Seeing is Believing: Emerging cultures of objectivity in scientific practice

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 10. The Cultural Authority of Science & Medicine

Abstract

This paper examines the emergence of a new culture of objectivity. Building on and extending Daston and Galison’s framework of epistemic virtues, we show how contemporary archaeological practice is developing a form of objectivity that incorporates manipulability, navigability, and relationality without abandoning scientific representation. Drawing on multi-year fieldwork with archaeologists developing and using 3D digital methods, we analyze the ways that scientists use new imaging technologies to learn about the past and to show others what they have learned. We follow archaeologists as they bring digital tools into the field and later reproduce that field on their screens, and argue that methodological responses to cultural shifts in the discipline have allowed archaeologists to enroll technological innovations in attempts to address persistent anxieties about subjectivity. Contrary to suggestions that manipulability might signal a move away from representation, we find that new technologies enable researchers to foreground both manipulability and representational fidelity simultaneously. By tracing this emergent culture of objectivity, we show how enduring epistemological problems generate novel solutions and illuminate the role of digital reconstructions in both scientific and public contexts. We offer a grounded account of how objectivity is actually practiced in a scientific field navigating deep metatheoretical conflict and strong temporal orientations to both a distant past and an uncertain future, and argue that understanding how new objectivities emerge requires attending to culture and to meaningmaking – to the landscapes of meaning within which scientists work, the interpretive shifts that make possible new solutions to old anxieties, and the resonances that allows particular technological affordances to become epistemically significant.

Authors

• Alison Gerber, Lund University

• Tobias Olofsson, Lund University