Objectivity

Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. 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 wokaday practices in the marketing of scientific images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences - from anatomy of 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, sketelons, elementary particules. 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 refuse to erase even most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name or trained judgment is a decision enforces 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. The point at whitch 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 are the traces of consequential choices about kwoledge, 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.