Objectivity at rest, or at work?

What prompted Ian Hacking to argue, in his widely read 2015 article, that we should stop using the terms ‘objectivity’, or ‘objective’? He argues that the terms are both meaningless (vague, ambiguous, polysemantic, etc.) and redundant (they can always be replaced, occasion by occasion, for whatever the specific circumstances require us to deliver on that occasion). If what we are after is to decide whether a conclusion (or a person, a policy, a method) is good, we can do that without mentioning objectivity, and indeed we are better off if we do that. In this article I put forward an argument to show, instead, that the term has work to do, important work, and so should not be universally discarded. I will proceed by analysing what kind of concept we are dealing with. I will distinguish between a descriptive and a prescriptive use and show that the concept should be retained on prescriptive grounds. The objection that on prescriptive grounds the concept equally appears vague and therefore it proves useless is countered by an argument to the effect that it is indeed by virtue of its vagueness (in a sense that will be qualified) that the concept can deliver what is expected of it.