Objectivity Is An Internal, Subjective, Developmental Discovery

Real World--Subjective World Continued
May ’77


The science of mechanical determinism weeded out all teleological
explanations of purpose in nature. Any explanation that had anything
to do with purpose became bad science. Following up on this reasoning,
Locke developed his theory of knowledge. All knowledge, according
to Locke, came from sensation. Consequently, according to Dr. Gill's
interpretation of Locke: "In order to produce science, three different
kinds of reality were involved. A fact consisted in 1) the material object
as it sent out rays of light that 2) struck the sensory organs that communicated
with the brain that in turn, 3) created an idea corresponding to the original
object.Truth consisted in a point-for-point correspondence between the mental idea
and the original scientific fact." With that set of conditions in
place, Locke gave us our empirical understanding of the "real world."
The difficulty with that view, however, was that (as we now know from
today's physics) the first step in that process has been eliminated.
The real object--the material out of which objects are made-- as well
as the space in which they are located, are all constructs. In this
new reality, facts are known only in terms of the highly developed
theories of which they are part. What that meant for Dr. Gill, (as far
as I can tell so far), was that when things were seen correctly, they
were seen scientifically, but seeing things correctly did not
necessary mean seeing things the way they actually were. It simply
meant seeing things in the most informed way possible. Gill
believed objectivity was itself "an internal, subjective,
developmental discovery, as was the real world out there." In other
words, Lock's "common sense" notion of science and scientific
discovery, according to Dr. Gill, "had blurred, on a significant
level, our lived interior and exterior boundaries."

Dr. Gill told the class that that method of seeing—scientific seeing,
was first discovered by the Greeks, most notably by Pythagoras and
Plato, and then reached its fruition in the geometry of Euclid of
Alexandria. Later, Archimedes of Syracuse also made some important
contributions. And, when Medieval artisans and craftsmen, in the
pursuit of artistic growth, combined geometry (theorems and axioms)
with their own experimental methods, the scientific method as we know
it began to take shape. That method matured in the work of Copernicus,
Galileo, and Kepler.