Every once in awhile when you get a bunch of intellectual types “talking shop”, the subject turns to the matter of intellectual objectivity. The journalist and broadcast majors will go on and on about the problems of maintaining objectivity and all of the things one does to keep from injecting your own biases and preconceived notions into a story (unless you work for Faux News). The science-types will tell a similar story, about the scientific method and peer review, and how their institutionalized readiness to abandon any idea that no longer holds up is one of the cornerstones of scientific progress. Meanwhile the postmodern deconstructionist harpy wing of the humanities will sit and smile indulgently, since they know that every proposition has equal weight, and demands equal respect. Therefore, the idea of a “correct” or “incorrect” is just another socially constructed discourse, as is the myth not only of “objectivity” but of being able to ascertain anything about anything. They are usually the ones who have stayed behind in academia, since the real world would deconstruct their asses faster than you can say, “You want fries with that?”

For the record, and in the spirit of full disclosure, I count myself among those practitioners of humanities scholarship who are quite happy to persist in our use of the positivist model, thank you very much. Because there is a real world out there, with real facts, and at the end of the day (if I may borrow from physics for a moment), F = MA and no amount of deconstructing is going to change that.

But let’s get back to the bit about objectivity. One of my dear friends is a physicist named Shawn Carlson, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and the founder and Executive Director of the Society for Amateur Scientists. His concise definition of science is that it is a set of tools you use to make sure you aren’t fooling yourself. Interestingly, that is the “prime directive” for another practitioner of the intellectual’s craft: the Intelligence Analyst.

In a way, the Analyst must strive for objectivity in ways that would tax most academics or professional thinkers in the public sector. I know that the culture of the intelligence community places an almost sacred sanction on always striving for objectivity, and they have developed some interesting intellectual tools to help Analysts maintain an objective viewpoint as much as possible. You can access a wonderful book titled Psychology of Intelligence Analysis by Richards J. Heuer, Jr. for free both as html pages and a downloadable .pdf file. Again, it’s a free download.

Editor’s Note: this document is no longer available from the CIA web site, but you can download your own copy here. I strongly recommend you do; in all my years of study in academia, I’ve never seen such a useful discussion of how we perceive things, why we make mistakes based on preconceived notions, and an awlful lot about how the mind actually processes information.

I’ve started reading it and I recommend it highly. There is too much fluffy pseudo-philosophizing and misreading of Derrida and others of the French School. As a result objectivity has fallen out of favor in some circles (though not nearly as much some claim). But for the guerrilla scholar who likes to actually deal in facts, this is a wonderful resource. And it’s free. Your tax dollars at work.