ABSTRACT
Objectivity is a fighting word. It is lambasted, cherished, hunted, defended; it is realism on Monday, certainty on Wednesday, intersubjectivity on Friday, and truth on Sunday. Claims and counterclaims proliferate: the natural sciences are objective; the social sciences want to be; architecture was in the 1920s. Postmodernism corrodes it, and metaphysics may or may not have captured its essence. Amid the cacophony of these discussions, the term loses its sense, and becomes little more than a contested token in battles from the Methodenstreit to the Culture Wars. In the midst of such polemics, a reader can be forgiven for having no conception of what might be meant by claims that objectivity still resides in quantum measurement, democratic politics, and statistical certainty.
