The Objective Self

Abstract

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 that structure the study: truth-to-nature, and 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 formationof objectivity and then of trained judgmentthey 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