One longstanding objection to the idea of objectivity is that all knowledge (or what pretends to be knoweldge) is “relative” in some fundamental sense. What does this mean? The idea seems to be that, at its heart, all knowledge is a “social construct”. This in turn seems to be based on the idea that even the notion of some independent “reality” to which we can gain access is mistaken, an illusion. In fact, according to this view, we can never access reality directly. All perception and all “knowledge” constructed out of those perceptions is inextricably influenced by our cognitive structure, and cannot be separated from it. Since to try to separate out the contributions of our brains/minds from the contributions of reality, requires the same brains/minds to do the separating! And so we are doomed to collective subjectivity, fooling ourselves into thinking we can be objective, and that what we claim as knowledge is in fact knowledge.
This view is in fact wrong. There are several problems with it. However, I do not want to get bogged down in philosophical digressions, and so I will refer only to what I believe to be the best rebuttal. As luck would have it, the best response also happens to be the simplest and most obvious. And despite the convoluted efforts of some philosophers, I have yet to see a single convincing refutation of this response. All I have seen are sophisticated deflections that end up being precisely as vulnerable to the original response as the original position was.
(This attack on objectivity is worth addressing, because it is a surprisingly common belief nowadays that knowledge is a “social construct” in some fundamental sense – in a way that is supposed to refute or make nonsense of the idea/virtue of objectivity.)
The response goes as follows: what is the justification for your claim that knowledge is an illusion, that all perception is distorted by our cognitive structure in a way that forecloses access to the way the world “really” is? Is it observation, or introspection? In either case, in formulating that hypothesis you are relying on precisely the organ/apparatus that you say is fundamentally unreliable with respect to establishing what is and is not in fact the case. If I accept your conclusion, then I have no reason to take seriously the argument you advance in support of that conclusion, since the conclusion implies that we cannot rely on any arguments we formulate.
In other words, the position is “self-defeating”. I’ve seen attempted rebuttals to this response. None of them work. If you’d like to read more and get a fuller sense of the debate, I recommend Michael Huemer’s “Skepticism and the Veil of Perception”.
For now, I hope this is enough to convince you that radical skepticism about the possibility of knowledge and objectivity at all is untenable.
However, there are less radical views that merit consideration. Isn’t it possible that, even if knowledge and objectivity are not impossible, they are nevertheless rare and incredibly difficult to attain?
While I believe this overstates the case, even if we grant it for the sake of argument, it doesn’t change the fact that we still would have every reason to strive to be as objective as we possibly can be, and to base our beliefs as best we can on facts, evidence, and reasons. We could still strive to approximate objectivity, even if we could never attain it. And even this more modest aspiration would be far preferable to, and more justifiable than, simply throwing our hands up and surrendering to subjectivity!
Again, some object that the ideals of objectivity and knowledge are potentially “oppressive”, since some people are from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds and so didn’t receive the educational/formative supports to allow them to succeed or cope in intellectual endeavours. The problem with this response is that it seems to imply a sub-optimal solution: to either abandon the standards because some are unfortunate enough to not be able to meet them; or to lower the standards to accommodate such people/groups.
The problems here are several. Firstly, it overlooks the far more obvious and far more favourable solution of seeking to resolve the underlying disadvantages, instead of just lowering the bar (or throwing the bar out altogether). Surely, “raising the floor” is what we should be striving to do, instead of just lowering/discarding the bar! Secondly, it seems a rather condescending response to those who might find meeting standards of objectivity or knowledge more difficult to achieve. It is essentially mollycoddling such people and presupposing that they will be unable to rise to the challenge on their own merits and endeavour, despite the challenges they may face. None of which is to say that society should not make every effort to assist in ensuring that they have the best opportunities to fulfil their potential and rise to the challenge. But to set things up in such a way that they never even have a chance to prove themselves, by lowering or abandoning the standards entirely, seems a case of trading a short-term delusion of progress for long-term disaster.
The point here is not to say that there aren’t very real and morally urgent problems when it comes to ensuring that children from all backgrounds are afforded the opportunities and resources they need to be able to participate effectively in a “knowledge economy”, to be able to manifest objectivity and knowledge. But to decry and reject objectivity and knowledge simply because we continue to fail certain people or demographics in our society, is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
There are many more variations on the theme of rejecting alleged “pretensions” to the possibility of knowledge and objectivity. It is not really necessary for present purposes to go too far down the rabbit hole of these philosophical and (often) political disputes. Moreover, as we endeavour to be as ideologically neutral as possible, I will avoid delving into the somewhat esoteric debates on “phallogocentrism” and “ethnocentrism” and all such variations on the theme. Suffice it to say that many, if not all of these variations on radical skepticism ultimately suffer from the same fundamental defect of self-refutation – despite some pyrotechnic efforts to avoid that conclusion through various mental gymnastics.