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Objectivities in Print

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Objectivity in Science

Part of the book series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science ((BSPS,volume 310))

Abstract

Since the late nineteenth century, observers of science have recognized a close link between several of the practices associated with scientific objectivity and the apparatus of scientific publishing. So compelling has seemed this link that it is commonly believed to be of very long standing, and even a precondition for the emergence of modern science itself. But this belief is both historically mistaken and philosophically misleading. This essay tracks two moments during which the bond between scientific publishing and certain epistemic virtues were in the process of formation. The first moment concerns the spread of referee systems in British science in the early nineteenth century, practices that were later transformed into what we now call peer review. The second concerns the late nineteenth-century consolidation of the periodical literature as the seat of collective scientific opinion at the same time that objectivity in science came commonly to be viewed as inhering in the rational coordination of such collective opinions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Daston developed the language of “communitarian objectivity” over the course of several essays up to the early 2000s (Daston 1999a, b, 2001). Her most recent publications on the subject co-written with Galison have however dropped the phrase in favour of the two more specific injunctions (that I discuss below), “structural objectivity” and “scientific coordination.”

  2. 2.

    In one interpretation of Peirce’s unorthodox Kantianism, the “transcendental unity of apperception” – a precondition for knowledge of objective reality – has essentially been recast as a social unity, as the possibility of community consensus (Apel 1998, chap. 3).

  3. 3.

    Two societies – the Geological and the Astronomical Societies of London – had experimented with referee systems prior to that of the Royal Society, but it was primarily through the Royal Society’s elaborate system that the referee became a well-known personage in British science by mid-century.

  4. 4.

    For recent accounts of Poincaré’s doctrine of conventions, see Walter (2009) and Ben-Menahem (2006).

  5. 5.

    Klein to Poincaré, June 25, 1881 (Dugac 1986, 95). For other historical accounts of this episode see Rowe (1992) and Gray and Walter (1997).

  6. 6.

    Hollinger (1990) used the phrase laissez-faire communitarianism to describe a defence of scientific autonomy that became popular in the American 1960s. This view includes: (1) Support of science is key to national progress, (2) scientists must have autonomy to determine research directions, (3) This autonomy is collective rather than individual: it resides in a concrete, organized, social constituency.

  7. 7.

    Andrew C. Revkin (2007) gives a further account of public confidence in scientific claims about climate science.

  8. 8.

    Oreskes emphasized more explicitly this point about two different conceptions of objectivity at work in these two different genres during her keynote address at the conference on Objectivity held in Vancouver, BC, June 19, 2010.

  9. 9.

    Oreskes herself has focused on a much wider spectrum of strategies for detecting social consensus in climate science than counts of the peer-reviewed literature. But the immense popularity of the 2004 Science note is compelling evidence of the elevated regard in which editorial peer review is held as a guarantor of scientific objectivity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Alex Csiszar

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  1. Alex Csiszar
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Correspondence to Alex Csiszar .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English & Philosophy, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

    Flavia Padovani

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Alan Richardson

  3. Department of Philosophy and Religious, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA

    Jonathan Y. Tsou

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Csiszar, A. (2015). Objectivities in Print. In: Padovani, F., Richardson, A., Tsou, J. (eds) Objectivity in Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 310. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14349-1_8

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