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: its weight, its material composition, its rate of displacement over time, and so on, all of which exist independently of her own striving.
This is the basis by which people speak of a ‘pure science’. The ‘pureness’ of science refers to the fact that all human strivings and values seem to have been stripped away from it, an activity which is believed to reveal nature ‘as it truly is’.
Of course, even a pure scientist would admit that this activity is still limited by the human perspective: our capacity to see some forms of light and not others, for example. But she would nonetheless believe that the scientific method will eventually be able to overcome this limitation. And she feels bolstered in this belief by the simple observation that, in the history of scientific progress, such expansions have already occurred: in addition to visible light, for example, we now know about X-rays.
This ‘objective, de-humanized’ perspective from which science claims to view reality has been called the ‘Archimedean point’. Science is ‘pure’ insofar as it takes its perspective to be this point, as opposed to the ‘human’ point.
But the ‘purity’ of pure science is only an illusion. Science is an irrefutably human practice, and is therefore tied up in the limited and finite bounds of human striving. In other words, science happens at a specific place and a specific time, and this particularity introduces to it an irreducible element of ‘subjectivity’, due simply to the fact that science is a practice that always takes place in a certain human context.
Rousseau famously pointed to the human origins of scientific pursuits. The ‘pure’ science of geometry, the study of shapes and their properties, started from humans striving to allocate plots of land. The ‘pure’ science of astronomy, the study of astronomical bodies and their course, started from humans striving to navigate while sea-faring.
We can even suppose that one of the most seemingly abstract philosophical questions, the so-called ‘problem of knowledge’ — namely, how we can be certain of anything — can similarly be ‘nested’ in human activity. Consider how diligently the philosopher Rene Descartes treated the question of certainty. Are we so sure that he was questioning certainty in itself — or was this questioning nested in an all-too-human pursuit, such as being absolutely sure of his social status, or absolutely sure of the constancy of his good health?
‘Pure science’, whether the study of geometry, astronomy, or epistemology, can never really be ‘pure’ because, as a human activity among any other, it’s nested in human striving. Yes, we can appear to ‘strip away’ these strivings when we momentarily examine a rock. But this stripping away is occurring at a particular place and a particular time — it happens in the context of a finite, human existence — and therefore, it cannot possess the ‘pure objectivity’ that some people attribute to it.
