Objectivity (Zone Books)

by Lorraine Daston (Author), Peter Galison (Author)

8 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-1890951795

ISBN-10: 189095179X

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The emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences, as revealed through images in scientific atlases―a story of how lofty epistemic ideals fuse with workaday practices.

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 its 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 what is worth looking at and how to look at it. 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 anyone interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity―and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically.

Editorial Reviews

Review

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 (2008-01-01)

Daston and Galison's book will take its place among the most distinguished histories of the making of scientific knowledge.

―American Scientist

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

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.

―Brian Dillon, Modern Painters

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

―Science

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

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

Review

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.

―Arnold Davidson, author of The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts

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.

―Hilary Putnam, author of Ethics without Ontology

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

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Product details

Series: Zone Books
Paperback: 504 pages
Publisher: Zone Books (November 5, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 189095179X
ISBN-13: 978-1890951795
Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.6 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 8 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #80,708 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #21 in Epistemology (Books)
- #66 in Epistemology Philosophy
- #477 in History & Philosophy of Science

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Book Bear

an impressive work

May 27, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This book is a very interesting, and entertaining, exposition on the history of what we now call scientific objectivity. It explores the definitions of the objective, subjective, and their pre-kantian and post-kantian meanings in the context of the evolution of the social construction of scientific objectivity. These few words cannot do this great book proper justice but there are very few books, that when I finish, I immediately begin to read again. This was one of them.

8 people found this helpful

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kristin

Five Stars

November 10, 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

By far my favorite book even though I've only read 20 pages

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KDonovan

This Book Should be Required Reading for all University Students!

September 13, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This book should be required reading for university students, the world over. Many students are so entrenched in ideology, the objectivity of their own carefully constructed reality is rarely questioned. This reading will certainly give you a some guidelines to arrive at an objective "truth."

5 people found this helpful

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Edward G. Rozycki

Objectivity Analyzed Historically with Pictorial and Textual Evidence

March 2, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

A fascinating, enlightening book. Made me realize how ideologically slanted by epistemological education was. A book to be taken seriously by philosophers and educators both science and the arts. (Occasionally, however, a conclusion is drawn from a weak premise -- this is mostly, but not always, a minor error.) I am rereading and closely analyzing the book to use it support my own future publications. It's a good read, a great historical study and an important source of insight.

4 people found this helpful

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Good Summary of Scientific Approach!

October 30, 2017

Format: Hardcover

In "Objectivity", Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison write, “Over the course of the nineteenth century other scientists, from astronomers probing the very large to bacteriologists peering at the very small, also began questioning their own traditions of idealizing representation in the preparation of their atlases and handbooks. What had been a supremely admirable aspiration for so long, the stripping away of the accidental to find the essential, became a scientific vice” (pg. 16). Defining their terms, they write, “Objectivity preserves the artifact or variation that would have been erased in the name of truth; it scruples to filter out the noise that undermines certainty” (pg. 17). They trace the movement from truth-to-nature to objectivity to trained judgement. Daston and Galison argue, “The history of objectivity is only a subset, albeit an extremely important one, of the much longer and larger history of epistemology – the philosophical examination of obstacles to knowledge” (pg. 31-32). Daston and Galison use atlases as their primary sources as these demonstrate the changing focus of image makers and their justification for new atlases reveal their objectives.
Daston and Galison write, “Truth-to-nature and objectivity are both estimable epistemic virtues, but they differ from each other in ways that are consequential for how science is done and what kind of person one must be to do it” (pg. 58). Of their sources, they write, “There is no atlas in any field that does not pique itself on its fidelity to nature. But in order to decide whether an atlas picture is a faithful rendering of nature, the atlas maker must first decide what nature is” (pg. 66). In this way, “eighteenth century atlases demanded more than mere accuracy of detail. What was portrayed was as important as how it was portrayed, and atlas makers were expected to exercise judgment in both cases, even as they tried to eliminate the wayward judgments of their artists with grids, measurements, or the camera obscura” (pg. 79). Later ethical concerns about scientists’ imposing their will led to mechanical objectivity, which Daston and Galison define as “the insistent drive to repress the willful intervention of the artist-author, and to put in its stead a set of procedures that would, as it were, move nature to the page through a strict protocol, if not automatically” (pg. 121). They write, “Objectivity was an ideal, true, but it was a regulative one: an ideal never perfectly attained but consequential all the way down to the finest moves of the scientist’s pencil and the lithographer’s limestone” (pg. 143). Of its impact, Daston and Galison write, “Over the course of the nineteenth century other scientists – from botanists to zoocrystallographers, from astronomers probing the large to physicists poring over the small – began questioning their own disciplinary traditions of idealizing representation in preparing durable compendiums of images” (pg. 160).
Moving forward in time, Daston and Galison write, “By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the epistemology and ethos of truth-to-nature had been supplemented (and, in some cases, superseded) by a new and powerful rival: mechanical objectivity. The new creed of objectivity permeated every aspect of science, from philosophical reflections on metaphysics and method to everyday techniques for making observations and images” (pg. 195). They continue, “Just as structural objectivity stretched the methods of mechanical objectivity beyond rules and representations, it carried the ethos of self-suppression to new extremes” (pg. 260). Daston and Galison write, “Slowly at first and then more frequently, twentieth-century scientists stressed the necessity of seeing scientifically through an interpretive eye; they were after an interpreted image that became, at the very least, a necessary addition to the perceived inadequacy of the mechanical one – but often they were more than that. The use of trained judgment in handling images became a guiding principle of atlas making in its own right” (pg. 311).
Entering the twentieth century, Daston and Galison write, “Early twentieth-century scientists reframed the scientific self. Increasingly, they made room in their exacting depictions for an unconscious, subjective element” (pg. 361). Finally, Daston and Galison conclude, “A history of knowledge that links epistemic virtues with distinctive selves of the knower traces a trajectory of a different shape from familiar histories of philosophy and science. Instead of a jagged break in the seventeenth century, in which knowledge is once and for all divorced from the person of the knower – the rupture that allegedly announces modernity – the curve is at once smoother and more erratic: smoother, because knowledge and knower never became completely decoupled; more erratic, because new selves and epistemic virtues, new ways of being and ways of knowing, appear at irregular intervals” (pg. 375).

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Mark Estes

insight

June 2, 2010

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Four versions of "seeing" scientifically are succinctly summarized (pp. 412-413):
18th century (classical) "four-eyed" sight -- truth-to-nature depiction;
19th century "blind" sight of mechanical objectivity;
20th century "physiognomic" sight of "trained" judgment;
where the first three give way to "haptic" sight by means of image-as-tool, inseparable from the scientific-self, made visible to the acolyte:
--subject to simulated manipulations
--machine-generated virtual artifact, expertly extracted from an artificial reality -- a model
--altered in aspect, hue, or scale to make it artistically pleasing
--no longer held to be a copy
--the True and Beautiful necessarily converging for the sake of presentation -- not representation
--deliberately enhanced to clarify, persuade, and/or please.

Daston is the new Mary Hesse.

17 people found this helpful

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W. P.

a new way to see objectivity

September 1, 2009

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

This is the best book I have read in a decade. It is breathtaking in its scope and its depth of detail. Seeing objectivity as it is depicted in scientific atlases provides a new image of objectivity and a new understanding of the history of its evolution.

28 people found this helpful

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Juan Ricardo Rey Marquez

One of the most important books to understand the construction of knowledge in science.

December 9, 2018

Format: Paperback

My primary interest is the study of the link between science and art. For that matter, the view gave by Lorraine Daston an Peter Galison is fundamental. The authors study "objectivity" as a culturally based concept in an enlightening way to understand the pre-photographic images in science. As to the use of photography and the "mechanic objectivity," the approach gives clues on the acceptance of this procedure in both art and science.

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