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Objectivity: The Limits of Scientific Sight| old_uid | 7175 |
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| title | Objectivity: The Limits of Scientific Sight |
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| start_date | 2009/06/12 |
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| schedule | 11h-13h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | When scientific objectivity became a goal in the early 19th century it was by no means obviously something to be desired. Natural philosophers had to invert the old epistemic virtues that involved finding ideal forms that lay behind the variations of this or that individual. Where genius was, plain-sight observation came to dominate. I will here track how the images and image-making technologies of scientific atlases helped define the modern scientific category of mechanical objectivity--and the new quieted and transparent scientific self that accompanied it. The fate of objectivity kept turning: twentieth century scientists questioned image-based, mechanical objectivity; they demanded more interpretation and modification of images than mechanical objectivity ever allowed. With that shift toward a "trained eye" came a new view of the right scientific self, one that explicitly made use of intuition, expertise, and the unconscious. Now, in the early twenty-first century new kinds of scientific pictures (such as nanomanipulated images) are demanding quite unexpected ways of being-- scientist-selves perched uneasily between scientific, engineering, and entrepreneurial forms of sight. Representation begins to cede its place to presentation. |
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| responsibles | Origgi |
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