Abstract
The natural sciences are often cited as paradigms of objective disciplines, and scientific method is widely believed to provide an objective way of acquiring knowledge of the world. The social sciences have been far less widely taken to be objective, but most philosophers of science who think they should be considered sciences regard them as objective in principle, typically on the ground that their subject matter is amenable to study using scientific method. Some philosophers and some scientists, however, have raised doubts about whether the scientific evaluation of hypotheses can be objective, even in principle. Perhaps the most common reason for this doubt is the idea that “value judgments” are unavoidable in scientific assessment. There have been other grounds for the doubt, of course, particularly in relation to the social sciences, and some of these grounds will also concern me in this paper.
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© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Audi, R. (1990). Scientific Objectivity and the Evaluation of Hypotheses. In: Salmon, M.H. (eds) The Philosophy of Logical Mechanism. Synthese Library, vol 206. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0987-8_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0987-8_16
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