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On the Impossibility of ‘Pure Science’
Abstraction, falling rocks, and sea-faring
Today it’s intuitive to distinguish between the subjective and the objective: the former is the domain of human experience, encompassing topics like morality, personal feelings, and aesthetics, while the latter is the domain of things as they are ‘in themselves’: the descriptive account of the world as it exists independently of human perspectives.
Science is the name that we give to the methodology of the objective. When we direct ourselves at the world ‘scientifically’, we ‘strip away’ our subjective attachments, allowing us to discover objects as they are ‘in themselves’. This reveals a variety of properties that we can measure, understand, and — perhaps most notably — predict, which is what makes science so helpful to us.
Consider, for example, that Aristotle believed that a rock falls to the ground because it’s composed of earth, an element that ‘seeks’ the center of the universe. A scientist today recognizes this theory as an anthropomorphization of the rock: the erroneous projection of Aristotle’s human existence onto it.
The scientist, by contrast, performs the opposite of this anthropomorphization: she ‘strips away’ her own values and strivings, seeking to understand the rock only in terms of its ‘self-given’ properties…
