“Write short note : The problem of objectivity” (1991)
- Max Weber and Emile Durkheim both treated objectivity as sociology’s central methodological demand, yet each confronted the same underlying obstacle from a different direction.
- The obstacle is not merely practical carelessness that better training could fix — it is a structural feature of sociology’s subject matter: the sociologist studies the very society of which she is already a member.
- A natural scientist stands outside inert matter and observes it from a position of externality; a sociologist cannot achieve the same externality, because she has been socialized into the categories, norms, and vantage point of the society she now sets out to study.
- This creates the specific problem of the observer-observed relationship: the researcher’s own prior socialization pre-shapes what even registers as a noticeable “fact” long before formal analysis begins.
The Structural Difficulty: Observer Embedded in the Observed
- Unlike a chemist examining a compound, the sociologist shares language, values, and lived experience with the people under study — simultaneously the instrument of observation and a product of the social world being observed.
- This embeddedness operates before conscious bias even enters the picture: the categories a researcher uses to notice a phenomenon at all — what counts as “deviant,” “normal,” “a family,” “poverty” — are themselves inherited from her own socialization, not neutral labels applied afterward, so prejudices of class, community, gender, and ideology can contaminate research at its very starting point rather than only at the stage of interpreting already-collected data.
- The difficulty is compounded because the sociologist’s findings can themselves feed back into the society studied, altering the very reality under observation — a reflexivity problem largely absent from the natural sciences.
Durkheim’s Response: Treat Social Facts as External Things
- Durkheim insisted that objectivity is achievable if the researcher brackets all prenotions — commonsense, ideologically loaded assumptions about social life — before beginning enquiry.
- His governing methodological rule was to treat social facts as things: external to the individual, exercising constraint, and observable through outward, measurable manifestations rather than the researcher’s intuitive sympathy — his statistical study of suicide exemplified this, relying on comparable rates across groups rather than interpretive empathy with any individual case.
- “The first and most fundamental rule is: Consider social facts as things.” — Emile Durkheim
- This rule is Durkheim’s entire answer to the observer-observed problem in one sentence: if social facts are treated as external objects rather than approached through the researcher’s own intuitive familiarity with them, the observer’s embeddedness in the society studied is methodologically neutralized rather than left to distort the findings.
Weber’s Response: Discipline Subjectivity Rather Than Deny It
- Where Durkheim sought to eliminate the observer’s subjectivity, Weber accepted that meaningful social action cannot be understood from the outside alone and built subjectivity into the method itself through Verstehen — interpretive understanding of the actor’s own meaning.
- To keep this necessarily subjective act of interpretation disciplined rather than arbitrary, Weber developed the ideal type: a deliberately one-sided, logically constructed mental model against which concrete cases are compared, which does not claim to describe reality but gives interpretation a fixed, unambiguous point of reference.
- Weber additionally distinguished value-relevance (values legitimately shape which problem is chosen for study) from value-freedom (values must not distort the findings themselves) — objectivity, for him, lies not in having no standpoint but in disciplining and making that standpoint transparent.
Two Strategies, One Underlying Problem
- Durkheim’s strategy is essentially exclusionary — remove the observer’s subjectivity as far as possible by treating facts externally; Weber’s strategy is essentially disciplinary — accept that subjectivity cannot be removed from a science of meaningful action, and instead regulate it through methodological tools like ideal types.
- Contemporary methodological writing extends this same debate through reflexivity and positionality — researchers explicitly stating their own social location and its likely influence on the study, a formalized version of Weber’s demand that the standpoint be made transparent rather than pretended away; critics such as Alvin Gouldner went further still, arguing that complete value-neutrality is itself a myth and that the honest response is disclosed subjectivity, not false neutrality.
- The problem of objectivity in sociology is thus not a solvable technical defect but a permanent structural condition of studying a society one is already part of.
- Durkheim and Weber represent the discipline’s two enduring responses — bracketing the self versus disciplining the self — and most later methodological positions, including present-day reflexive and standpoint approaches, essentially elaborate one or the other.
- What both agree on is that unexamined subjectivity is the real danger; the disagreement is only over whether the remedy lies in externalizing facts or in formalizing interpretation.
- Recognizing this observer-observed problem does not disqualify sociology as a science — it instead defines the distinctive discipline sociological method must exercise that the natural sciences rarely need.