Making Scientific objects and setting Standards: values, technology, government and the Enlightenment

Abstract

Governing is not the same as commanding. It is not sufficient to give orders from above, because the success of any action is linked to the level of personal involvement of the person carrying it out. Hence the importance of giving justification to an action. But we know this is not enough. Or rather, justification is only effective if it is based on identifiable activities and objective facts. This is easy to say, but increasingly difficult to understand. For the Moderns, however it was (and perhaps still is) quite clear. According to them it was sufficient to make sure that our information fulfilled certain conditions: among other things, it was crucial that it be obtained by means of specialized machines, which would avoid, as far as possible, the subjectivity and disarray of our senses. It was necessary to convert the greater or lesser intensity with which we detect phenomena into numbers and calculations.