Objectivity (Mit Press)

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.

Excellent book

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.

Peter Gallison is a great writer. This book is an in-depth look at objectivity through the image. It covers the evolution of being objective in science.

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.

It arrived a little late but the communication was very smooth. Thanks.

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).

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."

This book should be a basic reference for every student of philosophy or sciences. Definitely, one of the best books I ever read.

Brilliant. Important. And beautifully written.

Libro recomendable en el debate sobre la epistemología de las ciencias sociales en relación con las ciencias naturales. Entrega y calidad de la edición más que correctas.

Yes.