ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Edmund Husserl’s view of the status of scientific objectivity by looking into several ways in which science is related to intersubjectivity, starting with straightforward perception and ending with the critical ambitions of a “transcendental” science. Perceptual and scientific objectivity in Husserl would qualify as horizontal species of objectivity according to Burge’s generic division. In Husserl’s phenomenology, a perception belongs to a harmonious system of possible perceptions. It has “intentional content” through a set of “anticipations” that we are mostly unaware of. The anticipations can be fulfilled or frustrated, and that brings in constraints from sensory stimulation on the range of what can be constituted. Perceptual objectification as “corrected” through objective science not only circumvents pathologies as well as differences in orthoaesthetic systems, then, but also differences in the cultural backgrounds of individuals. This is particularly relevant to the extent that there can be cultural “sediments” on the perceptions themselves within a culture-relative life-world.
