Reading:
Fay, Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science, Chapters 10 and 11
"Feminist Defenses of Value-Laden Inquiry" by Elizabeth Anderson, at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/#valinq
"Bias, Balance, and the Problems of Media Objectivity" by Neil Levy at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=2312
"Re-Thinking Objectivity" by Brent Cunningham at http://www.alternet.org/media/16348
(I'll have some comments on this topic up on the class blog soon, as well.)
Because Elizabeth Anderson's discussion of "value-laden inquiry" is somewhat technical and difficult, I offer here some explanatory notes:
1. The central claim she makes
is that inquiry is generally undertaken for reasons other than (or in addition
to) a simple desire to know what's true. Inquiry typically has practical as
well as theoretical goals: we are trying to cure a disease, improve a
technology, address a social problem, predict the weather, or whatnot. These
other goals can play a perfectly appropriate role in shaping inquiry. The pure,
disinterested search for truth, which is probably mythical anyway, leaves open
many issues that need to be resolved somehow. We want inquiry to be guided
by evidence, but evidence by itself never determines a uniquely correct
answer. It has to be interpreted in light of some set of background
assumptions, and some of these can be value assumptions.
2. For example, the practical
goals of inquiry may properly influence how high a standard of proof we want to
achieve. Scientific inquiry is almost always dealing with probabilities, so we
have to decide how much evidence to gather before we decide that we have
answered our questions well enough for the purposes at hand. In medical
contexts, for example, we need to make this decision in light of the costs of
making a mistake (usually, the costs to patients). If we are conducting
clinical trials of a very safe and cheap procedure, we may be satisfied with
rather low levels of evidence that it works, because the cost of falsely
believing that it works are low. That is, if it doesn’t really work, and we
give this treatment to a lot of patients anyway, we won’t be doing much harm.
On the other hand, if the procedure is expensive and dangerous, we would want
to have a higher standard of proof before we decided that it worked well enough
to start using it.
A further point: Anderson thinks
we should make analogous judgments about what degree of proof we require when
the costs of making a mistake affect our social values. The example she gives
is a bit obscure. But I think the point is that we should require a higher
standard of proof for claims that might lead us to act in socially damaging
ways (if they turn out to be false after all). Suppose someone claimed that
they had evidence that girls were incapable of being good scientists or
engineers, so that we are wasting our educational resources by trying to
educate girls in these fields. If we thought this was true, and we therefore
excluded girls from all science classes, but it really wasn’t true, this
would be a very bad thing from a feminist point of view (i.e., from the point
of view of someone who wanted our society to provide equal opportunities to
women). So we would want such a claim to meet a very high standard of proof
before we accepted it.
3. Definitions of concepts: When
inquiry is aimed at a real-world problem, the values that lead us to see it as
a problem will properly shape the inquiry. For example, we might want a
scientific explanation of why so many women choose to stay with abusive
partners. We will need to define abuse in order to pursue this question. And
our values will come into play when we construct a definition of abuse.
4. Choice of methods: Her point
is that science (especially social science) includes a variety of methods, and
we may want to choose one method over another on political grounds. Going back
to my previous example: if we are trying to explain why abused women don’t
leave their abusive partners, we may want to investigate their thoughts and
feelings through interviews instead of investigating their brain chemistry
through blood analysis, because we may want to treat them as conscious persons
(Anderson uses the term ‘agents’) instead of as biochemical machines. One
reason we might want to do this is that we may be interested in empowering these
women rather than controlling or manipulating them.
These are just a few examples of the way she thinks values can properly influence inquiry.
1. How, according to Brian Fay, are objectivism and relativism two sides
of the same coin?
2. What is fallibilism and how does it help us
get beyond relativism and objectivism?
3. What does it mean to understand objectivity
as ‘critical intersubjectivity’?
4.
Do you think Fay has succeeded in showing us how to face up to the importance
of cultural differences without falling into relativism?
5. Do you agree with him that relativism is a
bad thing?
6. How might a relativist respond to his
views? (That is, how might someone who thought
that relativism was correct try to answer Fay's criticisms and defend full-out
relativism?)
7. What’s your own assessment of the possibility of objective knowledge of human beings and human cultures?
8. Levy and Cunningham suggest that simply reporting "both sides (or all sides) of the story" is not an adequate conception of journalistic objectivity. Why not? What do they recommend as a better way of understanding the reporter's job?
9.
Levy and Cunningham suggest that reporters can serve their readers
best by attempting to say what is true, instead of just reporting what
various people say (what they claim to be true). But Fay says that an
acceptable account of objectivity cannot be tied to the notion of 'objective
truth'. (See p. 212.) Rather, he says, "objective inquiries
must insure collisions between rival perspectives." (p. 213) Is there
any real disagreement here? Can we reconcile Fay's account of objectivity
with the journalistic practices recommended by Levy and Cunninghamr?
If so, how? If not, why not? And, finally, do you think that journalists can
discover the truth about the sorts of controversies that they must report on
(can "adjudicate factual disputes" to use a phrase Cunningham takes
from Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman near the end of his article)?