Over the years I’ve heard plenty of people wonder why Ayn Rand would have named her philosophy “Objectivism.” Rand is best known in ethics for her advocacy of the virtue of selfishness, and many—especially the philosophically trained—have a hard time understanding why anyone would call this an
The following comments on this post are preserved:
Stephen B. asks: Ben, you included in your reflection: “But in embracing ‘trained judgment’, how did twentieth century scientists differ from the Enlightenment idealizers who sought to represent ‘truth to nature’? Mainly in their commitments over the significance of their trained judgment: it could at best latch onto a family resemblance network of similarities, not anything essential to a species.” This rings foreign to me concerning science in the twentieth century. Classifications of biological phyla by morphological criteria may have required more “trained judgment” than did the later molecular sequencing criteria, but either way, it’s hard to see either of those ways of proceeding as aiming for at best family-resemblance similarities rather than the actual evolutionary relationships between the phyla. In the classifications of elementary particles in physics, again mere family-resemblance similarities were not the most hoped for or attained; we were in the chase of the out-there as it is in its dependency relations out there.
Ben B. replies: Stephen, this is a good question, and probably points to some imprecision in the passage from my post that you quote. I should have written this passage to make it clear that I was talking here about philosophers and philosophically-minded scientists who had reflected on the concept of "objectivity." I think you're quite right that the classification procedures you mention were often aiming at an understanding of the world in terms of essential similarities, not just family resemblance similarities. Here I was simply reporting Daston and Galison's account that in the leading theories of objectivity of the day, in the early-to-mid twentieth century, the philosophically minded *thought* there was nothing better than family resemblance, at least with regard to some prominent branches of science where formalistic structural objectivity didn't seem to apply.
The following comments on this post are preserved:
Stephen B. asks: Ben, you included in your reflection: “But in embracing ‘trained judgment’, how did twentieth century scientists differ from the Enlightenment idealizers who sought to represent ‘truth to nature’? Mainly in their commitments over the significance of their trained judgment: it could at best latch onto a family resemblance network of similarities, not anything essential to a species.” This rings foreign to me concerning science in the twentieth century. Classifications of biological phyla by morphological criteria may have required more “trained judgment” than did the later molecular sequencing criteria, but either way, it’s hard to see either of those ways of proceeding as aiming for at best family-resemblance similarities rather than the actual evolutionary relationships between the phyla. In the classifications of elementary particles in physics, again mere family-resemblance similarities were not the most hoped for or attained; we were in the chase of the out-there as it is in its dependency relations out there.
Ben B. replies: Stephen, this is a good question, and probably points to some imprecision in the passage from my post that you quote. I should have written this passage to make it clear that I was talking here about philosophers and philosophically-minded scientists who had reflected on the concept of "objectivity." I think you're quite right that the classification procedures you mention were often aiming at an understanding of the world in terms of essential similarities, not just family resemblance similarities. Here I was simply reporting Daston and Galison's account that in the leading theories of objectivity of the day, in the early-to-mid twentieth century, the philosophically minded *thought* there was nothing better than family resemblance, at least with regard to some prominent branches of science where formalistic structural objectivity didn't seem to apply.