Objectivity: Art and Scientific Sight

Pr. Peter Galison
Pellegrino University Professor
Harvard University

prononcera une conférence sur le thème

"Objectivity: Art and Scientific Sight"

Lundi 15 juin 2009 à 14:00.

Université Paris-Diderot
Halle aux Farines - salle 580F (salle des thèses)
10-16 rue Françoise Dolto
Métro : Bibliothèque François-Mitterand

ABSTRACT 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 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 images are demanding quite unexpected ways of being a scientist—selves perched uneasily between scientific, engineering, and entrepreneurial forms of life.

Contact: mankin@univ-paris-diderot.fr