THEORY-151: Scientific objectivity belongs to a community's critical practices rather than to individual method: because evidence bears on hypotheses only through background assumptions that no evidence supports, a community is objective to the degree that its criticism has venues, uptake, public standards and tempered equality of intellectual authority

Source

Longino, “The Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge”, LIT-725, read in NOTE-580, §5. The books in which the argument is made, LIT-717 and LIT-732, are unread.

What was actually shown

An argument, not a result. In her SEP entry (LIT-725), Longino states its premise. Data bear on a hypothesis only via background assumptions, and the chain of justification ends in assumptions with no evidence for them. Then “the only check against the arbitrary dominance of subjective (metaphysical, political, aesthetic) preference in such cases is critical interaction among the members of the scientific community or among members of different communities.”

Its conclusion is a set of conditions. Institutionalised criticism, such as peer review, counts toward objectivity only if:

1. there are venues where critical interaction can happen;
2. criticism has uptake, so belief in the community shifts over time in response to it;
3. the standards that regulate discourse are public;
4. intellectual authority is shared in tempered equality: every perspective has prima facie standing, lost only by refusing to engage or respond.

Since 2002 the processes these norms govern include observation and reasoning in progress, not only the review of finished claims.

What this does not say

• Not that consensus is truth. The norms are conditions on how criticism works, not on its outcome.
• Not that a community of good reasoners is objective. That is the point: individual competence without venues or uptake does not make the community’s knowledge objective.
• Not a claim about action or governance. The norms concern how a community comes to know. Applying them to how an organization decides or governs itself is an extension, plausible and unargued here.
• Not shown to improve accuracy. Whether communities meeting the norms get things right more often is not something the entry reports evidence for.

Connections

• Network epistemology (THEORY-143, THEORY-148). Zollman’s models measure one thing Longino’s norms leave open: how much communication, along which links. They count belief change, not criticism, so the two do not compete. No relation is declared.
• Group judgment. THEORY-127 (List & Pettit) says a rational group’s judgments cannot be read off its members’ judgments proposition by proposition. Longino’s community is a different kind of collective: knowledge is held socially without the group forming one judgment.

Note of 2026-10-29: what holds it back

Its promote_when is unmet in both halves: the books in which Longino makes the argument (LIT-717, LIT-732) are unread, so the norms and the underdetermination premise are checked only against her own summary in §5 of the SEP entry, and no evidence has been read that communities meeting the four norms, measured independently, track truth better or correct error faster. It could be narrowed to what the entry argues, keeping the wide form as a Proposed THEORY under ADR-047’s kind 1, if a claim comes to need only that.