Science researchers seem to hold one common principle unless they refer to their own previous research: To be valid scientific and technical writing must be in passive voice constructions. What’s the reason? They can’t insert first person personal pronouns lest their work smacks of subjectivity. Somehow, they believe the passive voice is inherently objective. If they resort to the active voice, they place the “doing” in some acceptable third party, i.e., “The experiment has shown….”
In truth, experiments don’t run themselves, and we are a long way off from artificial intelligence that acts as intuitive and insightful creators. Experiments and machines are the products of humans, and, as the quantum physicists are wont to say, “Just by being there, just by observing, humans play a role in the results.” Ultimately, it’s the researcher who chooses what to research, and it’s the researcher who concludes.
Humans have a difficult time abstracting themselves. Everything—okay, maybe most things—is personal in some way, if only in the motivation for inquiring about it in the first place.
“Not so,” you say. “What about astronomy? That’s just a matter of looking at images or at the night sky. Maybe observers insert themselves in the latter, but in looking at images made by the folks who work the antennae at Green Bank or at digitized images produced in the visible spectrum by the Hubble, there’s no insertion of human desire.”
Would that were so. Astronomers do make the choice to observe in some band of the electromagnetic spectrum, and they do explain their findings. We play a game when we write, “Gravity waves were detected by LIGO.” What’s wrong with “Hey, Everyone, guess what WE found? Gravity waves. Yeah. They’re real. We’ve seen them—well, not in the sense that we see a tree, but, you know what we mean, and we have proof they exist.” And thus, our collective minds come to a scientific discovery—no differently from a discovery announced in the passive voice. The machine, even one as sensitive as LIGO, is simply an extension of us, nerves in our fingertips, so to speak. Galileo observed sunspots and mountains on the moon. Hubble observed and then concluded, and now astronomers use his namesake telescope to make further observations. Penzias and Wilson observed the Echo of the Big Bang, and then “we” used the COBE satellite to image its immediate aftermath.
We play games to eliminate ourselves from what we do and how we understand in the belief (and it is simply a belief) that those games—i.e., the passive voice constructions in scientific papers—lend objectivity to knowledge.
“Again, not so,” you say. “Think math; think formulas; think models. E is the product of mass times the square of lightspeed. There’s no disputing that, no personality involved. Atomic bombs explode, and nothing subjective stops them from exploding, though I will admit that it is the human behind the making and exploding of the bomb. Certainly, discovering that the Sun is a fusion reactor is an objective finding.”
But I’m not really saying that the world can’t exist outside human experience as though I’m a follower of George Berkeley. I’m with Dr. Samuel Johnson in refuting Berkeley because I have kicked a stone—and a tire or two. Yes, there was a world before there were humans; we’ve come along late in the game of existence. There is a world outside the human mind. But without the human mind, it has no meaning.
I suppose what I’m after is an admission from scientists that what they do they choose to do and what they find they, and not some entity outside themselves, discover. We don’t need to play games with language, to assert that inserting a personal pronoun we diminish the value of the finding.
I’ve mentioned a parallel to this elsewhere in writing about the use of BCE for “Before the Common Era” instead of BC for “Before Christ,” or in writing CE (or C.E.) to substitute “Common Era” for Anno Domini. Silly distinction without a difference designed to give the appearance of freedom from any religious association. But when does the Common Era begin? With the approximate date of Christ’s birth? Then it is a term that uses Christ as the starting moment, the temporal point of departure from what came “before,” that is, before the Common Era. And yet, the Common Era begins some 2,000 years ago—by coincidence with the birth of Christ. Isn’t this all just a game? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. How are the last two millennia different in kind from any preceding millennia? They aren’t, are they, except in marking a beginning point at Christ’s birth? If they are not different as millennia, why separate the last two from any previous millennia? Why bother with C.E. unless there is some meaningful significance? Oh! The games we play in the name of objectivity and political correctness.
Yes, the world appears to obey “laws” that exist without human interpretation. Recognizing this in part, Sir James Hutton and then Charles Lyell noted that the processes that operate in the natural world today operated in the natural world before Anno Domini. There is an objective world. Berkeley was wrong. We do stub our toe on a rock. But in the stubbing and in the knowing that we stubbed a toe, we, and not some pseudo objective interpreter, insert ourselves into the equation of reality. What difference, what objectivity, occurs if we write, “The toe was stubbed on a rock.”
Not all scientific research deals with quantities, of course, thus the rise of “qualitative research” in recent decades and in the “social sciences.” Whereas many in the “hard sciences” might look with condescension upon those researchers, the world, though not Berkeleyesk, does include that which is a matter of subjectivity. Is it folly, then, to see studies in the social sciences that cannot be by the standards of “hard science” repeatable? Given, for example, a “scientific survey” of a certain group of people, can the survey’s results be repeated in a different group of people? Can we apply irrefutably and exactly the results of one to the other?
Much of what we do is subjective through and through. Why not admit it? Why play “passive voice” games to pretend an objectivity that doesn’t exist or that only partially exists?
Have you ever seen one of those TV shows about ghost hunters? Have you noticed that they never give conclusive proof? Have you also noticed the attempt at objectivity by the inclusion of some device? Who knows what the physical device is supposed to detect? Does it use the electromagnetic spectrum? Are ghosts as electromagnetic as we? As chemical?
Mind gives or finds meaning even in a world with real stones upon which real people stub real toes.
In truth, experiments don’t run themselves, and we are a long way off from artificial intelligence that acts as intuitive and insightful creators. Experiments and machines are the products of humans, and, as the quantum physicists are wont to say, “Just by being there, just by observing, humans play a role in the results.” Ultimately, it’s the researcher who chooses what to research, and it’s the researcher who concludes.
Humans have a difficult time abstracting themselves. Everything—okay, maybe most things—is personal in some way, if only in the motivation for inquiring about it in the first place.
“Not so,” you say. “What about astronomy? That’s just a matter of looking at images or at the night sky. Maybe observers insert themselves in the latter, but in looking at images made by the folks who work the antennae at Green Bank or at digitized images produced in the visible spectrum by the Hubble, there’s no insertion of human desire.”
Would that were so. Astronomers do make the choice to observe in some band of the electromagnetic spectrum, and they do explain their findings. We play a game when we write, “Gravity waves were detected by LIGO.” What’s wrong with “Hey, Everyone, guess what WE found? Gravity waves. Yeah. They’re real. We’ve seen them—well, not in the sense that we see a tree, but, you know what we mean, and we have proof they exist.” And thus, our collective minds come to a scientific discovery—no differently from a discovery announced in the passive voice. The machine, even one as sensitive as LIGO, is simply an extension of us, nerves in our fingertips, so to speak. Galileo observed sunspots and mountains on the moon. Hubble observed and then concluded, and now astronomers use his namesake telescope to make further observations. Penzias and Wilson observed the Echo of the Big Bang, and then “we” used the COBE satellite to image its immediate aftermath.
We play games to eliminate ourselves from what we do and how we understand in the belief (and it is simply a belief) that those games—i.e., the passive voice constructions in scientific papers—lend objectivity to knowledge.
“Again, not so,” you say. “Think math; think formulas; think models. E is the product of mass times the square of lightspeed. There’s no disputing that, no personality involved. Atomic bombs explode, and nothing subjective stops them from exploding, though I will admit that it is the human behind the making and exploding of the bomb. Certainly, discovering that the Sun is a fusion reactor is an objective finding.”
But I’m not really saying that the world can’t exist outside human experience as though I’m a follower of George Berkeley. I’m with Dr. Samuel Johnson in refuting Berkeley because I have kicked a stone—and a tire or two. Yes, there was a world before there were humans; we’ve come along late in the game of existence. There is a world outside the human mind. But without the human mind, it has no meaning.
I suppose what I’m after is an admission from scientists that what they do they choose to do and what they find they, and not some entity outside themselves, discover. We don’t need to play games with language, to assert that inserting a personal pronoun we diminish the value of the finding.
I’ve mentioned a parallel to this elsewhere in writing about the use of BCE for “Before the Common Era” instead of BC for “Before Christ,” or in writing CE (or C.E.) to substitute “Common Era” for Anno Domini. Silly distinction without a difference designed to give the appearance of freedom from any religious association. But when does the Common Era begin? With the approximate date of Christ’s birth? Then it is a term that uses Christ as the starting moment, the temporal point of departure from what came “before,” that is, before the Common Era. And yet, the Common Era begins some 2,000 years ago—by coincidence with the birth of Christ. Isn’t this all just a game? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. How are the last two millennia different in kind from any preceding millennia? They aren’t, are they, except in marking a beginning point at Christ’s birth? If they are not different as millennia, why separate the last two from any previous millennia? Why bother with C.E. unless there is some meaningful significance? Oh! The games we play in the name of objectivity and political correctness.
Yes, the world appears to obey “laws” that exist without human interpretation. Recognizing this in part, Sir James Hutton and then Charles Lyell noted that the processes that operate in the natural world today operated in the natural world before Anno Domini. There is an objective world. Berkeley was wrong. We do stub our toe on a rock. But in the stubbing and in the knowing that we stubbed a toe, we, and not some pseudo objective interpreter, insert ourselves into the equation of reality. What difference, what objectivity, occurs if we write, “The toe was stubbed on a rock.”
Not all scientific research deals with quantities, of course, thus the rise of “qualitative research” in recent decades and in the “social sciences.” Whereas many in the “hard sciences” might look with condescension upon those researchers, the world, though not Berkeleyesk, does include that which is a matter of subjectivity. Is it folly, then, to see studies in the social sciences that cannot be by the standards of “hard science” repeatable? Given, for example, a “scientific survey” of a certain group of people, can the survey’s results be repeated in a different group of people? Can we apply irrefutably and exactly the results of one to the other?
Much of what we do is subjective through and through. Why not admit it? Why play “passive voice” games to pretend an objectivity that doesn’t exist or that only partially exists?
Have you ever seen one of those TV shows about ghost hunters? Have you noticed that they never give conclusive proof? Have you also noticed the attempt at objectivity by the inclusion of some device? Who knows what the physical device is supposed to detect? Does it use the electromagnetic spectrum? Are ghosts as electromagnetic as we? As chemical?
Mind gives or finds meaning even in a world with real stones upon which real people stub real toes.
RSS Feed