Objectivity

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

Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in themid-nineteenth-century sciences--and show how the concept differs from itsalternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of loftyepistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images.From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that revealthe deepest commitments of the empirical sciences--from anatomy tocrystallography--are those featured in scientific atlases, the compendia that teachpractitioners what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Galison and Daston useatlas 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 oftruth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name ofobjectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decisionenforced 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 pursueobjectivity--or truth-to-nature or trained judgment--is simultaneously to cultivatea distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, thevery point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as aseparate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embeddedin the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices aboutknowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to anyoneinterested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity-- and in what it meansto peer into the world scientifically. Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max PlanckInstitute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. She is the coauthor ofWonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 and the editor of Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (both Zone Books). Peter Galison is PellegrinoUniversity Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University.He is the author of Einstein's Clocks, Poincar?'s Maps: Empires of Time, HowExperiments End, and Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, and otherbooks, and coeditor (with Emily Thompson) of The Architecture of Science (MIT Press, 1999).