{"product_id":"objectivity-9781890951795","title":"Objectivity","description":"\u003cp\u003eObjectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In \u003ci\u003eObjectivity\u003c\/i\u003e, 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. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eFrom 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eGalison 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eAs 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. \u003ci\u003eObjectivity\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003ePeter Galison is Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is the author of \u003ci\u003eEinstein's Clocks\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003ePoincare's Maps: Empires of Time\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eHow Experiments End\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eImage and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics\u003c\/i\u003e, among other books, and coeditor (with Emily Thompson) of \u003ci\u003eThe Architecture of Science\u003c\/i\u003e (MIT Press, 1999).\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Zone Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50625825931538,"sku":"9781890951795","price":26.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_c6733afe-1aee-42bc-9dbc-97a20186678d.jpg?v=1732640854","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/objectivity-9781890951795","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}