About Lorraine Daston Lorraine Daston received a Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard University in 1979 after studies
at Harvard and the University of Cambridge. Before becoming one of the three founding directors of
the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in 1995, she taught at Harvard, Princeton, and
Brandeis Universities, as well as at the Universität Göttingen and the University of Chicago.
Her work is devoted to the history of rationality, especially but not exclusively scientific
rationality, as pursued through a study of the long-term development of categories of thought such
as probability and evidence, epistemic ideals such as precision and objectivity, and practices such as
observation and image-making. Her publications include Classical Probability in the Enlightenment
(1988), presented with the Pfizer Award of the History of Science Society; Wonders and the Order of
Nature, 1150–1750 (with Katharine Park, 1998), also winner of the Pfizer Award; Wunder, Beweise und
Tatsachen (2001); Objectivity (with Peter Galison, 2007); How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The
Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (with Paul Erickson et al, 2014), and Against Nature (2019).
While at scas she will be completing her book Rules: A Short History of What We Live
By (Princeton University Press). Drawing upon sources as diverse as mathematical tables, the rules
of monastic orders, cookbooks, military strategy, sumptuary codes, rules of games, bureaucratic
ordinances, and precepts of the arts and crafts from Greco-Roman antiquity until the twentieth
century, the book traces the evolution of the rule-as-model to the rule-as-algorithm.
Abstract
There is no known human culture without rules, but the content of specific rules differs notoriously
among cultures in different times and places. Yet however different in content, all of these cultural
prescriptions and prohibitions are immediately recognizable as rules, whether they are implicitly or
explicitly formulated. My question is a different one: can the idea of what a rule is, regardless of its content,
change? Can rules as a category of thinking and acting have a history? I shall argue that at least
in some parts of Europe, notably in metropolises like Amsterdam, Paris, and London, rules underwent
a noteworthy change in form during the eighteenth century. Whereas most rules of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries – a period that witnessed an unprecedented efflorescence of rules for everything
from architecture to musical composition to warfare – were formulated using examples, appeals to
experience, and even exceptions, the rules and especially the regulations of the eighteenth century
became increasingly rigid in their formulation, as rigid as this marble meter standard mounted into
the wall during the French Revolution. The elasticity that had been built into the articulation of earlier
rules, leaving room for judgment and adjustment, disappeared. This was a major mutation in what a
rule could be, and in the age of algorithms for everything, we are still living with its consequences.
0 Yorumlar