Evidence? (Dick pt II)

(This is a continuation of my Richard Dawkins and atheism vs theism-thread.)

Evidence. A fav word for Richard Dawkins. But what does it mean? What can it mean? According to the correspondance theory truth is something that can be said to exist in nature that can be "objectively observed", and ones statement about this thing can be checked against the original. This is more or less the version of truth Dawkins adheres to.

What he does not address however, is the question of: how can I investigate this object objectively and not merely subjectively? Is it possible for one person to investigate something without any preconception about what it is he or she is about to observe or investigate? The critique against the correspondance theory is that it's impossible to rid yourself of your preconceptions, prejudice and choices made along the way if you are to observe this object and understand anything of it.

When communicating back what you've seen, this too has to be done in a fashion where you put the observation into a language, a contextual framework to make your observations of this object - investigated with the help of your previous experience and concepts of language, nature, science, history and whatnot - graspable to anyone but yourself.

The idea of objectivity is seriously under critique and constant scrutiny. One of the early postmodern contributions to philosophy of science was to demonstrate how this objective state of all things somehow always ended up benefitting the same group of people; white middleaged men, funnily enough.

It's a good thing to want to rid yourself of preconceptions - ethnocentricity included - and try to overcome the obstacles they pose. It's quite another one to pretend that the preconceptions don't exist. This is what Dawkins does, and is also one of the points where he should be justifiably criticized.

Yours philosophically

Jonatan

PS. One of the tags for this post is "theology". Which may strike you as odd, as my text says nothing about God. What I'm writing about here is philosophy of science. That said, Dawkins is not being explicit about his philosophy of science, and it is partly therefor his entire thesis falls short.