Objectivity+(Jalbert)


 * Overview**

"Objectivity has not always defined science. Nor is objectivity the same as truth or certainty...Objectivity preserves the artifact or variation that would have been erased in the name of truth; it scruples to filter out the noise that undermines certainty. To be objective is to aspire to knowledge that bears no trace of the knower..." (Daston and Galison 2007, pg.17)

To study scientific claims to objectivity in the last two centuries is to also study the moral and epistemological underpinnings of how science is conceived and communicated as a practice. Galison traces the modern definition of objectivity to romantic literature, and more specifically to the distinctions made by Samuel Coleridge who claimed that objectivity is bound to all things materially and naturally present in latent form. Subjectivity on the other hand implicates "the SELF or INTELLIGENCE" implying that the presence of the observer modifies given states of nature. Objectivity and subjectivity are thus mutually dependent as terms of understanding, but the distinction also implies that knowledge can exist independent of the scientist. (Galison 2007)

This second point will be the focus of this entry: knowledge is perceived as present in nature, and potentially attainable, but what counts as good scientific practice in this regard has continually shifted since the romantics. More specifically, these practices are enacted through representational strategies that mirror the epistemological preferences of their era, and produce very different artifacts of science from their respective subjects of study.

Working within the parameters of Galison’s categorizations (see chart below), three descriptive phases might be identified in scientific inquiry: pre-1820 genial depiction resulting in subjective representations, 1820-1920 mechanical objectivity aided by emerging imaging technologies and industrial practices, and post-1920 judgmental objectivity forwarded by new cultures of expertise as well as by new sciences of complex systems. This third phase is later articulated by Daston and Galison as “Trained Judgement” (Daston and Galison 2007, pg.17).




 * Key Concepts**

__Genial depiction__ Truth (singular) and Nature (multiple) are intricately bound in pre-19th century science. New taxonomies of the 16th century for example required vast efforts t collect and record specimens for emerging disciplines in science, “in the form of atlases, understood here as any compendium of images intended to be definitive for a community of practitioners. (Daston and Galison, 2007, pg.63) Modes of depiction established in these early compendiums relied heavily on the interpretive skills of the artisan: the trained illustrator applying a refined scientific craft. This required observing many specimens in order to depict the ideal equivalent for their genealogy. Because it was understood that the individual observer is an intervention in the presence of truth in nature, nature was understood as channeled through the skills of the artisan’s selection of key characteristics and proper forms.

__Mechanical Objectivity__ Among many possible causes, at least two can be credited the shift away from subjective scientific observations. First is the emergence of industrial labor and manufacturing practices in wider society, which shaped perceptions of what constituted the components of efficient systems, and thus knowledge production as well. Second, the introduction of new technologies of representation capable of capturing images through mechanical means rather than through the interpretive hand of the artisan such as directs plate etching, lithography, and photography. Here, natural phenomena could only be depicted in its pure form by removing the biased observer from any possible state of intervention: facts must speak for themselves. Mechanical representation thus became “moralized” as truth despite their still-misleading content or poor imaging quality.

__Judgmental Objectivity or Trained Judgment__ The unbinding of Mechanical-Natural truth is evident in post-1920s science for a variety of reasons: scientific fields generating trained experts in specific phenomena, increasingly complex instrument (especially with the computational turn) producing abstract data requiring interpolation in order to be understood in the context of other scientific systems, as well as postmodern realizations that scientific truth may not be singular in the first place. In the context of reading cloud particle chambers, for example, the emergence of a new expert judgment became, “a matter of training the eye, whether to pick malignant lesions from normal variations or to extract a kaon from a background of pions. Key concepts included acquired skill, interpretation, recognition.”

Feminist critiques of science have focused much or their attention on trained judge as well as how it is enacted and communicated in patriarchal institutions of science that still claim the importance of objectivity. Thus, it should be noted that while the above described a general trajectory of scientific observation and representation, it is by no means a series of replacing ontologies.


 * Examples**


 * __Decomposed stomach, 1864__

Medical professor Johann Ludwig Casper's richly colored lithographic plates illustrate specific postmortem examinations, some of them experiments on cadavers.

Johann Ludwig Casper, M.D., Atlas zum Handbuch der gerichtlichen Medicin [Atlas for the Manual of Legal Medicine], Berlin; Artist: Hugo Troschel; Lithographer: Winckelmann & Sons National Library of Medicine.

(From: []) || ||
 * __Tables of the Skeleton and Muscles of the Human Body. London__

Printed by H. Woodfall, for John and Paul Knapton, 1749. (total of 8 plates)

“I made choice of one that might discover signs of both strength and agility; the whole of it elegant, and at the same time not too delicate...In short, all of the parts of it beautiful and pleasing to the eye. For as I wanted to shew an example of nature, I chused to take it from the best pattern of nature.”

(More here: []) || || An Invention, Printed in Vienna, 1853.
 * __The Discovery of the Natural Printing Process__

The first publication of instructions for the process for which Alois Auer is attributed with the invention of the “nature printing” direct plate process.

This was written in four languages by the author. He shows the use of plants, a fossil fish, and lace impressed by roller onto a lead plate, this is hand colored and transferred to the final print.

(More here: []) || || The New Landscape in Art and Science, 1956, Gyorgy Kepes
 * __Cloud Chamber Photographs__

(Image thanks: []) || ||
 * Additional References**

Daston, L. and Galison, P. (2007) //Objectivity//. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books.

Galison, P. (1999). //Objectivity is Romantic//. Panel on the Humanities and The Sciences. Presented May 1, 1999. ACLS Annual Meeting,Philadelphia, PA.