**1. Introduction**

It is now more than 60 years since C.P. Snow's [1] *Two Cultures* pointed out that scholars in the humanities and those in the sciences lived in two different worlds. They rarely encountered each other in scholarly contexts and were mostly entirely ignorant about each other's projects. What interested Snow was the scientifically illiterate humanists.

New groups have joined the ranks of the scientifically illiterate, in the eyes of their critics: namely scientists themselves and the educated classes, as well as the policymakers who depend on scientific findings. These newest groups accuse the scientists of ignorance about androcentrism, racism, coloniality, and Eurocentrism that damages the reliability of their results of research. Science is a fully social process, they argue. What we know and do not know is shaped not only by "nature herself," but also by what the most powerful corporations and governments want to know. They point, for example to widespread ignorance about climate change, which has held back effective public policy in this area. And an increasing number of such critics point to the effective non-modern knowledge systems of

non-Western cultures, which have served those cultures well in their distinctive social and natural environments.

Obviously, nobody wants biased research that produces inaccurate accounts of nature and social relations. We want reliable accounts on which to base public policies and our practices. However, this can seem to be a dangerous moment even to take up this question in light of the constant barrage of false claims and "sciencebashing" that issues daily, as I write, from the outgoing U.S. president and other authoritarian regimes around the globe.

Yet today, as the front pages of our newspapers have revealed, who catches COVID-19 and who dies from it indicate that in important respects, maximally objective environmental and medical/health assumptions and practices have not been guiding public policy. COVID-19 is an equal-opportunity virus, but the conditions of life for poor people and peoples of color ensure that they are more likely to catch it and have fewer resources to deal with it. Moreover, in the related economic crisis, who falls into poverty and who does not reveal similar faulty assumptions that shape economic policy.

In response to the earlier complaints, the sciences have corrected their processes in significant ways. As most physicians now recognize, the bodies of members of these other groups are not in all respects exactly like the stereotypical model of the human as the idealized elite white man. Women's bodies are not immature or defective versions of men's bodies, with simply a different reproductive system characterizing them, as the old, pre-1970s accounts claimed.

Engineers also got the message. Automobile designers created the possibility of adjusting the height and position of drivers' seats so that even small drivers, such as many white women and most people in some other ethnic groups, could see out of the front window and at the same time reach the gas or brake pedals. Yet this morning, a story on NPR gave voice to women farmers, who were complaining that tractors and other farming equipment are not user-friendly to anyone but big, very strong men. Manufacturers need to design such items for use by the full array of peoples who farm, including white women as well as men and women in ethnic groups that characteristically are shorter and less heavily muscled.

## **2. Calls for greater objectivity**

Thus, accommodation to servicing the needs of physically and socially diverse groups has produced economic, political, and educational revisions of our policy worlds and our daily experiences in them. These groups want to research that is more objective than the conventional supposedly universally valid research that was grounded only in dominant groups' experiences. They do not want "subjective" research, as their critics often claim. It is the dominant models of the human and their standards that have been only subjective, the critics counter, representing only elite groups' experiences and interests. Rather, they want "stronger objectivity" that can more accurately chart all of our naturally and socially different lives in the worlds that we share.

Some sciences are more liable to such charges than others. High-energy physics certainly seems reasonably resistant to such charges. It does not seem to be at all about people as social beings. Yet one can still ask questions about why it is that these sciences' projects are so highly funded by the U.S Department of Defense. Could this have something to do with U.S. military politics rather than only with the objective desire to understand "pure nature"? Why do not sciences that could effectively prepare for a pandemic—one that on last Friday alone newly infected 99 thousand U.S. citizens and killed 1000—receive equal federal funding? It is becoming clear that today we live in a historically extraordinary moment in which deeply

*Strong Objectivity for New Social Movements DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99973*

anti-democratic infrastructures have become increasingly visible. Such infrastructures ensure that scientific research will not be maximally objective; it will continue to serve the desires of the powerful at the expense of the needs of the vast majority of the world's citizens. Our standards for objective research that were produced as a result of the earlier social justice movements did not go far enough.
