary scientific measuring devices.”

But Grinnell makes even this seem too optimistic. He notes that “seeing things one way means not seeing them another way,” which implies that there are multiple ways to interpret any given piece of the world toward which we point our sense organs. Moreover, he argues,

Each person’s previous experiences will have led to the development of particular concepts of things, which will influence what objects can be seen and what they will appear to be. As a consequence, it is not unusual for two investigators to disagree about their observations if the investigators are looking at the data according to different conceptual frameworks. Resolution of such conflicts requires that the investigators clarify for each other the concepts that they have in mind. (15)

In other words, scientists may need to share a bundle of background assumptions about the world to look at a particular piece of that world and agree on what they see. Much more is involved in seeing “what anyone can see” than meets the eye.

We’ll say more about this challenge in the next post, when we look at how Renaissance anatomists tried to build (and communicate) objective knowledge about the human body.
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[1] “The Nature of Science,” in Panel on Scientific Responsibility and the Conduct of Research, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine. Responsible Science, Volume I: Ensuring the Integrity of the Research Process. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 1992.

[2] Frederick Grinnell, The Scientific Attitude. Guilford Press, 1992.