Bad Historians' Arguments Against the Possibility of Objectivity

Kinda depressing--though they undoubtedly are capable of objectivity and undoubtedly achieve it sometimes...so you might say that they're merely wrong about the philosophical metatheory. Which is not great, but it's better than, say the practitioners of the "1619 Project" we generally neither strive for nor care about nor achieve objectivity in that train wreck of a thing. Many people have heard some.

   It's common for people now to simply eschew the word 'objectivity' and its cognates, and substitute some near-synonym like 'fairness' or 'neutrality'. Which is fine. Though the bad metatheory still infects others, including their students. And it will have bad consequences for some of them.

   IMO, anyway.

   The main problem seems to be that people suddenly start using the term 'objective' in a way that's inconsistent with the ordinary meaning of the term. Ordinarily, we use it--as it should be used--in a way that admits of degrees. Smith is more objective than Jones. Physics is more objective than women's studies. Jonny Quest is usually more objective than I am. I am not objective enough to officiate a Carolina - NC State game. People can become more objective if they try...etc. When we say someone is objective about something, we seem to mean something like: he's objective enough to reliably reason well about it or make good judgements. Or: he's sufficiently objective. We're pretty likely to be perfectly objective sometimes in at least some ways--e.g. when doing certain math or logic problems. But that doesn't really matter.

   In fact, it's really weird that people suddenly become Platonists or something when discussing objectivity. My own view is that we have a pretty clear conception of objectivity as a matter of degree...but we probably don't even have a very clear conception of perfect objectivity. Middlebrow arguments against the possibility of objectivity, however, almost always presuppose that only perfect objectivity is objectivity. Which is almost certainly wrong.