Читать книгу Evaluation in Today’s World - Veronica G. Thomas - Страница 27

For hundreds of years, philosophers of science have commented on the difficulty of attaining scientific objectivity. In 1821, Isaac Watts described the near impossibility of being unbiased: “The eyes of a man in the jaundice make yellow observations on everything; and the soul tinctured with any passion diffuses a false color over the appearance of things” (AZ Quotes, n.d., para. 1). More recently, Nage (1961) wrote about the difficulty of preventing our likes, aversions, hopes, and fears from coloring our conclusions. Looking at the issues of objectivity from a different perspective, Martin, Lee, and Bang (2014, para. 10) suggested that “it is commonly said that scientists should have a professional distance from what they study. But the metaphor of distance is misleading. Science, like a painting, necessarily has a perspective. And that perspective is at least partially shaped by variables such as race, gender and class.” When we move past the concept that scientists and evaluators are objective, we are able to look more clearly at biases, including our own.