Objectivity

Lorraine Daston, Peter L. Galison, Peter Galison

• Publisher: Zone Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781890951795, 9781890951788
• eBook ISBN: 9781942130611
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences — and show how the concept differs from alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images.

From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences — from anatomy to crystallography — are those featured in scientific atlases: the compendia that teach practitioners of a discipline what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Atlas images define the working objects of the sciences of the eye: snowflakes, galaxies, skeletons, even elementary particles.

Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology.

As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity — or truth-to-nature or trained judgment — is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to any one interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity — and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Prologue: Objectivity Shock
• I. Epistemologies of the Eye
• II. Truth-to-Nature
• III. Mechanical Objectivity
• IV. The Scientific Self
• V. Structural Objectivity
• VI. Trained Judgment
• VII. Representation to Presentation
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index