From Animals to Animats 5

Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, LorraineDaston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-centurysciences--and show how the concept differs from its alternatives, truth-to-nature and trainedjudgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making ofscientific images. From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images thatreveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences--from anatomy to crystallography--are thosefeatured in scientific atlases, the compendia that teach practitioners what is worth looking at andhow to look at it. Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientificobjectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials inthe name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name ofobjectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by anethos as well as by an epistemology. As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as wellas the objects of science. To pursue objectivity--or truth-to-nature or trained judgment--issimultaneously 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 aseparate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlasimage, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collectivesight. Objectivity is a book addressed to anyone interested in the elusive and crucial notion ofobjectivity-- and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically. Lorraine Daston isDirector at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. She is thecoauthor of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 and the editor of Things That Talk: ObjectLessons from Art and Science (both Zone Books). Peter Galison is Pellegrino University Professor ofthe History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is the author of Einstein's Clocks,Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time, How Experiments End, and Image and Logic: A Material Culture ofMicrophysics, and other books, and coeditor (with Emily Thompson) of The Architecture of Science(MIT Press, 1999).

Peter Galison is Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is the author of Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time, How Experiments End, and Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, among other books, and coeditor (with Emily Thompson) of The Architecture of Science (MIT Press, 1999).