SOCI 325 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Epistemic Virtue, Idiosyncrasy, Alphonse Bertillon
11 Apr 2020
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Removing the influence of personal bias, opinions, or feelings. In daston & galison"s (2010) account, 18th century scientists had a different ideal for representation. The job of a scientist was to characterize objects in the world, emphasizing regularity. Idiosyncrasies should be ignored, and descriptions should emphasize "the characteristic, the essential, the universal, the typical" With the advent of photography, scientists adopted mechanical objectivity as new "epistemic virtue" Mechanical objectivity aimed to take people out of the process of representing nature. Photography, impartial measurement, and blinded observation are prioritized. Alphonse bertillon - theorized that body distortions distinguished criminals from non-criminals. According to daston & galison, a new epistemic virtue of. "trained judgment" arose in the early 20th century. Cataloguing mechanical representations is not enough for valid, scientific knowledge. Trained experts, familiar with the theories, mechanisms, and methods in a domain should provide interpretation.
