{"title":"Books by Lorraine Daston","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780226324159","title":"How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind – The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality","description":"In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a \\u201cCold War rationality.\\u201d Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy.   The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56227629728117,"sku":"9780226324159","price":22.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780226324159_c95ebc91-51d6-4ac5-b7d0-cd647172caf2.jpg?v=1786012413"},{"product_id":"9780691254081","title":"Rules – A Short History of What We Live By","description":"A panoramic history of rules in the Western worldRules order almost every aspect of our lives. They set our work hours, dictate how we drive and set the table, tell us whether to offer an extended hand or cheek in greeting, and organize the rites of life, from birth through death. We may chafe under the rules we have, and yearn for ones we don’t, yet no culture could do without them. In Rules, historian Lorraine Daston traces their development in the Western tradition and shows how rules have evolved from ancient to modern times. Drawing on a rich trove of examples, including legal treatises, cookbooks, military manuals, traffic regulations, and game handbooks, Daston demonstrates that while the content of rules is dazzlingly diverse, the forms that they take are surprisingly few and long-lived.   Daston uncovers three enduring kinds of rules: the algorithms that calculate and measure, the laws that govern, and the models that teach. She vividly illustrates how rules can change—how supple rules stiffen, or vice versa, and how once bothersome regulations become everyday norms. Rules have been devised for almost every imaginable activity and range from meticulous regulations to the laws of nature. Daston probes beneath this variety to investigate when rules work and when they don’t, and why some philosophical problems about rules are as ancient as philosophy itself while others are as modern as calculating machines.   Rules offers a wide-angle view on the history of the constraints that guide us—whether we know it or not.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56293943279989,"sku":"9780691254081","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780691254081_d9339ad4-30de-42f8-8e06-cea450bcc543.jpg?v=1786015089"},{"product_id":"9781890951795","title":"Objectivity","description":"\u003cp\u003eObjectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In \u003ci\u003eObjectivity\u003c\/i\u003e, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences — and show how the concept differs from alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences — from anatomy to crystallography — are those featured in scientific atlases: the compendia that teach practitioners of a discipline what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Atlas images define the working objects of the sciences of the eye: snowflakes, galaxies, skeletons, even elementary particles.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGalison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity — or truth-to-nature or trained judgment — is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. \u003ci\u003eObjectivity\u003c\/i\u003e is a book addressed to any one interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity — and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308613841269,"sku":"9781890951795","price":32.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781890951795_bde208b4-7c80-49d6-b28c-72bfa28cabd8.jpg?v=1786029216"},{"product_id":"9798987053560","title":"Rivals","description":"\u003cb\u003eWhy is the scientific community so unified?\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e\nIn the last 350-odd years, the international “scientific community” has come to be the bastion of consensus and concerted action, especially in the face of two global crises: disastrous climate change, and a deadly pandemic. How did “the scientific community” come into existence, and why does it work?\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003ci\u003eRivals\u003c\/i\u003e is an attempt to answer these questions in the form of a brief historical overview, from the late seventeenth to the early twenty-first centuries, through the creation of two enormous projects—the Carte du Ciel, or the great star map, and the International Cloud Atlas, pioneered by the World Meteorological Organization after World War II. These new models of intergovernmental collaboration and global observation networks would later make the mounting evidence of planetary phenomena like climate change possible.\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e\nDrawing upon original documents stored in Paris, Geneva, and Uppsala, historian of science Lorraine Daston offers a fascinating, lively study of successful and unsuccessful scientific collaborations. \u003ci\u003eRivals\u003c\/i\u003e is indispensable both as history and as guidance.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56311442407797,"sku":"9798987053560","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9798987053560_fb23e22b-7064-413a-a694-a0c8448a1065.jpg?v=1786033257"},{"product_id":"9780262537339","title":"Against Nature","description":"A pithy work of philosophical anthropology that explores why humans find moral orders in natural orders.   Why have human beings, in many different cultures and epochs, looked to nature as a source of norms for human behavior? From ancient India and ancient Greece, medieval France and Enlightenment America, up to the latest controversies over gay marriage and cloning, natural orders have been enlisted to illustrate and buttress moral orders. Revolutionaries and reactionaries alike have appealed to nature to shore up their causes. No amount of philosophical argument or political critique deters the persistent and pervasive temptation to conflate the \"is\" of natural orders with the \"ought\" of moral orders.   In this short, pithy work of?philosophical anthropology, Lorraine Daston asks why we continually seek moral orders in natural orders, despite so much good counsel to the contrary. She outlines three specific forms of natural order in the Western philosophical tradition-specific natures, local natures, and universal natural laws-and describes how each of these three natural orders has been used to define and oppose a distinctive form of the unnatural. She argues that each of these forms of the unnatural triggers equally distinctive emotions: horror, terror, and wonder. Daston proposes that human reason practiced in human bodies should command the attention of philosophers, who have traditionally yearned for a transcendent reason, valid for all species, all epochs, even all planets.\u003cbr\u003eBinding: Paperback \/ softback","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56311667982709,"sku":"9780262537339","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780262537339_0f77c344-2fad-462a-83b1-5d929fa895da.jpg?v=1786012579"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-lorraine-daston.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}