0910G【Try Best】第二小组 issue157 by tianshi02

tianshi02UID: 2362794

It has long been a debated issue whether there is purely objective observation. The speaker asserts that all observation is subjective and it is always guided by the expectations or desires of the observer. One does not have to go very far to see that observation are quite often subjective. My point of contension is that even in science, which seems to reveal the objective truth, judgement of observation is usually guided by the observer's expectations, desires or experiences, nevertheless, the interpretation based on the observation might be purely objective by chance.

First, observation is restricted by observer's  expectations and desires. Since people have different perspectives, values, experiences, the judgement of any observation relies heavily on the observer. This is particularly true in social science. The archaeologists studies the remains depostied in the soil, in an attempt to reveal the prehistoric truth. The observation that a person is buried with delicate stone tools might lead many researchers to think that this person is of high social status, whereas another group of researchers might think that in an egalitarian society, the possible explanation could be that this person is the hero of the clan he belonged to. There might be other explanations, depending on the observers.

Even in  natural science, the observation is often circumscribed by humans' limited knowledge and expiences. As is known to all, the world is changing and our knowledge about everything is updating. Thus, any observation is only what the observer can say about a thing for the time being, based on what he knows, and what he conjectures. There are many examples showing that the observation is guide by observer's expections. Consider that in the past people thought that sun was revolving around earth, and people thought that the heaven was a vault and the earth was square. In a not dissimilar way, the observation that the sun will always rise in the morning is not necessarily an objective truth. The fact that the sun has risen for billions of days does not imply that it will always rise. It can at most be a conjecture guided by humans' experiences and desires,  as opposed to being an objective truth. It follows that all physical laws, based on sufficiently many times of experiments and careful observation, are unsound in general. Another detailed example could be that even Newton observed that the apple fell to the ground for a large number of times, it might be the case that a "weird" apple at some time and in somewhere fly to the heaven vertically.

However, some observation happen to be the fundamental truth about a subject, such observation are invulnerable regardless of the observers. If there were no Gauss, people might still think that 1+2+3+...+100 will take 99 computational steps. Nonetheless, the observation that 1+1=2 is always true, as it is the fundamental definition in mathematics. Unlike the observation that 1+...+100 takes 99 steps, the a priori knowledge that 1+1 =2 will never go wrong, as it is the fundamental stone to the edifice of mathematic. Another case in point is the observation that every algorithm takes at least n computational steps. This is an objective observation in that the definition of algorithm is a computational machine that takes an input of size n and produces the result within polynomial number of steps in n. The observation must hold because every algorithm has at least to read in the input before producing the result and reading alone will take n steps without doing the computation.  
All in all, due to the limited knowledgeand experiences of human beings, even in scientific world, our observation are,more often than not, subjective. However, the speaker fails to realize that there is some a priori observation that is objective.