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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 5080966" data-attributes="member: 18280">Umbran,If you are not familiar with Ludwik Fleck's excellent Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, I recommend the book to you.  He does a far better job of demonstrating that "scientifically objective observation" is, in fact, heavily influenced by the subjective fads of the day, and creates perforce a subjective dataset whose conclusions must be greeted with skepticism.Myself, I believe that the problem arises from the false dichotomy which divides observation into "objective" and "subjective" modes, and which would then cause all statements of belief to be either "objective" or "subjective".  I use the term "axiomatic" to refer to a third set of statements of belief, as well as a third classification of phenomenon.For the purposes of discussion, I will limit myself to the statement "Objective truth cannot be known".  The statement derives from axioms both about the nature of "truth" and the nature of "knowledge".  One could write a book-length treatment about "truth" and "knowledge" (and in fact many hundreds or thousands of books have been written on just this topic), but for simplicity's sake, I will turn my attention to Descarte.Descarte made a valiant effort to found a system of knowledge from "first principles", but was unable to find anything other than "Cogito ergo sum" to be directly observable.  Later philosophy and modern science have, of course, questioned even the validity of this statement.  To move beyond the cogito, Descarte had to accept as axiomatic truth that his observations of an external world are valid.  As later philosophy/science have demonstrated, even the cogito requires the acceptance of internal observation as an axiomatic truth.Again, with David Hume, one comes across the stark truth that, to move from observation of correllation to belief in causation, something is required beyond observation itself.  The problem that Hume highlights, and believes worth exploration, is that rational systems cannot be devised through rationality alone.  Everything which appears to be objective is, in fact, based upon subjective belief, unless one also accepts that there is something else involved.  What that something else is, Hume is not prepared to say -- but he is prepared to say that it is reliable, and that humans believe automatically in its reliablility.  Indeed, they seem unable to avoid doing so. The post-modern dilemma is based upon the concept that (1) only objective observation is of value in determing truth, and (2) there is no such thing as objective observation, therefore (3) nothing is true.  Or, worse (1) only objective observation is of value, and (2) there is no such thing as objective observation, therefore (3) nothing is of value.  The modernist viewpoint can demonstrate quite well that there is no such thing as objective observation.  What it has not (and cannot) demonstrate is that only objective observation is of value in determing truth.  It cannot do so because, when examined closely enough, all systems of thought can be seen to rely upon axioms that are taken as true, which can be neither confirmed nor denied through direct observation.It is the post-modernest view that the universe consists of nothing more than matter (objects), and has no qualities that are not objective, which is problematical when looked at carefully.  The idea that there is a non-material superstructure (what I am calling axiomatic) that is expressed in the material universe is not, perhaps, a popular one in the post-modern age, but it is a necessity for scientific observation -- indeed, for any observation -- to be anything other than subjective.  Only when something in the makeup of consciousness bridges the gap between subjectivity and objectivity, because it partakes of the same axiomatic structure, do any observations become meaningful in any real sense.RC</blockquote>

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