Important Tension

Thanks to Orac, who put a plug for Occam's Trowel on his blog Respectful Insolence today. Since I suspect that might draw a few scientists this way, I want to touch on an important tension that I'm encountering regularly in my studies.

The view of science from a practicing scientist's perspective is not the same as what philosophers and historians of science see. Chris Rowan has a post on Highly Allochthonous about one place where this tension is being played out. When I was still in physics, it was a basic assumption that we were looking at the world objectively, untainted by the subjectivity, wish-fulfillment and political maneuvering that other disciplines suffer. This, in fact, was ultimately why I left physics, I think: our professors never discussed the limitations of scientific knowledge, or the ways in which science had not simply reported the world "as it essentially was". I found it pretty disillusioning that the practice of science didn't seem to live up to its ideal.

Studying the history and philosophy of science has been an exciting reintroduction to that world, however -- one that reflects science's status as a human activity, and is all the more complex because of our fingerprints all over it. The choices that scientists make about what to observe, how to observe it, how to interpret it, and how to communicate it render science something other than objective... but I'm still learning what that other is. I've found that scientists in general don't like having their subjectivity questioned, as if it impugns their integrity and professionalism. Don't get me wrong -- I still think it's the best approach we have for understanding how the world works, but that it's far more interesting than the simplistic picture we put forward. Especially with the attacks coming from the land of pseudoscience, we want to defend the integrity of its methods and product.

The question that's on my mind today is how to reconcile these two views of science: the practicing scientist's striving for objectivity, and the historical/philosophical view that science is not perfectly objective. Is there some common ground to be found here?