The Commercial Origins of Scientific Objectivity

摘要

Cook's ambitious aim is to advance a social and cultural history of knowledge, objectivity and truth. He does so by drawing links between a set of material changes in the fabric of early modern Dutch society and culture-spurred by the rise of the global age of discovery and commerce-and the subsequent emergence of novel conditions for the construction of knowledge. The book addresses the question of how a variety of 'matters of exchange' were transformed into 'matters of fact'; how new 'matters' and new forms of 'exchanging' them-through material trade, moral evaluation and artistic representation-produced factual knowledge and new standards of objectivity. The objectivity Cook argues for is one that is rooted in the material world and in people's experiences of it.