I've been thinking more than usual about objectivity. Friends often take a postmodern stance and come back with, "What is objectivity, anyway? I don't think it exists." My view is quite different. If I were a philosopher, I unsheepishly wouldn't be a postmodern one! For practical purposes, I'm defining objectivity like this:
logic x evidence x uncertainty x openness
In other words, objectivity is curiosity at a high skill level.
Uncertainty is critical to your logic. If you aren't a smidge nervous about making mistakes, then you're making mistakes in logic—trust me! But before you do something rash like that, why would you trust me? Well, for years I've tutored math and other logical things (next to more subjective things like writing). And since middle school, I've coded in a variety of computer languages: basically, logic with ornamentation and gears attached. If the logic doesn't hang together at escape velocity, the code run's mangled. And if the student doesn't cotton on soon, the student's answers will go sideways and fall off the table and get eaten by feral cats. I've had countless chances to watch this phenomenon closely and tinker with it.
Logic is extremely unforgiving of little mistakes and oversights, and this is why most everyone you know still underestimates and underuses it. Emotionally and interpersonally, it's easier and more sophomorically delicious to accuse logic of being too flakily mechanized than it is to openly accuse a user of logic, or, sensibly, their listener, of whiffing. Little mistakes and oversights lead to big consequences. This is why we go paddling over the horizon to the oracle of uncertainty for advice on sculpting logic that works. We undismantle good logic. Ask your favorite coder this: "Do you avoid bugs by feeling so certain they aren't there?" I suspect the answer will be something like this:
"Negative, but if we feel certain they are there, we are not initially certain where."
Even when the logic side of reasoning is well cared for and polished and languidly rings true, a blind and deaf and generally unsensing logician will be, or will soon become, wrong about nearly everything. Logic needs raw material, malachite, facts. Openness helps you find and admit new evidence, not least by communicating what you have and agreeing to barter. Uncertainty can be fearful, but openness wants the new, the strange, the unexpected, even the unsettling. These two words overlap, but neither is enough alone.
"Logic + evidence + curiosity" would surely get the same point across, wouldn't it? But I like the more detailed equation, objectivity = skilled curiosity = evidence x openness x logic x uncertainty. (Rearranged... order doesn't matter under multiplication, yo.)
If even one of those factors isn't present, neither is objectivity. Zero times anything is zero! Maybe I wrote logic first before because it's "infallible," whereas evidence may be false or cherry-picked to support a belief or grind an axe. Beginning with a logical mindset might help, I suppose; but really, this ordering and reordering is just an excuse for discussion. The order matters zilcho! Admittedly, this is far from the kind of equation that would unfurl/exfoliate an ecosystem on a newly discovered planet, or even one you are very likely to plug numbers into, but I think it captures some of the elements and dynamics.
Openness and uncertainty could be represented as any number between 0 and 1, so that they work as dials or volume knobs on evidence and logic, respectively.
Plot hole: Sometimes you will luck out with a wild guess. If you could plug numbers into the equation, it would opine that you aren't objective. Let's say you use neither logic nor evidence when you make your bid: zeroes on both of those. Logic=0. Evidence=0. Whether you're passionately sure about your precognitive gift or just floating an idea, you can't be objective yet. Let's wait and see. Actually, let's go behind the scenes and ask the future. Ok, so, hm, your penciled description—"In exactly one month to the second there will be a swarm of grasshoppers and an electrician here"—is accurate, but you don't know that, do you? Your method isn't objective... or not yet. Guess-and-check, otherwise known as trial-and-error, is a legit method, puts makeup on the enormous talons of the uncanny beak of evolution. So you check. You do what it takes to gather facts. Once all that is done, once you've openly checked and now see the evidence, you can know—admitting uncertainly that you might be dreaming or crazy—logically that seeing grasshoppers swarming an electrician at the preordained time and location means they are very likely present, and therefore the original prediction holds up in spite of seeming unsubstantiated at the time. And the equation suddenly won't be producing a zero, either. By doing this work, you've removed the lack of objectivity. Though the equation doesn't show it, accuracy is a fact—which may or may not be determinable in a given time and place—while objectivity is a process. You can sometimes get an accurate answer randomly, say by listening to a crazy horse vet on a topic neither you nor they know anything about. An objective process might confirm the accuracy of the wild guess. You also may well, and more than just sometimes, follow an objective method and draw an inaccurate conclusion. But if you keep following the objective method, the boat should uncapsize eventually, as soon as better evidence or logic becomes available. Uncapsizing quickly is a political virtue of objectivity. It creates a more adaptive society. Random insights do not harm objectivity, though they won't be objective initially. A reluctance to uncapsize harms objectivity.
Other bigger plot hole: Emotions and opinions. Whatever your emotion or opinion is, isn't that objectively your emotion or opinion? Honestly, I don't know what the equation would say. Putting aside the equation and falling back on that last idea of objectivity as a process, I suppose there is a process toward knowing yourself. Objectively, you could know clearly—or not know clearly—how you feel. Polite questions aside, though, no one can or should argue with you about what your emotion or opinion or preference is. (Example questions that, while resembling a cross-examination, can be delivered politely: Is your "favorite color" really always your favorite, or is that an answer you've chosen to make a standard answer for yourself? Are you turning it into your favorite, rather than one of many colors you enjoy differently in different places, by calling it your favorite? Personally, I have several answers to "favorite color" and feel I'm creating the favorite status by saying one, which I enjoy for the fact I'm choosing in that moment.) People who try to do this impolitely, try to control people's preferences and feelings and views, seem not to understand subjectivity. Subjectivity is objectively there, but it doesn't need to match anything external, necessarily. A good answer when someone is pressing, in my experience, is "I believe that that's what you believe" or similarly "This is my feeling and preference and I have every right to those, don't I?" Not only do you have a right—they are fully yours and no one else's and do not necessarily respond to reason and evidence at all. Their objectivity is in their existence, not in their harmony with something external. Their subjectivity is in their internality and full ownership by the person sharing them, who could fluctuate or choose differently at any time but must not be beleaguered into doing so, because the choice is one of self and of expression.
Objectivity is often seen as the enemy of subjectivity and emotions and such. But aside from factual discussion (sometimes the focus really should be on facts and logic, more than how people feel about them, which can become irrelevant to a highlighted point and misleading as well) true and full objectivity, as I see it anyway, is radically accepting and can even be radically welcoming to all subjectivity as, well, really truly there.
