Alison Wylie, UBC - Objectivity

The scientific analysis of material from Indigenous contexts raises some challenging questions about the ideals of “objectivity” that inform scientific research and about the relationship between Indigenous and Western knowledge. Indigenous scholars and knowledge-holders often understand their material heritage in terms that cross-cut conventional Western distinctions between the spiritual and the natural; they may invoke elements such as sentient landscapes and the intervention of spirit-beings in geological and human history. The orthodox scientific response has been to reject Indigenous understanding on grounds that it’s “traditional,” limited to local contexts, rooted in a distinctive cultural world view; it isn’t objective. For a claim to be genuine knowledge it must be true across the board, “value free” and aperspectival: a “view from nowhere.” This not only excludes many facets of Indigenous knowledge but also ignores just how contentious and unstable a concept “objectivity” is in the context of Western science. It has meant quite different things at different points in its complicated history, and in current usage it is a “success” term that bundles together a number of different good-making features of knowledge, of authoritative knowers and their methods of inquiry, as well as the objects of knowledge we count as “really real.” Some critical theorists argue on these grounds that objectivity is nothing but a culturally constructed illusion but, pushed to its limit, this line of reasoning denies the potential for learning from experience and from one another. In this video Wylie discusses this history of contention about “objectivity” and makes a case for stepping back from wrangling about abstractions. Rather than invoke an unspecified and unattainable ideal, better to think systematically about what we want from the beliefs and claims we valorize as “knowledge,” from those who produce and transmit them, and from our collective practices of producing and appraising knowledge. When we focus on these questions it is clear that all knowledge is situated and that what we need, what we rely on in making decisions and acting in the world, is knowledge that’s “fit for purpose.” References: Lorraine Daston. Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective. Social Studies of Science 22 (1992): 597-618. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. Objectivity. (Zone Books, 2007). Heather Douglas. Science, Policy, and the Value-free Ideal. (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). Sandra Harding. What is Strong Objectivity? In Feminist Epistemologies, ed. L. Alcoff and E. Potter (Routledge, 1995). Helen Longino. How Values Can Be Good for Science. In Science, Values, and Objectivity, ed. P. K. Machamer and G. Wolters (Pittsburgh University Press, 2004). Alison Wylie. A Plurality of Pluralisms: Collaborative Practice in Archaeology. In Objectivity in Science, ed. F. Padovani, A. Richardson, and J. Y. Tsou (Springer, 2015).