Science is done inside institutions whose interests shape what is asked and published

The argument

A second line of argument looks past individual researchers to the arrangements they work in. Research costs money, and money is allocated by bodies with priorities of their own, so the questions that get asked are the ones someone was willing to fund. Careers advance on publication, and journals prefer results that are novel and positive, so the findings that enter the record are not a representative sample of the findings produced. Critics argue that a literature shaped by these filters cannot be treated as a neutral picture of its subject, however scrupulous each contributor was. The same applies to the judgment of quality. Peer review is carried out by established members of a field, who assess whether a submission is sound using the standards of that field, and a claim departing from those standards will tend to be read as poorly argued rather than as a challenge. Critics hold that this is how disciplines maintain coherence, but that it also means the community decides what counts as knowledge, and the community has a position. Work that would embarrass a funder, contradict a consensus or arrive from outside the discipline faces obstacles that have nothing to do with the evidence behind it. Critics are usually careful about what follows. The claim is not that results are fabricated or that findings are worthless, but that the practice producing them is a social institution with interests, and that an institution cannot step outside itself to check whether its own priorities have distorted its conclusions. On this account objectivity is best understood as a value the institution professes and partially enforces, not as a property its output possesses, and treating published science as a view from nowhere mistakes an aspiration for an achievement.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Defenders reply that these are criticisms of how science is currently administered rather than of whether objectivity is attainable, and that the reforms they have prompted make the point: registries of planned studies, journals committed to publishing negative results and open data all exist because the filters were identified and treated as faults. They argue the position is also self-undermining, since the evidence that funding and publication bias distort findings was produced by researchers inside these institutions, examining their own field and reaching an unwelcome conclusion. If an institution could not check itself, that work could not have happened. On that view institutional interests are a standing threat to objectivity, which is different from showing it to be impossible.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Funding and publication filters shape which questions are pursued without determining the answers, and the distortion they cause has been identified and acted on through registries of planned studies and journals publishing negative results. [Rejecting P2] Review by established members of a field also enforces the standards that catch error, and claims departing from consensus have repeatedly been accepted once the evidence for them accumulated. [Rejecting P3] The premise is undercut by the examples the argument relies on, since the evidence of institutional bias was produced by researchers examining their own institutions. [Rejecting C] It follows that institutional interests are a standing threat to objectivity that has to be managed, not that objectivity in science is unattainable.