This quote which is from Pierre Bourdieu's Logic of Practice, is one I wish I had committed to memory for the past 4 years. I first read it my second year of undergrad when I was 19. Bourdieu's influence on me I knew had been strong, but being such a dense work, I had never taken the time to go back and re-read the work once I had matured. Obviously, it would've been helpful in many of my discussions with colleagues over my uneasiness with "Science".
In context of a discussion about Structural Anthropology in a section entitled "Objectification objectified" Bourdieu quotes a passage from Wittgenstein (one of my faves!) and follows the passage with this:
"To slip from regularity, i.e. from what recurs with a certain statistically measurable frequency and from the formula which describes it, to a consciously laid down and consciously respected ruling (reglement), or to unconscious regulating by a mysterious cerebral or social mechanism, are the two commonest ways of sliding from the model of reality to the reality of the model."
While the mathematician may have greater awareness of the fallibility of her models, those in general who conduct themselves in the service of Science, I would argue fall prey to Bourdieu's common slide.
and on the importance of historical action: "To make transcendent entities, which are to practices as essence to existence, out of the constructions that science resorts to in order to give an account of the structure and meaningful products of the accumulation of innumerable historical actions, is to reduce history to a 'process without a subject', simply replacing the 'creative subject' of subjectivism with an automaton driven by the dead laws of a history of nature."
Bourdieu puts a final nail into the coffin of objectivity as rule.
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"It is necessary to reverse the common opinion and acknowledge that it is not the harshness of a situation or the sufferings it imposes that lead people to conceive of another state of affairs in which things would be better for everybody. It is on the day that we are able to conceive of another state of affairs, that a new light is cast on our trouble and our suffering and we decide that they are unbearable." - Jean-Paul Sartre
Subjectivist!
"The fact remains that one cannot rationally pursue the project of founding belief on a rational decision without being led to ask reason to collaborate in its own annihilation in belief, a 'disavowal of reason' that is supremely 'in accordance with reason'. To move from the decision to believe, which reason can induce, to a durable belief that can withstand the intermittences of consciousness and will, one has to invoke other powers than those of reason." -Bourdieu pg 48
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