Abstract
Questions of objectivity involve many general philosophy of science issues; when directed toward the social sciences, even more complex issues surface about the status of the social sciences, e.g. can they be sciences as are the natural sciences? This paper does not take on this mass of issues directly, but instead argues for more restricted theses, in particular that questions about objectivity in the social sciences are often usefully seen as local empirical issues. I look at arguments around underdetermination, value ladenness, the indeterminancy or nonquantitative nature of social science categories or attributes, and traditional ontological debates over materialism and idealism. I show that in all these cases some of the key issues about objectivity are specific empirical issues in the social sciences.
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Notes
Douglas (2004) survey a variety of sometimes overlapping but seemingly irreducible common sense notions of objectivity.
This picture asserts that there are ways to understand "is empirical" that do not require operationalist definitions, sense data, and other such positivist notions.
These are justified in analytic epistemology by ultimately appeals to intuition and ordinary language, which is of course is not my route. Nonetheless the distinction is useful.
CPT is a later version of prospect theory building in rank dependent utility to avoid the violation of stochastic dominance implied by prospect theory. These are often run together in the general literature which illustrates the point I am making.
Throughout the discussion I use the word "theory" and "hypotheses" loosely. Nothing I say claims that theories in the traditional sense are essential to science and the contextualism invoked here suggests rather that science is considerably more complex, etc.
One could be a strong moral realist and think that moral claims are as objective or factual as any other in principle and thus value ladeness is no reason for doubts about objectivity. I will not pursue that line here, though there are more guarded, contextualist versions that might be plausible (Kincaid et al. 2007).
Michell does not explicitly tie his arguments to debates about ontological objectivity.
His results are derivations from certain kinds of aggregate models—I do not mean to imply that his results are empirical; they use deduction to show what matters empirically and does not.
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The author would like to thank two anonymous referees who certainly helped make the paper better.
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Kincaid, H. Live empirical issues in debates over objectivity in the social sciences. Synthese 199, 1935–1954 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02867-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02867-x