User:Lucian Wester Annotation Objectivity prologue/chapter 1

Objectivity

Prologue and chapter one.

The prologue describes how a physicist named Arthur Worthington studies the impact of a liquid drop on a flat service. In the beginning he makes drawings of his own perception but later he uses photography to catch the different stages of the impact. In compare, the drawings made by observation where much more stylized and in perfect symmetry than to the photographs that showed a more chaotic splash. After comparing the drawings to the photographs the scientist realised how much his own subject, his own prejudice was involved in making these drawings.

In the first chapter this phenomena of objective view is more thoroughly described and given a historic background. The books study objects are images from atlases. The writer argues that objectivity emerges about 1860 and that it replaces the so called truth-to-nature view. The difference between the two is that truth-to-nature for example depicts a flower in an atlas as one who stands for the whole while objectivity shows the variety of the whole. In other words the first is stylized the other isn’t. This change appears because of what is illustrated in the prologue: ‘their fear was that the subjective self was prone to prettify, idealize, and, in the worst case, regularize observations to fit theoretical expectations: to see what it hopes to see.’ (objectivity, p.34) They also describe how objectivity cant be understood without subjectivity. Objectivity is mostly described as something outside of your self, something that is bigger than your self. At the and of the chapter the writer shows how scientific objectivity isn’t a concept that lays like a great structure over sciences as a whole but more exist in ‘performing objective acts’ (objectivity p.52). By constantly performing and repeating these objective act you build eventually a structure that you could call objective.