i’d like to know someone else’s stance upon the controversy to evaluate the objectivity of observational facts in science. how about the gestalt switch, for example? what about the phenomenon of the theory-ladenness of observation? i am writing a midterm and have written my opening paragraph and thesis. i am supposed to make a rebuttal, a defensive argument, and a closing conclusion. the gist of my paper has so far stated that objectivity does not stand alone, that there are other underlying factors contributing to making observations. our perception and background history/experience greatly influences our judgment upon things. as for the gestalt switch, take the rabbit/duck image…what if someone doesn’t know what a rabbit is? they wouldn’t be able to conclude that within the image could be a rabbit. this shows an example for the theory-ladenness of observation. as for the rebuttal, i’d like to find people who could argue with a counterexample that would help me with my ideas in formulating the rest of my paper. any help and deep discussion would be great.
any sense of objectivity is subjectively experienced…
-Imp
i like to consider the ‘gestalt switch’ at work in putatively moral deliberations
they can get interesting
The gestalt switch is just a mechanism by which we place subjectivity in a different position relative to the object. It doesn’t necessarily challenge the “objectivity” of observations in science.
Try thinking of it this way: you have a cluster of observed stuff (descriptions, data, interpretations, etc), which you’re thinking or writing about. It’s kind of like a cognitive “shape” in your mind - it exists in three dimensions and time - you “look at it” (think about it) and those aspects of it which you can “see” (comprehend, make sense of) are determined by where you are standing in relation to it (your place in time and thought) - just like how, if youre looking at a physical object, the contours and details of it which you can observe will be limited by where you are standing in space relative to it: That is, you can only see one side of the wall when you are standing in front or in back of it - you have to move around it to see the whole thing, and you can really only directly see it from one angle at a time, meaning you can never actually see the whole thing at once. That doesn’t make the far side of the wall any less “objective” when you are standing on the opposite side, it just means we are limited in how much information we can observe at any given moment. The gestalt switch is just like when you walk around to the other side of the wall to see what it looks like and youre suprised to realize it’s got a beautiful mural painted on it or something which you didn’t know about before - here you thought it was just a plain old brick wall, but then you look at it from some other perspective and it’s got all these interesting things about it which you never suspected.
The wall itself is still a single objective reality, you just couldn’t (and can’t - because we are phenomenologically limited creatures) see the whole thing at once.