Epistemological Liberalism

In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison provide a richly documented history of scientific objectivity in the modern era, isolating three clearly demarcated, and loosely sequential, epistemological practices: "truth-to-nature," "mechanical objectivity," and "trained judgment." Using scientific atlases as their main source of evidence for these discrete forms of objectivity, and limiting their analysis to Europe and North America, Daston and Galison trace a sequence beginning with the idealizing and perfecting tendencies of truth-to-nature, where naturalists and artists collaborated in collections of drawings that sought to show the typical or the ideal, rather than any given concrete specimen. This period lasted from the eighteenth through the early nineteenth century, after which it gave way to the rise and eventual dominance of mechanical objectivity, which relied on instruments (most emblematically, photographic means) to capture an exact record of particular samples, rather than painstakingly producing idealized or characteristic exempla. And lastly, trained judgment emerged as a kind of corrective to the anodyne limitations of a blank recording process seen as devoid of the skilled assessments and intuitive understandings deemed vital to the meaningful interpretation and presentation of raw data. Mechanical objectivity dominated the mid- to late nineteenth century, and trained judgment emerged at the turn of the century and exerted its influence into the twentieth century. There are a few side roads to explore—ambitious forms of epistemological stringency (what Daston and Galison gather under the rubric of "structural objectivity," and which include abstract reason, mathematics, and certain forms of universal linguistics) and, as the manifestation of a different spirit altogether, recent developments in nanotechnology and manipulable images that flexibly combine science and art. But the main story is elegantly tripartite and follows the sequence I have summarized, each mode carrying its own ethos or characterological tendency: "sage to worker to trained expert" (357).

The book is a highly impressive achievement on both intellectual and aesthetic grounds—beautifully written, lucidly argued, and supported by what seems to this reader as just the right proportion of illustrations to text, with truly arresting examples to highlight the arc of the narrative (check out the snowflakes, especially as they devolve into imperfection under the unforgiving eye of mechanical objectivity). Each chapter begins with an exemplifying story, often focusing on scientific rivals. There is a strong narrative dimension to the work, and character is placed at the foreground not only through the stories that stage the aspirations and contests of individual scientists but also conceptually, since one of the central claims of the book is that forms of scientific objectivity are always lived practices, that epistemology is always inter-articulated with ethos. In this way, Daston and Galison's study is fully in keeping with the argument (across a number of disciplines and intellectual movements) that what we call objectivity is always situated and hence variable. From feminist critiques of science to poststructuralist critiques of abstract reason to pragmatist critiques of the theory/practice distinction, a number of influential intellectual movements have challenged the ideas of neutrality, impartiality, or universality that have underpinned objectivity in its philosophical, moral, and scientific guises. By placing what looks to be the most impersonal and in some sense distortion free mode of scientific practice—mechanical objectivity—in the center of a narrative sequence that includes modes more legibly subjective and idealizing, Daston and Galison underscore that even the suppression or expulsion of subjective forces is itself an extreme effort of will and involves an assertion of subjectivity and, ultimately, an ethos. "Objectivity is to epistemology what extreme asceticism is to morality" (374)—this may read as an analogy but it also operates as an equivalence: mechanical objectivity for Daston and Galison is a kind of asceticism, and as such, it involves a focused and intense effort of will that is for them fully a part of the story of what objectivity is because there is no way to disentangle the ethos or method from the theory, principle, or truth claim that it instantiates. One might call the approach here a kind of characterological pragmatism, where the indistinctness between theory and practice is redefined as one between ethos and epistemology...