In our culture, the notions of “science,” “rationality,” “objectivity,” and “truth” are bound up with one another. Science is thought of as offering “hard,” “objective” truth: truth as correspondence to reality, the only sort of truth worthy of the name. Humanists – for example, philosophers, theologians, historians, and literary critics – have to worry about whether they are being “scientific,“ whether they are entitled to think of their conclusions, no matter how carefully argued, as worthy of the term “true.” We tend to identify seeking “objective truth” with “using reason,” and so we think of the natural sciences as paradigms of rationality. We also think of rationality as a matter of following procedures laid down in advance, of being “methodical.” So we tend to use “methodical,” “rational,” “scientific,” and “objective” as synonyms.

Worries about “cognitive status” and “objectivity” are characteristic of a secularized culture in which the scientist replaces the priest. The scientist is now seen as the person who keeps humanity in touch with something beyond itself. As the universe was depersonalized, beauty (and, in time, even moral goodness) came to be thought of as “subjective.” So truth is now thought of as the only point at which human beings are responsible to something nonhuman. A commitment to “rationality” and to “method” is thought to be a recognition of this responsibility. The scientist becomes a moral exemplar, one who selflessly expresses himself again and again to the hardness of fact.