Objectivity

by Lorraine Daston, Peter L. Galison

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781890951795
Publisher:	Zone Books
Publication date:	07/12/2010
Series:	Zone Books
Pages:	504
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She is the coauthor (with Katharine Park) of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 and (with Peter Galison) Objectivity and the editor of Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, all three published by Zone Books.

Peter Galison is Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is the author of Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time, How Experiments End, and Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, among other books, and coeditor (with Emily Thompson) of The Architecture of Science (MIT Press, 1999).

What People are Saying About This

Hilary Putnam

Objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison is not just a fine book, it is that rare thing, a great book. It is almost shockingly original, genuinely profound, and amazingly learned without ever being pedantic. It should force everyone interested in science and its history or in objectivity and its history to think more deeply about what they think they already know. It gives me great satisfaction to learn that thinking and writing of this brilliance and depth are still going on, even in this age of consumerism and mass markets.

Bruno Latour

This richly illustrated book deeply renews the meaning of accurate reproduction by showing how many ways there have been to be 'true to nature.' Art science and reproduction techniques are merged to show that 'things in themselves' can be presented with their vast and beautiful company. This splendid book will be for many years the ultimate compendium on the joint history of objectivity and visualization.

Endorsement

This richly illustrated book deeply renews the meaning of accurate reproduction by showing how many ways there have been to be 'true to nature.' Art science and reproduction techniques are merged to show that 'things in themselves' can be presented with their vast and beautiful company. This splendid book will be for many years the ultimate compendium on the joint history of objectivity and visualization.

—Bruno Latour, author of Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

From the Publisher

"This is a deeply researched book that will make you think. It is beautiful, and it is important....I recommend it to anyone — optimist or pessimist, female or male — with a healthy dash of curiosity and a cranium." — Oren Harman, Bar Ilan University, Israel,The European Legacy

Zone Books

Arnold Davidson

Historically brilliant, philosophically profound, and beautifully written, Objectivity will be the focus of discussion for decades to come. At one and the same time a history of scientific objectivity and a history of the scientific self, rarely have rigor and imagination been combined so seamlessly and to such deep effect. No one who opens this book can fail to be engaged and provoked by its energy, ideas, and arguments. One emerges from reading it as if from a series of intellectual earthquakes—sound but no longer safe.

Editorial Reviews

"A truly outstanding book that will hopefully shape our future vision of what is meant by objectivity, from an epistemic as well as from an ethical (and aesthetical) point of view."

Image and Narrative

"Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison pursue the idea that we can best explore the many meanings of objectivity through an examination of images. . . . Objectivity offers a cornucopia of images ranging from plants and birds to embryos and snowflakes, and it is enriched by the authors’ expert sleuthing and wide intellectual reach."

Nature

"We need history of science in the style of Daston and Galison: a history of science that commands the details but at the same time discerns the shape of larger developments — and that makes us realize just how many meanings have been packed into the little word ‘objectivity,’ which rolls so trippingly off the tongue."

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

We need history of science in the style of Daston and Galison: a history of science that commands the details but at the same time discerns the shape of larger developmentsand that makes us realize just how many meanings have been packed into the little word 'objectivity,' which rolls so trippingly off the tongue.

—Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Reviews

We need history of science in the style of Daston and Galison: a history of science that commands the details but at the same time discerns the shape of larger developmentsand that makes us realize just how many meanings have been packed into the little word 'objectivity,' which rolls so trippingly off the tongue.

—Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

From the Publisher

This is a surprising, engrossing book that treats humanity's struggle to unsnarl the world and itself as a field of endless turmoil and fascination.

Rain Taxi

The author's argument here is complicated but fascinating (and, because the argument is about images, the book is beautiful).

Science

As Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison point out in their capacious and engaging study of the concept of scientific objectivity from the 17th century to the present day, the universal form is key to understanding how modern science moved from the study of curiosities, through the representations of perfect, notional specimens, to a concept of objectivity as responsibility for science.

Modern Painters - Brian Dillon

This is a deeply researched book that will make you think. It is beautiful, and it is important....I recommend it to anyone—optimist or pessimist, female or male—with a healthy dash of curiosity and a cranium.

The European Legacy - Oren Harman

"Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison pursue the idea that we can best explore the many meanings of objectivity through an examination of images. . . . Objectivity offers a cornucopia of images ranging from plants and birds to embryos and snowflakes, and it is enriched by the authors’ expert sleuthing and wide intellectual reach."

Nature Lib