Germany/Usa

Lorraine Daston

2024 Balzan Prize for History of Modern and Contemporary Science

For the extent, originality and variety of her work, which has drawn on a wide range of scientific fields to highlight the mental representations and values underlying research activity; for the number and quality of her articles and books, which have opened up new paths in the history and epistemology of sciences; for her contribution to the training of generations of researchers; and for her support - as head of prestigious institutions - for innovative research projects.

Lorraine Daston’s work on key topics and figures in the history of scientific thought in the Modern Age displays a consistent feature: her emphasis on the analogy between the concepts and paradigms that have marked its evolution and those that played a crucial role in the historical development of other fields of knowledge and the social sciences. This main theme is visible from her very first monograph (Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, 1988), in which she offered a detailed account of the eighteenth-century foundation of a predictive science based on rigorous mathematical methods. In this work, she did not confine her analysis to cosmology and particle physics, but extended it to moral sciences, the calculation of risk factors, the assessment of the credibility of miracles, and other areas. One of her most recent volumes, Rules (2022), confirms her long-standing commitment to a vision of the history of science as an integral part of the general history of knowledge. She illustrates the emergence and ever greater pervasiveness of the concept of law/rule, not only in the natural sciences but in every area of culture and social practices.

The goal of challenging the thesis of the “splendid isolation” of scientific disciplines by emphasizing their links – at the level of their epistemological foundation – with the humanities and social sciences informs a series of penetrating essays, in which Lorraine Daston highlights the “cross-sectional” scope of concepts such as order of nature, objectivity, theory, factual data, and truth. In her memorable Wonders and the Order of Nature (1150-1750), co-authored in 1998 with Katharine Park, she takes the reader on a fascinating journey from the Middle Ages populated by monsters, prodigies, and miracles all the way to a total reversal of that vision in the Enlightenment, when the image of nature governed by laws suffering no exceptions came to prevail.

In Objectivity (2007), co-authored with Peter Galison, Lorraine Daston, through a close analysis of a series of historical cases, submitted to rigorous scrutiny scientists’ peremptory assertions of the objectivity of the theories they profess. She offered tangible evidence of how their theories are often based on generalizations uncorroborated by exhaustive observations and experimental results, on preconceived opinions about the constitution and ends of nature, on religious beliefs, and on conditioning due to the authors’ affiliation with a community competing against others.

She has also dedicated illuminating studies to the transition from the prevalence of research conducted individually, characterized by a strong competitive spirit and extreme discretion, to the progressive emergence in the mid-eighteenth century, of international cooperative networks for the implementation of projects requiring heavy financial support and sophisticated infrastructure. The essays collected in her latest volume (Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate, 2023)are exemplary in this respect. LorraineDaston begins by examining two of the earliest manifestations of the awareness of the benefits of joining forces: the 1761 and 1769 expeditions to observe the transit of Venus from different locations of the globe, and the international network formed between 1780 and 1792 to discover the laws of meteorological change. She then analyzes the circumstances presiding over the launch and development of two giant research projects predicated on international cooperation and financial contributions: the Carte du ciel, designed in the late nineteenth century, and the International Cloud Atlas, begun after World War II. Using a language accessible even to non-specialists, she emphasizes the difference – in moral codes, operating rules, and decision-making processes – between international scientific communities and all other institutions in the world of culture and education. While functioning solely through financial support from the nations to which their members belong, scientific communities remain substantially independent of the individual countries’ agendas and political relationships.