Read more
Although "objectivity" is a term used widely in many areas of public discourse, from discussions concerning the media and politics to debates over political correctness and cultural literacy, the question "What is objectivity?" is often ignored, as if the answer were obvious. In this volume, Allan Megill has gathered essays from fourteen leading scholars in a variety of fields--history, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, history of science, sociology of science, feminist studies, literary studies, and accounting--to gain critical understanding of the idea of objectivity as it functions in today's world.
In diverse essays the authors provide fascinating studies of objectivity in such areas as anthropological research, corporate and governmental bureaucracies, legal discourse, photography, and the study and practice of the natural sciences. Taken together, Megill argues, this volume calls for developing a notion of "objectivities." The absolute sense of objectivity--that is, objectivity as a "God's eye view"--must be supplemented, and in part supplanted, by disciplinary, procedural, and dialectical senses of objectivity. This book will be of great interest to a broad range of scholars as it presents current thinking on a topic of fundamental concern across the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Contributors. Barry Barnes, Dagmar Barnouw, Lorraine Code, Lorraine Daston, Johannes Fabian, Kenneth J. Gergen, Mary E. Hawkesworth, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Evelyn Fox Keller, George Levine, Allan Megill, Peter Miller, Andy Pickering, Theodore M. Porter
List of contents
Introduction: Four Senses of Objectivity / Allan Megill 1
How Not To Do the Sociology of Knowledge / Barry Barnes 21
Baconian Facts, Academic Civility, and the Prehistory of Objectivity / Lorraine Daston 37
Why Science Isn't Literature: The Importance of Differences / George Levine 65
Ethnographic Objectivity Revisited: From Rigor to Vigor / Johannes Fabian 81
Objectivity and the Mangle of Practice / Andy Pickering 109
The Shapes of Objectivity: Siegfried Kracauer on Historiography and Photography / Dagmar Barnouw 127
From Objectivity to Objectification: Feminist Objections / Mary E. Hawkesworth 151
Who Cares? The Poverty of Objectivism for a Moral Epistemology / Lorraine Code 179
Objectivity as Standardization: The Rhetoric of Impersonality in Measurement, Statisitics, and Cost-Benefit Analysis / Theodore M. Porter 197
Accounting and Objectivity: The Invention of Calculating Selves and Calculable Spaces / Peter Miller 239
The Mechanical Self and the Rhetoric of Objectivity / Kenneth J. Gergen 265
The Unquiet Judge: Activism without Objectivism in Law and Politics / Barbara Herrnstein Smith 289
The Paradox of Scientific Subjectivity / Evelyn Fox Keller 313
Contributors 333
Index 337
About the author
Allan Megill
