Dynamist Blog: The Nature of Objectivity

Dynamist Blog: The Nature of Objectivity: "The always-interesting historian of science Peter Galison, author of Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps and Image and Logic, has a new book called Objectivity, co-authored with Lorraine Daston. Examining scientific atlases from widely diverse fields, they trace the overlapping histories of three different scientific ideals: 'truth-to-nature' (representing the underlying type of, say, a particular species of plant), 'mechanical objectivity,' and 'trained judgment' (finding patterns and 'family resemblances' in many samples). Objectivity, they argue, only emerged as an ideal in the 19th century:"