Lorraine Daston

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Lorraine Daston in February 2009

Lorraine Jennifer Daston (born June 9, 1951 in East Lansing , Michigan , sometimes abbreviated as Raine Daston ) is an American science historian and director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She retired in June 2019.

Act

Daston received his PhD from Harvard University in 1979 and has since taught at Harvard, Princeton , Brandeis and Göttingen Universities . She has been working at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science since 1995. She is also visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and honorary professor for the history of science at the Humboldt University in Berlin . She was also visiting professor in Paris and Vienna and gave the Isaiah Berlin Lectures at Oxford University (1999), the West Lectures at Stanford University (2005) and the Tanner Lectures at Harvard University (2002). She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1993) and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and, since 2002, of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina .

Daston received the renowned Gerda Henkel Prize in 2020. In the declaration of the Gerda Henkel Foundation it was said that with her innovative research she had made a lasting impact on the subject of the history of science and the humanities .

Work areas

Within the history of science , Daston's focus is on the ideals and practices of rationality . Her work focuses on epistemological and ontological categories (including "scientific object", " objectivity ", "demonstration" and " observation ") that shape scientific research and its standards. Lorraine Daston has published on a wide variety of topics in the history of science, e. B. on the history of probability and statistics , on the problem of miracles in early modern science, on the emergence of a scientific fact, on scientific models, on scientific objects of investigation, on the moral authority of nature and on the history of scientific objectivity.

Comments in the interview

When asked about the provisional nature of the supposedly objective knowledge derived from scientific research in the Corona crisis , Daston emphasizes that science is about “the ideal of procedural objectivity, not about producing timeless truths.” Objectivity is, as it were, “a procedure for elimination of sources of error ". The subjectivity of the researchers should, where possible, be hidden. “The knowledge that science produces is, however, never absolute, always provisional and in principle revisable.” What is needed is “a dynamic truth model”. Because in empirical reality one is not dealing with the polarity of true and false, but with a spectrum of probabilities.

However, the knowledge gained in this way cannot be relativized at will. Even if criticism and debate represented a central democratic value, societies needed “a consensus on key issues”. In the absence of this minimum consensus, it would be dangerous for democracies. To bring scientific dissent to the public is nevertheless correct as a sensible impetus for a learning process; To publish only relatively reliable results gives the public the false impression of a science that is always ready, instead of clarifying how it works.

Daston also sees the traditional separation of natural sciences and humanities currently in flux “in the age of big data ”, as many newer research concepts run across them, for example with regard to the cooperation of scientific disciplines such as literary and computer science or climate research and history.

Private life

Lorraine Daston is married to Gerd Gigerenzer .

Awards

Fonts (selection)

  • The quantification of female intelligence . In: Renate Tobies (Ed.): “All male culture in spite of”. Women in math and science . Campus, Frankfurt a. M./New York 1997, ISBN 3-593-35749-6 , pp. 69 ff . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  • with Katharine Park : Wonders and the order of nature. 1150-1750. Zone Books, New York NY 1998
    • German edition: Miracles and the order of nature 1150–1750. Eichborn, Berlin a. a. 2002, ISBN 3-8218-1633-3
  • with Peter Galison : Objectivity. Zone Books, New York NY 2007, ISBN 978-1-890951-78-8
  • with Paul Erickson et al .: How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind. The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality , University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, USA 2013, ISBN 978-0-226-04663-1 .

As editor

  • with Gregg Mitman: Thinking with animals. New perspectives on anthropomorphism. Columbia University Press, New York NY et al. 2005, ISBN 0-231-13038-4 .
  • with Katharine Park: Early modern science (= The Cambridge history of science. Volume 3). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 2006, ISBN 0-521-57244-4 .
  • with Christoph Engel: Is there value in inconsistency? (= Common Goods. Volume 15). Nomos, Baden-Baden 2006, ISBN 3-8329-2143-5 .
  • with Elizabeth Lunbeck: Histories of Scientific Observation. University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL et al. 2011, ISBN 978-0-226-13678-3 .
  • (Ed.): Science in the Archives. Pasts, Presents, Futures , Chicago 2017: University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0-226-43236-6 .

literature

  • Uta Deffke: The observer . In: MaxPlanckForschung , (Ed.) Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science e. V., 1/2012, pp. 86-92, online, PDF

Web links

Videos

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Solstice Celebrations: A Celebration for Raine Daston, press release from the MPI for the History of Science accessed September 24, 2019
  2. ↑ http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/staff/members/ldaston
  3. ^ Süddeutsche Zeitung: Prize for Lorraine Daston. Retrieved July 18, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Lorraine Daston in conversation with Christoph David Piorkowski in Tagesspiegel on August 21, 2020, p. 22
  5. ^ Lorraine Daston historian of science. Orden Pour le Mérite, accessed on March 6, 2018 (German).
  6. ↑ Medal awards on the Day of German Unity ( Memento from December 9, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), press release from the Office of the Federal President, accessed on October 3, 2010
  7. ^ Fellows: Professor Lorraine Daston. British Academy, accessed March 6, 2018 .
  8. ↑ Science historian Lorraine Daston receives Sarton Medal for life's work from Informationsdienst Wissenschaft (idw-online.de); Retrieved November 28, 2012
  9. ^ Ceremonial annual meeting of the Bavarian Academy of Science, December 8, 2012 at Informationsdienst Wissenschaft (idw-online.de); Retrieved November 27, 2012
  10. ↑ Annual reception for members of the Curia for Science and Art. In: bundespraesident.at. Retrieved October 31, 2019 .
  11. ↑ a review of the book by Henning Trüger at hsozkult.de , accessed February 1, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Daston, Lorraine
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Daston, Lorraine Jenifer (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American historian of science
DATE OF BIRTH June 9, 1951
PLACE OF BIRTH East Lansing , Michigan