Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Preface
- 1 Moralizing Measurement: (Dis) Trust in People, Instruments, and Techniques
- 2 Meanings of Measurement and Accounts of Accuracy
- 3 Mercurial Trust and Resistive Measures: Rethinking the ‘Metals Controversy’, 1860–1894
- 4 Reading Technologies: Trust, the Embodied Instrument-User and the Visualization of Current Measurement
- 5 Coupled Problems of Self-Induction: The Unparalleled and the Unmeasurable in Alternating-Current Technology
- 6 Measurement at a Distance: Fairness, Trustworthiness, and Gender in Reading the Domestic Electrical Meter
- Conclusion
- Index
1 - Moralizing Measurement: (Dis) Trust in People, Instruments, and Techniques
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Preface
- 1 Moralizing Measurement: (Dis) Trust in People, Instruments, and Techniques
- 2 Meanings of Measurement and Accounts of Accuracy
- 3 Mercurial Trust and Resistive Measures: Rethinking the ‘Metals Controversy’, 1860–1894
- 4 Reading Technologies: Trust, the Embodied Instrument-User and the Visualization of Current Measurement
- 5 Coupled Problems of Self-Induction: The Unparalleled and the Unmeasurable in Alternating-Current Technology
- 6 Measurement at a Distance: Fairness, Trustworthiness, and Gender in Reading the Domestic Electrical Meter
- Conclusion
- Index
Summary
The scientific community is morally superior to every other form of human association since it enforces standards of honesty, trustworthiness and good work against which the moral quality of Christian civilization in general stands condemned.
Rom Harré, Varieties of RealismThe scientific laboratory is also populated by a wide variety of inanimate agents: experimental apparatus, oscilloscopes, measuring instruments, chart recorders and other inscription devices.
At any time, the culture of the laboratory comprises an ordered moral universe of rights and entitlements, obligations and capabilities differentially assigned to the various agents.
Steve Woolgar, Science: The Very IdeaWhom and what should people trust or distrust? This question has long been a prominent concern not only in everyday human transactions but also in the most abstruse domains of science, commerce, and technology. Both Steve Shapin and Ted Porter have shown the significance of this question in the complex relationship between trust and quantification. They demonstrate that, to a certain extent, Restoration natural philosophers and nineteenth century engineers were able to win greater trust for their claims by giving them quantitative expression. At the same time, though, Shapin and Porter map some of the important historical contingencies of the subject. Quantification has not always been achieved to the satisfaction of all, nor has it necessarily made claims uniformly more highly trusted by all parties. Therefore, to avoid facile transhistorical generalizations about the relations between trust and numerical work, the historian has to ask questions rather more socio–historically specific in nature.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Morals of MeasurementAccuracy, Irony, and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice, pp. 1 - 39Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004