They say that the idea of objectivity, the idea that science aims at and sometimes attains the truth about how things are, is incoherent -- a foolish bauble left over from the babyhood of thought.
The VNT, and the idea of scientific objectivity as value freedom, could then be saved for the case of individual scientific reasoning.
But it is just this aim, central to the idea of moral objectivity, that Williams thinks is fundamentally misguided.
We begin with a natural conception of objectivity: faithfulness to facts, which is closely related to the idea of product objectivity.
They appeal at one point to the dubious idea of "contextual objectivity": al-Jazeera presents an Arab view of the world, just as CNN presents an American one.
For that matter, as Mr. Keen points out, the idea of objectivity is becoming increasingly passé in the relativistic realm of the Web, where bloggers cherry-pick information and promote speculation and spin as fact.
"Perhaps this is so because many liberal activists in America have lost faith in the idea of objectivity, which means they have lost faith in the reality of objective truth, the finding of which--the finding of truth--has been the goal, the central focus of the American legal system since its creation".
In his 1988 book, "That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession," he questioned the idea of objectivity itself in historical research.
Keller (1985a) has developed the idea of objectivity as (non-neurotic) emotional engagement in her ideal of "dynamic objectivity".
In general, the author advises challenging the idea of objectivity and confronting subjectivity with openness but, most of all, making futures studies more inclusive and fostering the discourse on the representation of hitherto neglected groups (e.g. women) in futures studies.
Many postmodernists regarded the very idea of objectivity as a dubious invention of the modern i.e., post-Enlightenment era.
