Objectivity? What’s that?

My eye caught a post in some blog that debated how objective, objectivity really is. My understanding of objective and subjective is slightly off-beat compared to most in the scientific world.

When you hold a ‘pure scientific’ paradigm, especially in ’subjective sciences’ like psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. you believe that you can do your science objectively. Now that I don’t believe.

It is totally impossible to be ‘objective’, since the moment you start to observe anything, you are involved. Your paradigm is involved. All the knowledge your paradigm holds get involved in your observations and eventual interpretations. You might think your paradigm is more ‘objective’, but that is not possible, because you will eventually use YOUR (subjective) paradigm to interpret what YOU are observing. YOUR observations and YOUR interpretations will become clear, not necessarily what you observe.

In the end, after you have made your observations and interpretations what he hear from you is YOUR decriptions of YOUR interpretations of what you have observed. You make your paradigm explicit about your topic of research.

Consensual validation, an interesting term. Now that is something I believe can exist. Consensual validations is a term that describes that in our observations we have consensus that we believe we interpret what we observe in basically the same way.

Let me give you an example. If I show the colour green to 1000 people and all 1000 of them say that what they see is the colour ‘green’, we have consensual validation about what the 1000 people observe. The same interpretation of a thing after it has been observed means we have consensual validation.

In the scientific world we don’t have objective and subjective, we have consensual validation.