“For a history of human rationality: an interview with Lorraine Daston. 2024 Balzan Prize for History of Modern and Contemporary Science“, Luca Sciortino, The British Journal for the History of Science, 2025

On 21 November 2024, in Rome, the historian of science Lorraine Daston was awarded the Balzan Prize for History of Modern and Contemporary Science, one of the world’s most prestigious academic awards. Administered by the International Balzan Prize Foundation, this award honours the work of scholars with internationally outstanding achievements. The General Prize Committee recognized Professor Daston ‘for the extent, originality and variety of her work, which has drawn on a wide range of scientific fields to highlight the mental representations and values underlying research activity’.

Daston has mainly explored concepts – such as probability, evidence, rationality, objectivity and many others – which shape our practices of knowledge, structure our thought and constitute the conditions of the possibility of our experience. For Daston, these organizing concepts – as we may call them – come into being through specific historical and social processes, and change and get their meaning from the uses we make of them in a certain period of history. Through tracing the trajectory of scientific objects and concepts in this way, Daston has expanded the field of historical epistemology. She attributes a special role to rationality, which could be described as a sort of meta-organizing concept that gets its meaning from the interaction of different organizing concepts and other epistemic elements in a given historical and social context. One of her best-known books, Objectivity (2007), co-authored with Peter Galison, charts the history of the conceptions of objectivity that emerged in the last three centuries and shows how each of these conceptions is rooted in an epistemic virtue, as the two scholars call the scientific ideal to which scientists are committed in a particular period or circumstance….