Objectivity - (Mit Press) by Lorraine Daston & Peter Galison (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>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.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p>Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In <i>Objectivity</i>, 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. <p/>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. <p/>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. <p/>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. <i>Objectivity</i> 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.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>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"<br><br>Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison pursue the idea that we can best explore the many meanings of objectivity through an examination of images. . . . <i>Objectivity</i> 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"<br><br>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"<br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br><p>Peter Galison is Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is the author of <i>Einstein's Clocks</i>, <i>Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time</i>, <i>How Experiments End</i>, and <i>Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics</i>, among other books, and coeditor (with Emily Thompson) of <i>The Architecture of Science</i> (MIT Press, 1999).</p>
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