Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective

Social Studies of Science

Volumn 22, Issue 4, 1992, Pages 597-618

  Daston, Lorraine ^a  

^a Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte ^*  (Germany)

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EID: 84972654381     PISSN: 03063127     EISSN: 14603659     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030631292022004002     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. See, for example, Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987), and Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1985).
2. Here I am thinking especially of Charles C. Gillespie's classic The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), which is a history of when and how various sciences attained objectivity, rather than of objectivity itself.
3. See Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973);
4. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979);
5. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986);
6. R.W. Newell, Objectivity, Empiricism and Truth (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986);
7. Helen E. Longino, Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
8. Nagel, View, note 3, 4-5.
9. George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago, IL & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 183.
10. On ontological objectivity in its modern form, see Newell, Objectivity, note 3,16-38; on mechanical objectivity, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, The Image of Objectivity’, forthcoming in Representations.
11. Concerning the social sciences, see Max Weber, ‘Die “Objectivitt” sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis’ (1904), in Johannes Winckelman (ed.), Gesammelte Aufstze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tbingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 3rd edn, 1968), 146-214, and Robert Proctor, Value-Free Science? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); concerning ethics, see Bernard Williams, The Scientific and the Ethical’, in S.C. Brown (ed.), Objectivity and Cultural Divergence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 209-28. For a discussion of the resurgence of ‘objective’ ethics, see Samuel Scheffler, ‘Objectivity’, London Review of Books, Vol. 12, No. 7 (13 September 1990), 9-10.
12. For examples of the scholastic meanings, see the article Objective’ in the Oxford English Dictionary; on Augustine's influence, see John F. Bowler, ‘Intuitive and Abstract Cognition’, in Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny and Jan Pinborg (eds), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 460-78.
13. See, especially, Meditation III, in Ren’ Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641); also Calvin Normore, ‘Meaning and Objective Meaning: Descartes and His Sources’, in Amlie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Essays on Descartes’ Meditations (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 223-42, and Peter Dear's contribution to this Symposium, ‘From Truth to Disinterestedness in the Seventeenth Century’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 22 (1992), 619-31.
14. See, for example, the article ‘Objectif, Dictionnaire de Trvoux (Paris, 1762).
15. On the professional ethos of disinterestedness among lawyers, see Lucien Karpik, ‘Le D'sintressement’, Annales: Economies, Socit's, Civilisations, Vol. 44 (mai-juin 1989), 733-51.
16. See Dear, note 9; also Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
17. George Berkeley, Siris (1744), Section 292, quoted in the OED article ‘Objective’, note 8.
18. C.A. Crusius, Weg zur Zuverl'ssigkeit und Gewiheit der menschlichen Erkenntnis (1747), in G. Tonelli (ed.), Die philosophischen Hauptwerke (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1965), Vol. 3, 95.
19. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781, 1787), A201-02/B246-47 et passim: Kant uses the word Gegenstand to denote the reality of external objects (as opposed to the objectivity of conceptions of objects). See Henry E. Allison's Kant's Transcendental Idealism (New Haven, CN & London: Yale University Press, 1983), 134-55, for a lucid discussion of the distinction.
20. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), ed. J. Shawcross, 2 Vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), Vol. 1, 174.
21. I realize that there exists a distinguished philosophical literature which attributes a form of aperspectival objectivity to Descartes: see, for example, Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978), 69-70; or Karsten Harries, ‘Descartes, Perspective, and the Angelic Eye’, Yale French Studies, No. 49 (1973), 28-42.1 cannot here address these claims in the detail they deserve. However, I believe that they are the result of mistakenly collapsing the entire history of objectivity into a single moment, thus projecting current meanings and metaphors on to past usage. Here suffice it to remark that Descartes epistemological worries concern the entire human species, not individuals, and that (in contrast to, say, Montaigne's discussions of morals and manners) the perspectival metaphor is rarely invoked.
22. David Hume, Of Standards of Taste’, in Philosophical Works, 4 Vols (Edinburgh, 1826), Vol. 3, 271.
23. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), eds D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 135.
24. Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, etc. (1711), ed. John M. Robertson, 2 Vols (London, 1900), Vol. 1, 296.
25. Smith, Moral Sentiments, note 20, 125.
26. On the motif of disinterestedness in the academic ‘loges, see Charles B. Paul, Science and Immortality: The Eloges of the Paris Academy of Sciences (1699-1791) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), and Dorinda Outram, ‘The Language of Natural Power: The “Eloges” of George Cuvier and the Public Language of Nineteenth-Century Science’, History of Science, Vol. 16 (1978), 153-78. Concerning the importance of impartiality among enlightenment intellectuals, see Lorraine Daston, ‘The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment’, Science in Context, Vol. 4 (1991), 367-86.
27. Smith, Moral Sentiments, note 20, 124.
28. Kant, Kritik, note 15, A820-22/B848-50.
29. See Daston & Galison, note 6. The difference between perspectival and mechanical objectivity is brought into sharp focus by their contrasting responses to photography. The photograph is the emblem of mechanical objectivity, because it appears to be a direct transcription of nature, free of meddlesome human interference. But perspectival objectivity rejects the photograph, because it preserves ‘[t]he unfamiliar angle of vision, the seemingly random cropping, which… can be understood as ways of stressing the necessary presence of the distinctive perceiving subject, the peculiarly individual point of view’: Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art (New York: Viking, 1984), 110.
30. Charles Sanders Peirce, ? Critical Review of Berkeley's Idealism’ (1871), in Philip Wiener (ed.), Values in a Universe of Chance: Selected Writings of CS. Peirce (1839-1914) (New York: Dover, 1958), 81-83.
31. G. Frege, ‘Thoughts’, in Peter Geach (ed.), Logical Investigations (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1977), 8-9; quoted in Thomas G. Ricketts, Objectivity and Objecthood: Frege's Metaphysics of Judgment’, in L. Haaparanta and J. Hintikka (eds), Frege Synthesized (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986), 65-95.
32. See, for example, the rather typical views of Marin Mersenne on the necessity of scientific cooperation: Questions inouyes ou Recrations des Savans (Paris, 1634), Qu. 30.
33. On the rise and fall of Enlightenment scientific cosmopolitanism, see Daston, ‘Ideal and Reality’, note 23, and Lorraine Daston, ‘Scientific Neutrality and Nationalism under Napoleon’, in T. Frngsmyr (ed.), Solomon's House Revisited (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 1990), 95-119.
34. For example, the correspondence between the electricians Charles Dufay and Stephen Gray, or that between the naturalists A. Jussieu and Joseph Banks. On the absence of a scientific community in the eighteenth century, see Wolf Lepenies, Between Science and Literature: The Rise of Sociology, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 2.
35. Zeno J. Swijtink, ‘The Objectification of Observation’, in Lorenz Krger et al. (eds), The Probabilistic Revolution, 2 Vols (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), Vol. 1, 261-85.
36. On the standardization of statistical categories, see Alain Desrosieres and Laurent Thevenot, Les Catgories socioprofessionelles (Paris: La Dcouverte, 1988); on electrical units, see Simon Schaffer, ? Manufactory of Ohms: The Integrity of Victorian Values’, paper presented to the UCLA History of Science Workshop (Fall 1989).
37. Simon Schaffer, ‘Astronomers Mark Time’, Science in Context, Vol. 2 (1988), 115-46.
38. Lorraine Daston, ‘The Cold Light of Facts and the Facts of Cold Light: Luminescence and the Transformation of Scientific Fact, 1600-1750’, paper presented to the UCLA History of Science Workshop (Winter 1990).
39. See Theodore M. Porter's contribution to this Symposium, ‘Quantification and the Accounting Ideal in Science’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 22 (1992), 633-52; also Porter, ‘Objectivity as Standardization: The Rhetoric of Impersonality in Measurement, Statistics, and Cost-Benefit Analysis’, Annals of Scholarship, in press.
40. Ernest Renan, L'Avenir de la Science (Paris, 1890), 91.
41. Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self Representation in Britain 1832-1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), Chapter 6.
42. On the tension between the ideals of solitude and conviviality, see Steven Shapin, ‘The Mind in Its Own Place: Science and Solitude in Seventeenth-Century England’, Science in Context, Vol. 4 (1991), 191-218.
43. A. van Leeuwenhoek [Letter of 12 October 1713], Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (reprinted New York: Johnson Reprint, 1963), Vol. 29 (1714-16), 55-56.
44. For other examples of attempts by scientists to police their artists, see Daston & Galison, ‘Image’, note 6.
45. Edmund Halley, ‘Observations of the Late Total Eclipse of the Sun Philosophical Transactions, Vol. 29 (1714-16), 245-62.
46. On the relationship between social status and trust in early modern English natural philosophy, see Steven Shapin, ’ “A Scholar and a Gentleman” : The Problematic Identity of the Scientific Practitioner in Early Modern England’, History of Science, Vol. 29 (1991), 279-327.
47. [Bernard de Fontenelle], ‘Sur le phosphore du baromtre’, Histoire de l'Acadmie Royale des Sciences: Anne 1701 (Paris, 1743), 1-8. See Steven Shapin, ? Henry’, Isis, Vol. 78 (1987), 417-24, concerning the de facto impossibility of doubting a colleague's word.
48. Ron Westrum, ‘Science and Social Intelligence about Anomalies: The Case of Meteorites’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 8 (1978), 461-93.
49. John S. Billing, Our Medical Literature’, The Lancet (1881), Vol. 2, 265-70, at 270.
50. See Pnina Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram (eds), Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1789-1979 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), on this widespread and important form of scientific labour.
51. Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (London, 4th edn, 1835), 195. The mechanization of scientific work and the reproduction of scientific images also served the ideal of mechanical objectivity, by purportedly eliminating interpretation: see Daston & Galison, ‘Image’, note 6.
52. Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865), trans. H.C. Greene (New York: Dover, 1957), 38.
53. Charles Babbage, Reflections on the Decline of Science in England and on Some of its Causes (1830), in Martin Campbell-Kelly (ed.), The Works of Charles Babbage (London: William Pickering, 1989), Vol. 7, 86.
54. See Swijtink, ‘Objectification’, note 32. The best philosophical account of the ‘tacit’ quality of scientific skill is still Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958). On the social invisibility of manual skill and technicians in science, see Steven Shapin, ‘The Invisible Technician’, American Scientist, Vol. 77 (1989), 554-63.
55. Georges Cuvier, Recuil des ‘loges historiques lus dans les sances publiques de l'Institut de France (Paris, 1861), Vol. 3, 4.
56. E.J. Marey, Physiologie mdicale de la circulation du sang (1863), quoted in Franois Dagognet, Etienne-Jules Marey: La Passion de la trace (Paris: Hazen, 1987), 87.
57. See Swijtink, Objectification’, note 32, concerning the statistical treatment of outliers, and Desrosieres & Thevenot, Catgories, note 33, on the subtleties of statistical coding.
58. Renan, Avenir, note 37, 228.
59. Bernard, Introduction, note 49, 39.