num_pages: 504
description: 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 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 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.
language: English
title: Objectivity
publisher: Zone Books