Objectivity

The term 'objectivity' has shifted in meaning over time and continues to be contested in terms of both meaning and value.The first appearance of the noun form in English in 1803 suggests both renewed interest in the term and its at least temporary undoing.Reviewing Charles de Villers's Philosophie de Kant in the Edinburgh Review, the Scottish philosopher and poet Thomas Brown remarked that philosophy, 'using reason to correct the false representation of the senses', 'believes that the objects of our senses exist in a manner really known to us, after this correction'. 1 In respect of these views, however, philosophy had relation only to the 'objectivity' of the objects, that is, to 'their qualities as independently existing in themselves', rendering the endeavour 'therefore erroneous, as those qualities cannot be discovered by us' (258).The seemingly self-cancelling nature of the term also underlines the account Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison give of the complex and sometimes contradictory senses of 'objective' and 'subjective' since the early 15th century.They refer to these adjectival forms as having a 'somersault' history, with the European cognates of objectivity, introduced by 14th-century scholastic philosophers such as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, deriving from the Latin objectivis/objective, which was paired with subiectivus/subiective.However, 'objective' denoted things as they are presented to consciousness, whereas 'subjective' denoted things in themselves-almost precisely the opposite of what they mean today. 2 Objectivity subsequently became associated with such positive values as impartiality and disinterestedness, as in William Faulkner's remark in The Hamlet (1940), that 'If the defendant's counsel had any detachment and objectivity left at all by then, he probably realised soon that it was not his client but himself who was embattled with that jury.' 3 But by the end of the 20th century, the historian of science Theodore M. Porter would remark that objectivity was a word that 'arouses the passions as few other words can'; 'Its presence is evidently required for basic justice, honest government, and true knowledge.But an excess of it crushes individual subjects, demeans minority cultures, devalues artistic creativity, and discredits genuine democratic political participation.' 4 He noted that attacks were rarely directed at true