The Objective Self

Toward the back of Objectivity, after many striking images, there is a table that maps the historical trajectory of scientific objectivity (371). Along the horizontal axis we find the three "epistemic virtues" that structure the study: "truth-to-nature," "mechanical objectivity," and "trained judgment." The vertical axis lists persona, image, practice, and ontology. The authors, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, argue that each of the epistemic virtues prescribes a distinct kind of scientific practitioner as well as how these scientists work, what they believe the world to be made of, and how they represent it. Their argument that objectivity is historically variable and that different versions of it are linked to distinct forms of scientific identity make this an exciting book. Still more boldly, the authors place the epistemic virtues in historical sequence, with truth-to-nature arising in the late Enlightenment period and passing the torch around 1850 to mechanical objectivity, which itself gives way to trained judgment circa 1920. These transitions are not quite ruptures, for while Daston and Galison insist on the genuine novelty of each emerging formation—of objectivity and then of trained judgment—they allow the old ones to endure right up to the present. Yet the persistence of antique forms of objectivity is hard to square with the discontinuities on which so much of the book's argument is based, and a transformation of the character of the scientist across so many dimensions at once would be a revolution indeed. I have already tried to assess this hugely ambitious book within the narrow limits of a review in Nature. Here I reflect on this most promising and at the same time most problematic aspect, Daston and Galison's historical periodization of "the scientific self" (198).

The source materials for this study are dazzlingly various, but the emphasis is on scientific images and especially on a particular form of visual reference text, the scientific atlas. The authors base their large claims about the historical periodization of objectivity first of all on the evidence of a profound shift in these images. Daston and Galison do not put much stress on scientific atlases as a distinctive genre, and they largely pass by possible explanatory factors that would be specific to atlases and images. Some possibilities—I lack the knowledge to do more here than imagine a few—might include a growing demand for reference works for education and consultation, an expanding division of labor within scientific work, an increase of state funds for large-scale scientific surveys, and the availability of new photographic technologies. In the place of such mundane considerations, Daston and Galison argue for a series of seismic shifts, the coming to be and passing away of (a specific sense of) objectivity.

This objectivity, in turn, they link to the self or persona of science, whose dynamic of change provides the principal basis of explanation for the mutations of objectivity. On this crucial point, Daston and Galison write of large-scale mentalistic transformations—a trajectory of dialectical paradoxes. Philosophy in the decades around 1800, they argue, conceived the mind as passive and impressionable. Savants undertook to compensate for this passivity by inverting it, interpreting the truths of nature as deeper and more solid than what our wavering senses can detect. Mid-nineteenth-century researchers, by contrast, were captivated by a Kantian sense of the active mind. They looked to science to confine the dangers of an overpowering will, pursuing a radically depersonalized form of objectivity that excluded human intervention in the production of images and, by extension, of knowledge. Finally, the post-1920 scientist, seeking escape from the prison of mechanical objectivity and exploiting new institutional modes of scientific socialization, claimed the right to interpret images on the basis of expert judgment.

My skepticism regarding aspects of this story will be apparent, but I want first to emphasize what I take to be fundamentally valid and important: namely, the tight relationship between modes of objectivity and conceptions of the scientific self. This is a welcome alternative to...