The third point is that in doing this, we would have formulated our question “Who is the fairest of all?” in a restricted and biased way. And yet this would go unnoticed, because, as Gould writes, “The mystique of science proclaims that numbers are the ultimate test of objectivity.” This means that the way we have defined the concept will recede from our consciousness—that is, its fundamental subjectivity will become invisible, and the objective number itself will become reified. One would think that such a process would appear ridiculous on the breast of it, especially since, by believing it,
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