Objectivity as a Problem: An Attempt at an Overview

Abstract

Objectivity has become a contested notion. The chief contending models, which may be conveniently abstracted from Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus, may be termed, respectively, constructivism and objectivism. There are difficulties, but of different sorts, confronting each. Objectivism is now seriously challenged, but constructivism is not yet cast in any canonically compelling way. There is an increasing tendency, now, to construe knowledge as a construct of historical experience and to challenge any principled disjunction between objectivity in the natural sciences and in the human sciences and practical life. To favor these themes is, effectively, to deny any privilege or hierarchical order of knowledge favoring the natural sciences.