The Image of Objectivity

Entering a Risky Territory: Space in the Age of Digital Navigation

“…A glance at scientific papers is enough to show that the proof never resides in one visual display but in the invisible constant that is conserved through the many intermediary steps leading from one inscription to the next (Netz, 2003) [and the series would be even longer if followed through the laboratory practices (see Latour, 1999)]. Any given image is always preceded or followed by long series of graphs, tables, equations, legends, and paragraphs, and it is the series in its entirety that can be said to`have a referent' or to prove something incontrovertibly (Daston and Galison, 2007). In other words, writing or reading a scientific paper heavily resembles the laying out of signposts that we have just described as the only practical way through which maps are generated.…”

Thinking like a climate

“…Although the idea that human activities might conceivably have been responsible for the changes in CO2 levels that were being detected, the scientific method through which this information was discerned was working very much within the kind of modernist objectivist scientific paradigm that has been written about extensively by scholars of the history of science (Daston and Galison 2010;Shapin and Shaffer 1985). This was only to shift as the method for analysing climate moved gradually from the collation of information across different disciplinary subfields, to the incorporation of different kinds of data into complex climate models which were able not only to describe the climate system in terms of a dynamic interaction of physical properties, but could begin to provide both retro-analysis of an earlier science of climate and predictions of future trajectories under different scenarios.…”

Quantifying, Economising, and Marketising: Democratising the social sphere?

“…But the apparent simplicity of numbers is misleading. For it is not just numbers that matter, it is numbers that are accorded objectivity, something that Daston and Galison (2007) date as having occurred in the middle of the nineteenth century. What matters is that moment when objectivity is attached to numbers, and when that objectivity becomes ubiquitous and irresistible.…”