Objectivity wins the day...right? Guys?

From the website hosting the 2005 Spelke-Pinker debate:

"Scientists debate continually, and reality is the check. They may have egos as large as those possessed by the iconic figures of the academic humanities, but they handle their hubris in a very different way. They can be moved by arguments, because they work in an empirical world of facts, a world based on reality. There are no fixed, unalterable positions. They are both the creators and the critics of their shared enterprise. Ideas come from them and they also criticize one another's ideas."

I'd like to believe this true (although perhaps without the implicit dig at the humanities), but I think this is a little too rose-colored glasses for me. Scientists are often quite prone to stubborn subjectivity as well. Even if they weren't, the empirical truth is often not all that clear, and saying that scientists will ultimately go for the truth assumes that there is a clear truth to go for.

The science I know (which admittedly sits on the edge of science, in interdisciplinary-land) has *very* few hard and fast, established facts (even allowing for the general grain of uncertainty which exists in all theories), so even the most empirical of us can often get away with POV-based theories and lots of subjectivity, with egos definitely playing a less-than-wholesome role. And frankly, I'm not convinced we're all that different from other scientific fields in that respect.