Could science and technology ever be objective or achieve objectivity?

When the radar systems of early Cold War defense networks first went online, they repeatedly classified rising moons and migrating geese as incoming Soviet nuclear warheads. This was not a mechanical failure, but a conceptual one: the programmers had inscribed their own geopolitical anxieties and binary assumptions directly into the machine's threshold of detection. Science and technology cannot achieve absolute, value-free objectivity. Instead, they operate through what feminist philosopher Donna Haraway famously termed "situated knowledges." In her seminal 1988 essay, [Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective](https://www.jstor.org/stable/190890), Haraway argues that the pursuit of an unmediated, infinite vision—what she calls the "god trick"—is a myth. > "I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims." To understand why absolute objectivity is structurally impossible, we must distinguish between two concepts: 1. **Ontological Objectivity**: The existence of a reality independent of our minds. While the physical universe exists externally, we can only access it through conceptual frameworks, sensory apparatuses, and linguistic tools. 2. **Epistemic Objectivity**: The freedom from personal bias or social values in our investigation of that reality. Science does not bypass human subjectivity; rather, it structures it. In [Personal Knowledge](https://www.routledge.com/Personal-Knowledge-Towards-a-Post-Critical-Philosophy/Polanyi/p/book/9780415519786), chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi demonstrated that scientific discovery relies on "tacit knowledge"—unarticulated skills, aesthetic judgments, and communal commitments that cannot be fully formalized or codified. Similarly, technology is never a neutral tool. As Langdon Winner argues in his classic paper [Do Artifacts Have Politics?](https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652), technological designs embody specific forms of power and authority. For instance, low-hanging overpasses in Long Island were deliberately designed by Robert Moses to prevent public buses—primarily used by low-income and racial minority groups—from accessing Jones Beach. Therefore, progress toward "objectivity" is not about purging human perspective, but about expanding the diversity of perspectives within the scientific community. As Helen Longino argues in [Science as Social Knowledge](https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691020518/science-as-social-knowledge), objectivity is a social, cumulative product of robust, transformative criticism among diverse practitioners, rather than an individual attribute of a researcher or a tool. ## Next Steps for Exploration 1. **The Algorithmic Mirror**: If machine learning models are trained on historical human data, do they merely automate and codify our past subjective biases under the guise of mathematical neutrality? 2. **Quantum Observer Effects**: How does the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics—which posits that the act of measurement collapses the wave function—challenge the traditional boundary between the objective observer and the subjective observed? 3. **Epistemic Injustice**: How have marginalized communities historically been excluded from defining what counts as "objective" evidence, and how can scientific institutions rectify these systemic blind spots?