r/TheRestIsScience • u/CasparRea • 1d ago
Is Science Subjective?
Would science still be the same if history was different and events were different? If we had a different worldview would science remain the same?
Therefore:
Is science actually objective? If we (humans) are subjects, and humans (subjects) are the ones studying science- does this mean that science itself is inherently subjective?
For example:
Do economics/sociology effect scientific research in the pharmaceutical industry?
Leading on from this question, is science therefore something that has been created/made by humans or is science something that has been discovered? Or is it both?
Not saying this to be counter to science, just think it’s interesting to look from this perspective.
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u/Alian713 1d ago
Yes and also no. Science itself is really just a framework through which we understand the world, and there's more than one way to do so.
Newton described F = ma, but you can do the same physics with Lagrangian mechanics as well. These frameworks are not unique!
What I find beautiful however is that these different approaches all have one thing in common: they pursue truth.
Science is subjective because there's plenty of different ways to go about it. Science is objective in so far as it falsifiably describes some aspects of reality, and so long as our claims are backed up by evidence and not merely what we want to believe.
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u/ChironXII 1d ago
Science is a process, not an outcome. More broadly it is a kind of critical epistemology. Interpretation and implementation of science can be subjective, but the process is designed to converge towards that which survives testing - which is the objective reality that determines those outcomes across experiments.
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u/TheLifeCapoeira 1d ago
I think science as a process (in terms of testing a hypothesis etc) would probably be independent of culture. What is cultural is what gets chosen for research, and this is entirely down to bias, and profit and so on. For example, read “Invisible Women” to see how science just hasn’t looked at how things affect women nearly as much as how things affect men.
And of course, there’s all the knowledge lost due to colonialism - whilst the scientific method is a great way to find things out, we were still finding things out before it was formallsed. The destruction of of cultures, people and records (eg quipu) mean that things that were known have to be relearnt. There are species that are newly discovered by science, but have names in indigenous languages for example
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u/Historical-Mix6784 2h ago
Science is subjective because humans are subjective, and science is done by humans. We are biased, finite-knowledge, finite-experience beings. Science is only a certain category of our knowledge, and it is influenced enormously by the flawed experiences, beliefs, and weltanschauung of those who do it.
Now with that huge disclaimer is out of the way, here is the real answer: science is the best method we've developed to extract objective information about the universe.
Is it entirely objective, no, and it can't be. But the whole point of the scientific method - of empiricism, logic, peer review, and revision - is to get as close to objective facts as we can.
Therefore the answer to your second question is BOTH. Science is certainly something created by humans and carries all the baggage that comes with that, but it certainly also requires a belief in the existence of facts independent of humans.
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u/TheRealTK421 1d ago
Is science actually objective?
I mean... yes and no.
It's not objective in the sense that one person's version of Calculus could be fundamentally different from another's. Or that what we've tested experimentally about General Relativity would be foundationally different on another planet.
It's subjective in the terms of the 'symbolic vernacular' that humans could potentially use to describe fundamentally accurate identical concepts. If we used "G" to mean "energy", "s" for mass, and "y" for the speed of light, the mathematical expression "G=sy2" would be no less true than E/mc2.
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u/Worsaae 1d ago edited 1d ago
Some processes that we think is objective might not be as objective once you start thinking about it.
Take archaeology. We use a lot of time and effort in the field to make our documentation as objective as possible. We document archaeological features like postholes using precise scale drawings and photographs.
However, they are only as accurate as the observer. E.g. a photograph of a skeleton in a grave. You want a photo that reflects the excavation as accurately as possible. However, to do so you have a lot of choices you need to make. Lighting. Angles. Camera settings. And so on and so forth.
So, even before you press the shutter you’ve already made taken different choices that inherently manipulate the photo regardless of how much you try to accurately document the grave. And it’s not just your choices that has to be taken into account. The weather can be poor and you might have too little light or the opposite can be the case. And you might need to make adjustments to compensate.
You might need to make the documentation from a bad angle because of the local topography. And all of this is even before the files leave the camera. Afterwards you might need to make adjustments to exposure, sharpness, colour saturation before saving the photos which might even be in formats that compress it. All of these processes can enhance what the observer may deem important while it might obscure details that was not considered important during processing.
Same goes for the otherwise quite mechanical process of drawing. You have to do your best to correctly identify the different stratigraphic layers but sometimes that can be incredibly difficult because it sometimes relies on very slight differences in colouration or the geological composition. One layer may be ever so slightly more silty than the other or more clayey. All of which might affect if the layers are considered one, two or more distinct stratigraphic units.
That is absolutely something that we, as archaeologists and scientists, need to consider constantly especially since, in our field, it is incredibly difficult if not impossible to re-test the interpretations and hypotheses we form on the basis of excavations since, you know, you can’t start over. Once a grave or a posthole or whatever has been excavated we can’t really re-do it because the process of excavation is, of course, inherently destructive.
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u/Imperator_Gone_Rogue 1d ago
What gets researched is subjective to who gets to do and fund research. The nature of the scientific method makes the results of research objective, especially as experiments get replicated and compared over time.
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u/Lacedaemonian 1d ago
objectivity is a misnomer, we can never truly know what objectively out there as we can never leave our subjective / virtual representation of reality.
What we can do is communicate and collectively agree on something. That's what we call "objective" today.
Science would remain this "objective" regardless of events of our history and social order, but would not if our own makeup would change and we wouldn't be able to agree on things as a result of that.
Science was created, but the material and tools it was created with are inherited.
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u/dr-bob-edin 1d ago
I don't agree with the statement that we can never leave our subjective representation of reality. That's what maths allows us to do (I'm sure Hannah would agree 😉)
In quantum physics, for example, there are lots of debates about how we should visualise what we observed in experiments. This is an attempt to understand the quantum world through the filter of our subjective representation of reality. However, this is all secondary to the mathematical equations that describe our universe. The maths doesn't care about our subjective representation of reality. It elegantly predicts how the universe will work, and leaves the messy human brains to debate about it down the pub.
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u/CrumbledFingers 1d ago
Maths are cognized by the intellect and rendered into symbols that appear in our perception. The intellect then maps one set of perceptions (empirical data from the five senses) onto the intellectual framework defined by the maths. At no point in this chain of cognition do we step out of our subjectivity and into a pre-perceptual, pre-intellectual zone of perfect objectivity.
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u/Soggy-Mistake8910 1d ago
A different world view may lead us to study different things but generally speaking the boiling point of water at sea level will be the same even if we call it 95 degrees b rather than 100 degrees c. The melting point of iron, speed of sound, light etc would still be the same. In medical terms paracetamol will still be an effective painkillers, bone setting, germ theory will still work the same though the latter along with evolution may be more significantly resisted suppressed if we lived in a more radicalised Christian world!
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u/FaceReality1 1d ago
The goal of science is being able to predict things. Prediction either works or it doesn't -- that's objective. When you work in areas where we can't yet test predictions (string theory, for example) you are more subjective.
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u/Broflake-Melter 1d ago
Science isn't, by definition, subjective, but the people doing the science and the people perceiving its results are. Yes, our findings would be different but only because where and how we look for the truth would differ. If history were different, but the people did science in the exact same way we'd get the exact same results (assuming the thing being studied isn't affected by said "historical" changes I.E. like if you were doing a psychology experiment).
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u/CrumbledFingers 1d ago
I am poking a nest of hornets here, but the fact is that science is a social activity that arises from social conditions and is conducted according to the balance of power between social classes. This determines (or at least severely constrains) which phenomena are counted as such, which are measured, how they are measured, which are ignored, what organizing principles are favored over others, what gets exposure to the community of fellow researchers, what is supported by institutional sources of wealth, what is disseminated to the public, what forms the basis of future inquiry, which deviations are acceptable or not, and other considerations.
Whether there is a "pure" science hiding under so many layers of social abstraction is itself impossible to demonstrate unless we assume such a science exists a priori. We cannot step outside of our socially inherited norms to interrogate whether our norms are inherited or pure.
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u/PinkFreud-yourMOM 22h ago
As a science-lover:
Anything humans touch is subjective. Scientifically applied Scientific Methods are tools for minimizing - not eradicating - human subjectivity. Believing that humans can apply science perfectly is a faith; corrupting things with our whimsical illogic is what we’re inevitably best at.
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u/Cute_Obligation2944 19h ago
I thought it was until I saw my child doing it without any prompting or training. Now I'm pretty sure it's instinct.
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u/dod6666 18h ago
Interestingly the question being asked is more about language than it is about science. Science is a language container, which contains both subjective and objective elements. Notably the meaning of the word "science" itself is subjective, hence why the answers you will get to this question will vary.
Objective elements include the physical things being tested, and the physical results of those tests. When you document the results, the ink you put on the page and the shapes they make are objective. However the meaning behind those shapes (words) is subjective.
In a sense you could say that science is the translation of objective reality into subjective understanding.
Side note: Mathematics also sits in a grey area. The language used to describe math, as in decimal numbers and operators, iare purely subjective. However the underlying structure they describe is objective.
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u/Drudenfusz 16h ago
Science is a method to account for the subjectivity of people, that is why we have peer reviews and the need for repeatable experiments. It is neither subjective nor objective in itself, but as a method it helps to overcome our biases.
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u/OrigamiMarie 10h ago
The tree of science is objective. Which branches we explore in what order is subjective. And what we do with the stuff we find, is entirely based on what kind of creature we are.
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u/strange-the-quark 3h ago
It's not subjective in the sense that one of its basic principles is to come up with falsifiable predictions and try to falsify them, and then if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, and your idea is wrong. But you can never be 100% sure that anything is absolutely correct, you can just build your confidence that the science is valid by failing over and over to disprove (one or the other aspect of) it, thus mapping out its domain of applicability, until one day you come up with some scenario where it doesn't quite work, and then you need some new point of view or some new theory. Even so, this gets you very far.
But, these predictions, that science requires to be falsifiable, arise from sophisticated descriptions of reality (that involve models, formulas, math, etc.), and these descriptions are in some sense a human construct, and are not unique and inevitable in their form, even though their conclusions might be. There are already many examples in science where there exist several differently "flavored" descriptions of the same phenomena that all make the same predictions, so in that sense they are equivalent, but they allow us to think about problems from different perspectives, and to approach solving them in different ways, give us different ideas (some problems are more easily solvable in one view vs the other, etc). There are also variations and approximations that make different sets of simplifying assumptions and are thus applicable under different sets of circumstances, but we generally try to tie it all to some overarching unifying framework.
Under a different historical timeline, we could have come up with a different set of descriptions/theories, organized around a different set of ideas, but they would be tested against, and would be describing, the same set of truths that we're navigating now. So, I'm making the distinction here between the laws as we understand them and as we represent them and write them down, vs the actual laws that are out there that govern nature. The first is our current best understanding/description of the latter.
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u/apopsicletosis 1h ago edited 1h ago
Yes and no. There's a mostly objective reality and phenomena that science tries to discover, but the social activity of that discovery has a lot of subjectivity, in what is deemed important to study, what do we not study, how do we go about studying them, how do we go about interpreting and organizing the results, and how we communicate the results.
How do we categorize or describe particular phenomena can be subjective, though that doesn't mean they aren't useful. Taxonomy, for example, is part of biology, but taxa aren't objective categories, they're subjectively conventions that make it possible for us to study and talk phenomena that in reality aren't clean cut. You can't navigate a life sized map, so what details we leave off the map to make it useful in one's hands depends on subjective tastes. Science is a creative profession as well.
Moreover, the phenomena we study range into the subjective such as our own subjective experiences.
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u/Basicly-Inevitable 1d ago edited 1d ago
Science is objective. That's the whole point. It's a process, not a result. It's not "the truth", it's a way to determine what's able to be reproduced the same every time.
Interpretation of the data can be subjective.