Objectivity and ideology in the human sciences

This paper is a gloss on section 6 of chapter four of Michel Foucault's The Archeology of Knowledge and on some of his essays on knowledge and power. 1 The title contains an ambiguity: there are two related and distinct senses of "objectivity". In the first sense it is opposed to subjectivity. An assertion or a view is then said to be objective to the extent that the truth value or meaning of what it asserts does not vary with who asserts it, or with the situation or time in which it is asserted. That entails, for example, that whatever tenses and demonstrative or personal pronouns occur in the assertion must be straightforwardly eliminable in favor of dates and proper names. That scientific knowledge at least approaches this sort of objectivity may be its most fundamental principle. This principle is at once the most obvious and the most profound mark by which science is distinguished from ordinary or personal knowledge, which is always subjective and deeply rooted in its context. From this difference flow others. Scientific knowledge is theoretical, its normal form is the written theory. It is deductively closed, organised by explicit rules, and, when correct, free of contradiction. Personal knowledge, on the other hand, is typically neither theoretical nor written, and should it be cast in written form that is more likely to be narrative than theoretical. Personal knowledge, as the plentiful recent literature on belief makes evident, is neither deductively closed nor consistent. 2 It cherishes and administers its contradictions, as science could never do. Much of its organization follows unconscious rules. The second sense of objectivity is metaphysical. This is objectivity in the sense of object-hood, or object-ness. The question of objectivity in the human sciences is then the question of the ontology of these sciences, of the natures and sources of their objects. This is not quite the question how the empirical objects of those sciences come into being; how men, societies, money, families, states, and so on come into being. These are more properly questions of the subject sciences in their historical forms than questions about their constitution or foundation. The question of objectivity is rather one of those typically philosophical questions, apparently idle and pointless, and of little concern to the sciences themselves. It is a question about the categories in terms of which the human sciences organize their subject matter. Why is it that economists think in terms of the market, psychologists in terms of stimulus and response, political theorists in terms of sovereignty, anthropologists in terms of kinship systems? Within the subject sciences themselves questions like these are uninteresting. The existence of the market is the most pervasive and banal of economic facts; it should be evident to anyone that kinship systems are fundamental in social organization, and so on. A science does not occupy itself with the justification of its own categories. Nor is this an error. It is not as if the scientist somehow goes wrong in not raising the question of the nature of the objects he investigates, It is inherent in the virtuous dogmatism of scientific inquiry, as distinguished from other sorts of inquiry, that it takes its objects as given and obvious. If "objectivity" is ambiguous, "ideology" is that and is also vague. Two overlapping sorts of ideology are of concern here. One of these consists of the values and motivations of individual researchers. The relations of these to the conduct of scientific inquiry are of considerable importance for the salient reason that different researchers may have different values and motivations. Should methodology, procedure, or the results of scientific investigation be in part determined by these values, then the outcome might vary depending upon who conducts the experiment, and the impersonal objectivity of science would not be assured. A second sort of ideology, which may in some cases coincide with the first sort, is institutional and is usually associated with Marxist critiques of science. The economic and political functions of science in a given society are the major ideological influences of this sort.