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.
