ABSTRACT
Rather than trying to solve fundamental philosophical questions, we want to describe the conditions within which the concept of pure knowledge of objective physical reality can function as a useful metaphysical conceit that promotes research and governs scholarly debate. For example, not all theoretical physicists agree with Steven Weinberg (1993) that a unified theory of everything is just around the corner, but enough agree that such a theory is an important goal to allow it to partially organize the internal evaluation of competing explanations, hypotheses, and facts within the field itself. A grand unified theory can only be constructed within a conceptual framework that holds that what is scientifically true now has always been scientifically true and always will be scientifically true. In this sense, the fundamental reality of the universe has no history; it is truly an object. Objective reality serves a different but equally important function for experimentalists. Experimental physicists “stub their toes” against reality constantly. Experiments turn out differently than expected. Often the best designed and most carefully executed experiments produce surprising results, or (even worse) fail to produce meaningful results at all. These results (and failures) are explained by reference to objective reality. To the experimentalist, objective reality seems like a glittering jewel swirling in a vat of seething acid: parts of it are driving us to grasp it, while other parts are making it almost impossible to do so. Objective reality is both what inspires research and that which disrupts and frustrates our efforts to make sense of the world. The possibility of achieving a pure knowledge of absolute objective reality, therefore, can then be seen as something like a foundational belief that structures both the successful and unsuccessful attempts at the production of knowledge within physics. It could operate in a manner
similar to all such structuring beliefs not only in that it sets the basic terms within which debate can take place (marking the boundaries of the field) but also in that one of its main effects is to allow the participants in this field to “deny the social world” (Bourdieu 1993: 87).
