Evidence and Objectivity

The concepts of objectivity, truth, and the authority of empirical standards have comeunder serious challenge by some critics of the social sciences in the past several decades. Feminist critics charge that the concepts and methods of the social sciences reflect an essentialpatriarchalism that discredits the objectivity of social science knowledge. Marxist criticssometimes contend that the social sciences are enmeshed in a bourgeois worldview that makesobjectivity impossible. And post-modernist writers seem to disdain the ideas of truth andobjectivity in the social sciences altogether, preferring instead the slippery notions of multiplediscourses and knowledge/power. This essay reaffirms the centrality of empirical constraintsand the goal of objectivity within social science research. It begins with an account of adefensible empiricist philsophy of social science. It turns next to a consideration of the problemsinvolved in making factual judgments in social science research. It considers next the problems of inference faced by social science researchers: how do we derive conclusions about social factson the basis of the sorts of evidence available to us? The essay concludes with a reconsiderationof Karl Popper's theory of falsifiability as a criterion of scientific credibility.