Greetings Bo,
"The evidence for the nineteenth-century novelty of scientific objectivity
starts with the word itself. The word "objectivity" has a somersault
history. Its cognates in European languages derive from the Latin adverbial
or adjectival form *obiectivus/obiective*, introduced by fourteenth-centruy
scholastic philosophers such as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. (Tthe
substantive form doesn not emerge until ;much later, around the turn of the
nineteenth century.) From the very beginning, it was always paired with
*subietivus/subiective*, but the terms originally meant almost precisely the
opposite of what they mean today. "Objective" referred to things as they
are presented to consciousness, whereas "subjective" referred to things in
themselves. One can still find traces of this scholastic usage in those
passages of the 'Meditationes de prima philosophia (Meditations on First
Philosophy, 1641) where Rene Descartes contras the "formal reality" of our
ideas (that is whether they correspond to anythng in the expternal world)
with their "objective reality" (that is, the degree of reality they enjoy by
firtue of their clarity and distinctness, regardless of whether they exist
in material form). Even eighteenth-century dictionaries still preserved
echoes of this medieval usage, which rings so bizarrely in modern ears:
"Hence a thing is said to exist OBJECTIVELY, objective, when it exists no
otherwise than in being known; or in being a Object of the Mind."" (Lorraine
Daston & Peter Galison, 'Objectivity', Zone Books, October 31, 2007, P.29)
What exactly is SOM? Do you think it has an essence? Seems to be it's
_evolved_ over the past 2000 years? Evolved. Meaning different things at
what points in its evolution? What are you arguing for/against? You cannot
mean the conventional view because there has always been quite a difference
between the philosophers/scientific pov and the laypersons pov. The SOL
seems to dissolve when you understand that s/o has been a moving target.
Marsha
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