CONCEPT
Trained Judgment (Daston–Galison)
Daston and Galison's third epistemic regime — emerging in the twentieth century and explicitly rehabilitating the expert's interpretive capacity that mechanical objectivity had tried to suppress, without returning to the metaphysics of truth-to-nature.
By the early twentieth century, working scientists in fields from neuroanatomy to crystallography to medical imaging had discovered that pure mechanical reproduction was inadequate to their needs. Photographs of cells revealed artifacts the trained pathologist could identify but the untrained camera could not filter. X-ray images required expert interpretation to distinguish pathology from normal anatomical variation. The response was not a return to truth-to-nature but the development of a new regime Daston and Galison named trained judgment: the explicit recognition that reliable scientific representation requires disciplined interpretive expertise, and that the expert's task is not to suppress judgment but to train it through long immersion in the specific materials and characteristic failure modes of a domain.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Trained judgment differs from truth-to-nature in a crucial respect: it does not claim that the expert sees the ideal form behind the accidents. It claims, more modestly, that the expert has developed a tacit repertoire of