INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, VOL. 14, NO.

1, 2000

EDITORIAL

Rethinking objectivity: Nozick’s neglected

third option

ALISON WYLIE
Department of Philosophy, Washington University in St. Louis, USA

In the last decade philosophy of science has taken a decidedly re¯ ective turn. Retrospec-
tives proliferate, ranging from closely worked histories of the Vienna Circle through to
more programmatic assessments that focus on critical developments of more recent
vintage: the 25th and 30th anniversaries of Kuhn’ s The Structure of Scienti® c Revolu-
tions (1962 [1970]), turning point in the fortunes of logical positivism and, more
recently, the 30th anniversary of Suppe’ s The Structure of Scienti® c Theories (1977),
which charted a course beyond the demise of the ª received viewº .1 Re¯ ections on both
immediate and more distant history have been the catalyst, as well, for a number of
forward-looking declarations that have a distinctly millennial ring to them. One that
stands outÐ both as exemplary of this genre and as a departure from itÐ is Robert
Nozick’ s Presidential Address to the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philo-
sophical Association in December 1997.
Nozick’ s topic was objectivity: how we might best reconceptualize objectivity given
challenges that call into question the ª standard viewº of the testing procedures that were
presumed to secure scienti® c objectivity. The ª complicationsº Nozick identi® es as
responsible for undermining these conventional accounts (principally Popperian, hypo-
thetico-deductive) all originate within mainstream philosophy of science (1998, p. 36);
they include the recognition that hypothesis testing is comparative, dependent on
auxiliary hypotheses, and underdetermined by evidence that is, in any case, theory-laden
and ª not completely solidº (1998, p. 36). These precipitated a crisis to which, Nozick
argues, philosophers of science have responded in two ways. On the one hand, some
took a radical stance; they acknowledged the insecurity and contingencyÐ the irre-
ducibly ª path dependentº , historical natureÐ of scienti® c practice and drew the con-
clusion that there is, therefore, ª no objectivity to scienceº (1998, p. 37). On the other
hand, Nozick observes, a great many philosophers of science have strenuously resisted
any such conclusion; they take a ª defensiveº stance, arguing that science is objective
despite the considerations that undermine conventional logicistic and foundationalist
ideals. Although Nozick is sympathetic to this last response, he makes the case for a
third option which, on his account, has been systematically neglected: that science is
objective (in part) because of the ª complicating factorsº that play an irreducible role in
scienti® c practice. Crucial here is Nozick’ s argument that a ª complicating factorº is
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6 A. WYLIE

never inherently biasing; it is biasing, or not, depending on the role it plays in the
process of arriving at a belief (1998, p. 33).
In broad outline Nozick’ s account is unexceptional. By the mid-1960s the lines of
debate had been sharply drawn by defenders of the rationality and objectivity of science
(e.g. Schef¯ er, 1963, 1967, in opposition to Kuhn), and a decade later Suppe could
summarize half a dozen standard arguments for and against the alleged relativist
implications of familiar objections to the ª received viewº (1977). Twenty years after the
initial engagement Richard Bernstein (1983) described a pattern of deepening critique
and defensive counter-response that seems to unfold whenever questions about the
autonomy and objectivity of science are raised; he traced trajectories of debate in recent
philosophy of social science and philosophical hermeneutics that closely parallel the
polarizing debates internal to Anglo-American philosophy of science. In each case
challenges to objectivist ideals had been construed as arguments for relativism (or as
leading inexorably to relativism), and the threat of a reductio to irrationalism renewed the
conviction that some form of robust objectivism must be viable.
When you look beyond the broad outlines, however, Nozick’ s summary obscures
more than it illuminates. The ª radical reactionº was not so narrowly an epistemic affair
as Nozick’ s catalogue of ª complicatingº factors would suggest.2 Arguments for underde-
termination, theory ladeness, holism and the rest undermine ª the standard viewº of
objectivity, not just because they make it clear that epistemic insecurity may be
unavoidable for ª creatures with thin data in a robust worldº (1998, p. 43)Ð something
Nozick welcomes inasmuch as it motivates us to deepen our theories and extend our
search for new dataÐ but because, in establishing the limitations of appeals to evidence
and good reasons, they suggest that non-cognitive factors must play a role in shaping the
course and outcomes of most interesting scienti® c inquiry. The critical implications of
these arguments were early elaborated, in philosophical contexts, by advocates of the
family of contextualizing theories of science that Suppe identi® ed, collectively, as
Weltanschauungen approaches (1977, pp. 125± 165; he associates Bohm, Toulmin,
Kuhn, Hanson, and Feyerabend with these approaches). They question the plausibility
of any hard and fast distinction between contexts of discovery and of justi® cation,
arguing that the values and interests typically excluded from science or relegated to the
realm of discovery infuse all aspects of inquiry, from the identi® cation of data and its
interpretation as evidence, through to the formation of explanatory hypotheses and the
articulation of standards that govern the use of evidence to test these hypotheses. In
short, Weltanschauungen theorists insist that science must be treated as ª an ongoing
social enterpriseº whose questions, strategies of inquiry, evidence, and results are
pervasively structured by a shared ª world viewº (Suppe, 1977, p. 125). It was centrally
the relativism implied by these argumentsÐ the insistence that science is inevitably a
creature of its (human, social) contextÐ that posed the starkest challenge to conven-
tional conceptions of objectivity, speci® cally, those that depend on the fact:value
distinction and equate objectivity with value neutrality. And it was this challenge which
provoked the polarized responses that have long structured, not only internal philosoph-
ical debate about science, but also the sharp engagements between philosophers and a
newly radical generation of sociologists and historians science.
Most important, when the recent history of post-positivist philosophy of science is
told in these terms, it becomes clear that the third option Nozick hopes to reclaim is by
no means neglected; it is, in fact, a strategy of response to contextualizing arguments
that has been actively explored by a great many science studies scholars in the last 30
years. Suppe argued that, by 1977, Weltanschauungen approaches in their strongest form
 RETHINKING OBJECTIVITY 7

were already passe (1977, p. 634), but their central insights had powerfully in¯ uenced
those who took up the challenge of formulating nuanced historical± philosophical
accounts of science. The point of departure for these emergent theories was acceptance
of the anti-foundationalist thesis that there is no ª uncategorized givenº that can ground
scienti® c knowledge (1977, p. 193); philosophical analysis must take ª contextualº
factors seriously, at least insofar as linguistic and conceptual context structures eviden-
tial claims. But this was understood to require, not a retreat to conservatism nor a
capitulation to radicalism, but a fuller account of the dialectic by which objects, theories,
and ª world viewº shape one another in particular sub® elds and episodes of scienti® c
practice.
Suppe’ s assessment is born out by several subsequent reviews. For example,
Bernstein’ s intent in Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (1983), cited above, was to
delineate a range of pragmatist and dialogic options that were immanent in the critical
analyses of those who had questioned objectivist ideals (Kuhn and Winch, for example),
options that do not ® t neatly into the terms of a debate de® ned by polarized responses
to the threat of relativism. In Knowledge and Power (1987) Rouse makes a similar case
with respect to Kuhn, painstakingly distinguishing the Kuhn of popular (mis)conception
from the much more complex and promising position that emerges in the details of
Kuhn’ s historical analyses; he elaborates a Foucauldian approach that makes it possible
to trace the interplay between a very wide range of factorsÐ material, intellectual,
social-institutionalÐ that constitute the practice of science. Even in the case of polarized
responses that were uncompromisingly radical and defensive, there has been consider-
able movement toward Nozick’ s third option; with a few prominent exceptions, most
sociologists of science seem to be backing away from accounts that reduce science to the
play of power and interests at the same time as philosophers from diverse backgrounds
embrace ª socialº variants of the program to naturalize philosopher of science. This
rapprochement is evident in a growing number of hybrid conferences, edited volumes,
and journals that bring together philosophers, sociologists, and historians interested in
scienceÐ for example, Hacking’ s 1993 conference ª Historical Epistemologyº ; Picker-
ing’ s Science as Practice and Culture (1992); Galison and Stump’ s 1991 conference and
subsequent collection, The Disunity of Science (1996); the journal Perspectives on Science
(1993)Ð and it is a central theme in several recent assessments of philosophy of science
(see, e.g., Rouse’ s review of ª New philosophies of science in North Americaº , 1998).
Among those who have most systematically explored Nozick’ s third option are feminist
philosophers of science and feminist scientists who have theorized their practice. Indeed
it is striking that, although the feminists working in and on science are routinely
characterized as anti-scienti® c relativists, almost to a person they have refused the terms
of the polarized debate Nozick sets out (Wylie, in press), whether it arises in the context
of second-order studies of science (philosophical, historical, sociological or anthropolog-
ical), in the sciences themselves, or in public debate of the kind associated with the
recent Science Wars.
The question is, then, how can Nozick describe his ª third optionº as a new
departure? Why does he ignore the rich, well-established, and rapidly growing body of
work that illustrates precisely the possibilities he means to advocate? No doubt there are
a number of factors at work here. Where feminist work is concerned, perhaps Nozick
exempli® es the kind of myopia Lloyd describes in ª Objectivity and the double standard
for feminist epistemologiesº (1996). But Nozick ignores much more than feminist work.
I suspect that at least part of the answer lies in the way Nozick constructs his ª very brief
sketch of the last seventy years or so of philosophy of scienceº (1998, p. 35). By ignoring
8 A. WYLIE

the challenges posed by various forms of contextualism, Nozick sets aside the whole
spectrum of responses to the demise of ª the standard viewº in which philosophers of
science (and other science studies scholars) have struggled with the challenge of
grounding philosophical analysis in a detailed understanding of the local dynamics of
scienti® c inquiry. It is here, in close contact with the complex realities of scienti® c
practice, that the need for a ª third optionº is most inescapable; it is, above all, the
exigencies of taking (actual) science seriously that are responsible for the growing
number of studies in which contextual factors are treated, not as intrusive contaminants,
but as constitutive of science itself and, indeed, as a crucial precondition for maximizing
the cluster of epistemic virtues Nozick associates with objectivity.
In addition, Nozick’ s third option has substantially more radical metaphilosophical
implications than he seems prepared to recognize. He maintains the view that philo-
sophical accounts can serve two possible sets of goals: one is to present all the truths that
hold (necessarily) about a particular notion in all possible worlds (wherever the notion
is exhibited), and the other is to identify the ª actual essence of the notion as it is actually
exhibited in this worldº , the ª deepest truths that actually hold about the notionº (1998,
pp. 27± 28).3 In the actual world of post-positivist philosophy of science, however, these
goals of ª maximum breadth and depthº often seem not just unattainable, even acknowl-
edging inevitable tradeoffs (1998, p. 28), but unlikely to be very illuminating, especially
where such complex and contextually in¯ ected notions as objectivity are concerned. If
you include features of contextÐ institutional structures, historical traditions, situated
values and interestsÐ among the ª complicating factorsº that have destablized standard
views of objectivity, then a more adequate account of this notion requires a resolutely
grounded and naturalized analysis of objectivity-establishing practices. This is, indeed,
how (much) ª real philosophy of science is doneº (Callebaut, 1993), and it is, in many
ways, inimical to the sensibilities of conventional (analytic) philosophy as articulated by
Nozick; it is a hybrid form of analysisÐ empirical on several dimensions as well as
conceptual and normativeÐ that diverges from conventional philosophical practice not
just in thesis, but in content and style. More to the point, contextualizing, naturalizing
studies of science routinely bring into view a degree of contingency in key epistemic
notions that mitigates against the very idea that they have an essence which can usefully
be captured by a catalogue of unconditional truths, universal, necessary, and deep. Even
accounts that aim at Nozick’ s second goal are, as he puts it (with reference to the ® rst),
ª a little thinº (1998, p. 27) if you take seriously a requirement for adequacy to the actual
ideals that structure scienti® c practice. Nozick’ s ª third optionº can only be considered
neglected if philosophy (in the theorizing mode) is con® ned to the goals he sets out;
perhaps Nozick cannot recognize the rich body of work that exempli® es this ª third
optionº because he cannot recognize it as philosophical.

Notes
1. There were any number of retrospectives on Kuhn’s contributions coinciding with anniversaries (25th,
30th) of the publication of The Structure of Scienti® c Revolutions. Most recently, the publication of Suppe’s
The Structure of Scienti® c Theories was marked by a symposium organized by Steven French and Nick
Huggett for the 1998 Biennial Meetings of the Philosophy of Science Association: ª The Structure of
Scienti® c Theories: Thirty Years Onº (11 October 1998; Kansas City).
2. In Nozick’s oral presentation he characterized this recent history in rather different terms, describing the
radical and defensive stances as a response to various forms of argument that science must be understood
to be infused by ª valuesº . He also developed the proposal for his third option in terms of a legal analogy
 RETHINKING OBJECTIVITY 9

to the possibility that justice might be served, not by trying to ensure that all jurors are neutral with regard
to the case they are to try, but by recruiting jurors who hold strong commitments on the issues central to
the case; a verdict would be reached when a tie between jurors is broken. By analogy, perhaps in scienti® c
contexts the best way to produce ª objectiveº results (qua facts that are invariant under transformation) is
to foster, not neutrality, but a sharply engaged contest between similarly strong and well-developed
convictions. Nozick makes no mention of ª valuesº in connection with the ª complicating factorsº he
discusses in the published version of his presidential lecture.
3. Presumably these are the goals Nozick considers proper to philosophy in the theorizing mode, by contrast
to the edifying goals of philosophy in genre of personal life writing that he explores in Examined Life (1990).

References
BERNSTEIN, R. (1983) Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis (Philadelphia,
University of Pennsylvania Press).
CALLEBAUT, W. (Ed.) (1993) Taking the Naturalistic Turn or How Real Philosophy of Science is Done (Chicago,
University of Chicago Press).
GALISON, P. & STUMP, D. (Eds) (1996) The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford, CA,
Stanford University Press).
KUHN, T.S. (1962 [1970]) The Structure of Scienti® c Revolutions, 2nd edn (Chicago, University of Chicago
Press).
LLOYD, E. (1996) Objectivity and the double standard for feminist epistemologies, Synthese, 104, pp. 351±
381.
NOZICK, R. (1990) Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Touchstone Books).
NOZICK, R. (1998) Invariance and objectivity, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Associ-
ation, 72.2, pp. 21± 48.
PICKERING, A. (Ed.) (1992) Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).
ROUSE, J. (1987) Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University
Press).
ROUSE, J. (1998) New Philosophies of Science in North America: twenty years later, Journal for General
Philosophy of Science, 29, pp. 71± 122.
SCHEFFLER, I. (1963) The Anatomy of Inquiry: Philosophical Studies in the Theory of Science (New York, Knopf).
SCHEFFLER, I. (1967) Science and Subjectivity (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill).
SUPPE, F. (1977) The Structure of Scienti® c Theories, 2nd edn (Urbana, University of Illinois Press).
WYLIE, A. (in press) Feminism in philosophy of science: making sense of contingency and constraint, in: M.
FRICKER & J. HORNSBY (Eds) Companion to Feminism in Philosophy (Cambridge, Cambridge University
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Note on contributor
Alison Wylie is Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. She writes on philosophical
issues raised by the social and historical sciences, in particular, archaeology. Most recently she has contributed
articles on concepts of objectivity and evidence to special issues of Osiris (1997) and Philosophical Topics
(1995), and to The Disunity of Science (Eds Galison & Stump, 1996). She is completing a manuscript for the
University of California Press, Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology. Correspondence:
Department of Philosophy, Washington University in St. Louis, USA.