WORK
Objectivity (Daston and Galison, 2007)
Daston and Peter Galison's 2007 landmark from Zone Books — the book that transformed how scholars understand scientific objectivity as a historically specific concept invented in the mid-nineteenth century rather than a timeless ideal.
Objectivity (Zone Books, 2007) is the monumental collaborative work in which Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison developed the three-regime framework — truth-to-nature, mechanical objectivity, and trained judgment — that has become foundational across the history and philosophy of science. The book traces the emergence of objectivity as a historically specific epistemic virtue, documenting how successive regimes of scientific representation each produced their own practices, confidence artifacts, institutional structures, and characteristic blindnesses. Its argument is that objectivity is not a timeless ideal that scientists have always pursued but a historically contingent concept, invented in the mid-nineteenth century under specific institutional conditions, as a response to specific epistemic anxieties.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's method is distinctive. It combines close analysis of thousands of scientific atlases and instructional images across three centuries with philosophical argument about the epistemic virtues these images embodied. The result is a work that operates simultaneously at