THE MYTH OF OBJECTIVITY: LITERATURE AS A CRITIQUE OF PHILOSOPHY-FREE SCIENCE

Abstract

Scientific inquiry presents itself as value-neutral and philosophy-free, yet this self-image conceals the very assumptions that make such inquiry possible. The central problem this study addresses is: what kind of discourse is best equipped to expose the philosophical presuppositions embedded within scientific claims to objectivity? This study argues that literary fiction performs exactly this function. Focusing on Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021) and drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Kuhn (1962), Latour (1993), and Haraway (1988), the study demonstrates how narrative form, voice, and metaphor reveal the hidden philosophical and ethical assumptions underlying claims to neutrality and reason. Through close reading of the novel's artificial intelligence narrator, the analysis shows how even machine cognition reproduces the subjectivity, moral imagination, and embodied perspective that science seeks to exclude. The findings indicate that the myth of philosophy-free science is not merely an epistemological error but an ethical one, and that literature, through its formal resources, is uniquely capable of making this contradiction visible in ways that abstract philosophical argument cannot.

Keywords: objectivity; philosophy of science; situated knowledge; posthumanism; narrative epistemology; artificial intelligence; Ishiguro