Scientific Objectivity Quotes & Sayings

The old scientific ideal of episteme - of absolutely certain, demonstrable knowledge - has proved to be an idol. The demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative for ever. — Karl Popper

Even scientific knowledge, if there is anything to it, is not a random observation of random objects; for the critical objectivity of significant knowledge is attained as a practice only philosophically in inner action. — Karl Jaspers

Any attempt to dismiss a phenomenon that is not understood merely by explaining it as hallucination becomes irrelevant when a coherent scientific theory can be applied. — Amit Goswami

Science contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world. Its great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view. This means doubting everything except facts; it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may. — Aldo Leopold

Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue. Between — Paul Kalanithi

We have a thousand machines for making war but none for making peace. We have computers and iPhone apps that can make millions out of a tiny change in exchange rates, but none that can rescue the poorest countries from their plight. We know how to make Internet pornography, but not how to repair marriages. The very objectivity or neutrality of scientific knowledge as commonly conceived has played into the hands of the gods we secretly worship. — N. T. Wright

[I shall not] discuss scientific method, but rather the methods of scientists. We proceed by common sense and ingenuity. There are no rules, only the principles of integrity and objectivity, with a complete rejection of all authority except that of fact. — Joel Henry Hildebrand

As scientists linked smoking to cancer, the tobacco industry was under particularly pointed attack, which might have heightened Powell's alarmism. As a director at Philip Morris from 1964 until he joined the Supreme Court, Powell was an unabashed defender of tobacco, signing off on a series of annual reports lashing out at critics. The company's 1967 annual report, for instance, declared, "We deplore the lack of objectivity in so important a controversy ... Unfortunately the positive benefits of smoking which are so widely acknowledged are largely ignored by many reports linking cigarettes and health, and little attention is paid to the scientific reports which are favorable to smoking." Powell took umbrage at the refusal by the Federal Communications Commission to grant the tobacco companies "equal time" to respond to their critics on television and argued that the companies' First Amendment rights were being infringed. — Jane Mayer

Human beings cannot, of course, wholly transcend human nature; something subjective, if only the interest that determines the direction of our attention, must remain in all our thought. But scientific philosophy comes nearer to objectivity than any other human pursuit, and gives us, therefore, the closest constant and the most intimate relation with the outer world that it is possible to achieve. — Bertrand Russell

Well, as it turns out, even in scientific research where there is supposed to be objectivity in the way experiments are carried out, interpreted and reported, it is still run by scientists who might have their own preferred ideas and biases (scientists are after all humans). As such, articles are selected for publication not necessarily because the work represents an objective truth. Rather, articles are published because they have crossed the sometimes arbitrary threshold for novelty and technical requirements as accepted in the respective fields. — Foong May Yeong

Are you really surprised by the endurance of religion? What ideology is likely to be more durable than one that conforms, at every turn, to our powers of wishful thinking? Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe. The methodology isn't perfect, and the history of science is riddled with abject failures of scientific objectivity. But that is just the point-these have been failures of science, discovered and corrected by-what, religion? No, by good science. — Sam Harris

The scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity - that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the universe. Now, this is basically incompatible with virtually all the religious or metaphysical systems whatever, all of which try to show that there is some sort of harmony between man and the universe and that man is a product - predictable if not indispensable - of the evolution of the universe. — Jacques Monod

Science has long been in the values business. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; rather, scientific validity is the result of scientists making their best effort to value priinciples of reasoning that link their beliefs to reality, through reliable chains of evidence and argument. — Sam Harris

The classification of facts and the formation of absolute judgments upon the basis of this classification - judgments independent of the idiosyncrasies of the individual mind - essentially sum up the aim and method of modern science. The scientific man has above all things to strive at self-elimination in his judgments, to provide an argument which is as true for each individual mind as for his own. — Karl Pearson

What I have tried to show is that the scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity - that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the universe. — Jacques Monod

Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. — Paul Kalanithi

Scientific objectivity is not the absence of initial bias. It is attained by frank confession of it. — Mortimer J. Adler

The bottom line about the information possessed by non-Western peoples is that the information becomes valid only when offered by a white scholar recognized by the academic establishment; in effect, the color of the skin guarantees scientific objectivity. — Vine Deloria Jr.

It was my good fortune to be linked with Mme. Curie through twenty years of sublime and unclouded friendship. I came to admire her human grandeur to an ever growing degree. Her strength, her purity of will, her austerity toward herself, her objectivity, her incorruptible judgement - all these were of a kind seldom found joined in a single individual ... The greatest scientific deed of her life - proving the existence of radioactive elements and isolating them - owes its accomplishment not merely to bold intuition but to a devotion and tenacity in execution under the most extreme hardships imaginable, such as the history of experimental science has not often witnessed. — Albert Einstein

Economics seeks to be a science. Science is supposed to be objective and it is difficult to be scientific when the subject matter, the participant in the economic process, lacks objectivity. — George Soros

Computer science increasingly relies on its private corporate patrons who apply their own closed systems of peer review and criticism, with occasional results thrown over the wall. The closed walls of Redmond or Mountain View enable old-fashioned patronage of nature's secrets. The objectivity and scientific status of computer science is a chimera: we cannot stand on the shoulders of giants in computer science, for they simply refuse to let us. — Samir Chopra

What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions ... and yet which still remains a context. — Jacques Derrida

Paid product endorsements, especially by real or purported experts, constitute a steady rainfall of deception. They betray contempt for the intelligence of their customers. They introduce an insidious corruption of popular attitudes about scientific objectivity. — Carl Sagan

Many of us who read the literature of social science as laymen are conscious of being admitted at a door which bears the watchword "scientific objectivity" and of emerging at another door which looks out upon a variety of projects for changing, renovating, or revolutionizing society. In consequence, we feel the need of a more explicit account of how the student of society passes from facts to values or statements of policy. — Richard M. Weaver

The key point is that anthropomorphism is not always as problematic as people think. To rail against it for the sake of scientific objectivity often hides a pre-Darwinian mindset, one uncomfortable with the notion of humans as animals. When we are considering species like the apes, which are aptly known as "anthropoids" (humanlike), however, anthropomorphism is in fact a logical choice. Dubbing an ape's kiss "mouth-to-mouth contact" so as to avoid anthropomorphism deliberately obfuscates the meaning of the behavior. It would be like assigning Earth's gravity a different name than the moon's, just because we think Earth is special. — Frans De Waal

Space is not a scientific object removed from ideology or politics. It has always been political and strategic. There is an ideology of space. Because space, which seems homogeneous, which appears as a whole in its objectivity, in its pure form, such as we determine it, is a social product. — Henri Lefebvre

Scientific objectivity is one of our most deeply held, and crippling, illusions. — Mark Frost

Given cognitive vulnerabilities, it would be convenient to have an arrangement whereby reality could tell us off; and that is precisely what science is. Scientific methodology is the arrangement that allows reality to answer us back. — Rebecca Goldstein

Properly conducted scientific studies ... give us a pretty good idea of when something is likely to be correct. To me, pretty good is a linguistic statistic that falls somewhere in between more likely than not and beyond a reasonable doubt, et avoides the pitfalls arising from the belief in complete objectivity. — Robert A. Burton

There are science teachers who actually claim that they teach "a healthy skepticism." They do not. They teach a profound gullibility, and their dupes, trained not to think for themselves, will swallow any egregious rot, provided it is dressed up with long words and an affectation of objectivity to make it sound scientific. — Anthony Standen