Objects and subjects

In the social sciences subjectivity is critically important. One of the key achievements of rational choice theory in economics has been to use the language of calculus to present highly contingent and subjective constructions as though they were real objects. Other social sciences, especially sociology, have centralized the notion of subjective meanings and torn away at the ‘taken for grantedness’ of everyday life. Peter L Berger writes in Facing up to Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1971), that these subjective meanings are useful precisely because they are buried and taken for granted – it would be intolerable, he says, if we had to search for the meaning in everything.

Before the late 1800s the notion of ‘objectivity’, as we understand it, at least, would have been incomprehensible. Mid-19th century scientists sought to be truthful, dispassionate, and disinterested – but do not seem to have drawn a clear distinction between objectivity and subjectivity in the way that we do today. This is a distinction that plagues the social sciences, and especially sociology, in a quite unhelpful way. Positivism, false objectivity, and objectification are now constituted as some of the sins of the sociological universe. Interrogating subjectivity – and subjective self-identity – are now central to the sociological project. Everything is contested – in the practices of knowing, and in the practices of representation. It is this problem that Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison’s wonderful book Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007) takes as its topic. They chart the history of the ebb and flow of object and subject in science over the course of a century and a half – from Arthur Worthington’s observation of water droplets to images of nano-tubes. At the centre of this book is the problem of the retreat from personal observation and subjective knowing that underpins some of the natural sciences in the 20th century. The account is framed with scholarship and modesty. It figures prominently in the CBC Radio series How to think about Science, which is available on-line here.