Epistemological Questions: A Workable Objectivity


"Objectivity does not require taking God's perspective, which is impossible." -Mark Johnson

Early scientists and social scientists thought that they could discover the world as it really was. By adhering to strict standards and methods they thought that they could unearth facts without any doubt as to the validity of the results. Today, we know that social and cultural baggage cannot be excluded or dismissed. The results that our scientists come up with are bound not only linguistically to a culture, but also the philosophy backing the pursuit of truth is culturally bound. We are in fact unable to see reality "as it really is". But this is not the end of the discussion, but rather the beginning. The realization of our limitations only gives us a clearer view of what it is we know and how it relates to us, others, and the world as it stands. It comes to this point that objectivity, as it was once understood, needs to be redefined in light of this new understanding. Just because our subjectivity gets in the way of reality, as it were, it does not mean we should throw away all knowledge as tainted goods.

However limited we need to realize that a workable objectivity can lead us, at least, to a shadow of truth. The words we use to describe the objects around us, the events that occur, and the ideas we have are not completely disconnected from the objects themselves. The observations we have are in fact based on those objects and reflect, at least, a slice of reality as we see it. The real objectivity and knowledge gathering occurs not when one single person researches an object, event, or idea, but rather when multiple peoples interact with material, scrutinize it, criticize it, become skeptical of it, and discuss it. The real knowledge gathering occurs when we interact and bounce our individual perspectives off one another to come to some consensus about the reality "out there".

This small amount of knowledge that we have, though fraught with cultural, social, and linguistic pitfalls, is all we have. It is comforting, however, to realize that our observations, though unable to describe the world as it really is, is based on that world and in turn reflect our view of things. Some call this view "practical realism", I call it our only real hope of gaining useful knowledge for ourselves.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Python 3.4 - Caesar Cipher

Caesar ciphers take a list of values and rotates through them to give them a different value. The program below takes from the alphabet and creates a cipher of the message. It returns many variations of the cipher then returns the actual message. import string import collections def caesar (rotate_string , number_to_rotate_by): upper = collections.deque(string.ascii_uppercase) lower = collections.deque(string.ascii_lowercase) upper.rotate(number_to_rotate_by) lower.rotate(number_to_rotate_by) upper = '' .join( list (upper)) lower = '' .join( list (lower)) return rotate_string.translate( str .maketrans(string.ascii_uppercase , upper)).translate( str .maketrans(string.ascii_lowercase , lower)) my_string = 'This is the message' my_string2 = caesar(my_string , 1 ) for i in range ( len (string.ascii_uppercase)): print (i , "|" , caesar(my_string2 , i)) /Users/mattfassnacht/PycharmProjects/untitled12/venv/bin/pyt
Read more

UML - Use Case Diagram

Image
UML stands for unified modeling language. It is used to create a blueprint for a project. A use case diagram is a list of steps needed to reach a goal. Its defines what is required and how those requirements are met. You will narrow down what you have to have. Before you create a use case diagram you need to create a description of the use case diagram. For example the above would look something like this: Use case descriptions includes who the actors are, what the triggers are, and other elements. Beta versions of a project have Shall requirements, should requirements can be done but can be done later. A use case diagram uses stereotypes to represent an element of your system. https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/use-case-diagram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkC7HKtiZC0
Read more