![]() ![]() Because the camera lacks personality, and so is unbiased, Galton believes it can be an instrument for portraying types. If the best artists lacked personality they would each be able to generate the consensus portrait of a certain type. Galton is hinting, here, at two traditions: one is the Platonizing God (the highest artist) which only cognizes essences or types not particulars the other is the romantic artist who has heightened powers of sensation. Galton's composite portrait is, in one sense, a counterfactual image available to an especially (non-existent) acute artist if such an artist did not have personality, which biases his or her ways of seeing and representing the world. #GALTON COMPOSITE PHOTOGRAPHY PROFESSIONAL#Today's statisticians acknowledge that their tools can be abused, and so forthrightly announce in their professional guidelines of the ASA that "using statistics in pursuit of unethical ends is inherently unethical."* (HT Mauricio Suárez) Of course, views on what is ethical are not always stable while there have always been cogent ethical criticisms of eugenics, there were plenty of ethical arguments in its favor, too (especially in Galton's age).** Regular readers know I am no friend of eugenics, but I am aware of the the argument that a contaminated source need not pollute all its fruits. Galton, the leading statistician of his age and a central figure in the development of mathematical economics, developed many of his tools, including the composite portrait, in order to make various components of eugenics properly scientific. ![]() ![]() Khan's (2004) use of the composite portrait.++ In particular, the question I wish to explore here is how one can begin to characterize a collective way of thinking (arguing, conceptualizing, etc.) when the underlying source materials are composed of individuals who also, as it happens, embrace individuality. It's much more nebulous to try, with the methods of contemporary scholarship, to characterize precisely (the ideas, arguments, views, concepts of) a Zeitgeist, a tradition, a collective, and a (dynamic) style.+ In fact, for example, few allow that Zeitgeist is a legitimate concept to be deployed in one's scholarshop. These methods all treat the sources as evidence, and the scholar as a kind of detective (see Goldenbaum) piecing the material together for some end (historical truth, argumentative progress, conceptual articulation, historical meaning, etc.). Smith), on the whole these methods are designed to focus on describing, interpreting, and tracing (the influence of) the views of authors, ideas, concepts, and arguments. While there are attempts to bring the techniques of the study of material cultures and, even archeology, to bear on it ( see J.H. The contemporary methods of the history of philosophy are fine-tuned to study texts and arguments. Galton (1879) "Composite Portraits, Made by Combining Those of Many Different Persons Into a Single Resultant Figure," The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 134. The merit of the photographic composite is its mechanical precision, being subject to no errors beyond those incidental to all photo graphic productions.-F. But the imaginative power even of the highest artists is far from precise, and is so apt to be biassed by special cases that may have struck their fancies, that no two artists agree in any of their typical forms. A composite portrait represents the picture that would rise before the mind's eye of a man who had the gift of pictorial imagination in an exalted degree. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |