Response: Objectivity and Its Critics

We are grateful to Amanda Anderson, Theodore Porter, and Jennifer Tucker for their thoughtful and thought-provoking reflections on our book and to the editors of Victorian Studies for the opportunity to respond to them. Given the constraints of space, we have chosen to concentrate on those points that allow us to widen the discussion about the kind of history we have attempted in the book and to clarify how that history stands in relation to more familiar alternatives.

Why Scientific Atlases?

No one science has monopolized scientific objectivity: whatever objectivity is and wherever and whenever it came from, its career crosscuts many scientific disciplines. Moreover, if we are right about the central claim of the book, namely, that objectivity has a history, then there must have been a time before objectivity. Finally, objectivity and the other epistemic virtues tracked in our book are not just the stuff of prefaces, popularization, and philosophy but also of specific and significant scientific practices. We therefore needed a source of sufficient longevity, breadth, and importance to practice in order to capture the phenomena in which were interested—otherwise we would perpetually find ourselves comparing apples and oranges. As we stress (17–19), atlases are by no means the sole possible source for a history of scientific objectivity and its alternatives, but they do have several signal advantages: (1) a long baseline as a key scientific genre, dating back to at least the eighteenth century (or earlier, depending on discipline); (2) a broad span across almost all the empirical sciences (and even some branches of mathematics); and (3) a central place in the teaching and sustaining of key scientific practices. Because atlases are so expensive along every dimension (time, money, skill) to make and remake, they are also sensitive barometers of deep shifts in epistemic values. No discipline supplants its vade mecum to vision without urgent cause: a new atlas demands that the community of practitioners learn to see anew.

Given the prominence of atlases in our book, both Tucker and Porter ask why we did not pay more attention to the details of atlases as a genre. Our project is, however, not a history of scientific atlases per se. We are, instead, using atlases to track changes in normative right depiction. For our purposes, scientific atlases are an index, not the primary subject matter. There is ample evidence for the wide dissemination of these costly volumes, which generally went through many editions, and for their status as constantly consulted reference works, often showing vivid physical evidence of use: sufficient proof of their impact in teaching scientists how to see.

Tucker raises the key issue of how atlases are read:

Atlases, indeed, serve as descriptive guides to idealized scientific identities or personae; a bit like conduct books for scientists, they offer moral lessons about how proper knowledge is to be secured. However, a crucial historical question about both atlases and conduct books concerns their reception and use, not their production alone. We do not really accept that nineteenth-century women lived according to prescriptive literature.

(655)

The atlases are normative but not, as Tucker suggests, in the sense of conduct books: scientific atlases exemplify rather than merely prescribe a way of seeing. To use an atlas to diagnose a disease, identify a plant, or classify an elementary particle track is willy-nilly to absorb its visual conventions. An apt analogy would be reading a map constructed according to a certain projection, scale, and legend: the more one uses this particular kind of map, the more second-nature its conventions become—as evidenced by the initial disorientation experienced in using a map constructed according to a different projection and scale. Unlike conduct books, maps don't prescribe rules on how to see; they embody a set of practices. To read a map is to master a way of seeing by doing; atlases function in the same way. To use an atlas is to see, over and over again, and thereby to learn how to see in a specific way: it is more like practicing a musical instrument than reading a...