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Latour’s Prosaic Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

James Robert Brown
James Robert Brown*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 1A1
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Extract

The most embarrassing thing about ‘facts’ is the etymology of the word. The Latin facere means to make or construct. Bruno Latour, like so many other anti-realists who revel in the word’s history, thinks facts are made by us: they are a social construction. The view acquires some plausibility in Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (hereafter LL) which Latour co-authored with Steve Woolgar.1 This work, first published a decade ago, has become a classic in the sociology of science literature. It is in the form of field notes by an ‘anthropologist in the lab.’ This may seem an odd place for an anthropologist, but Latour finds his presence easy to justify. ‘Whereas we have a fairly detailed knowledge of the myths and circumcision rituals of exotic tribes, we remain relatively ignorant of the details of equivalent activity among tribes of scientists … ’ (LL, 17).

Type
Review Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , June 1991 , pp. 245 - 261
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1991

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References

1 Latour, Bruno and Woolgar, Steve lAboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (London: Sage 1979)Google Scholar. A new edition (a reprint by Princeton University Press) drops the word ‘Social’ from the title on the grounds that it is so obvious as not to need mentioning.

2 For example, Collins, Harry in his Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (London: Sage 1985)Google Scholar takes the same general outlook to science: existence of facts and acceptance of instruments go hand-in-hand.

3 Hacking, Ian ‘The Participant Irrealist at Large in the Laboratory,’ British journal for the Philosophy of Science (1988) 283Google Scholar

4 Brian Bagrie has rightly stressed (in private communication) that the network contains much more than propositions. I entirely agree. It remains in the case at hand, however, that propositional or not the network is very small.

5 Latour, Bruno Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1987)Google Scholar

6 Latour, Bruno The Pasteurization of France (translated by Sheridan, A. and Law, J. from Les Microbes: Guerre et Paix suivi de Irreductions [Paris, 1984)) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1988)Google Scholar

7 For a critical discussion of how social factors can influence the content of science in a variety of ways see Brown, James Robert The Rational and the Social (London: Routledge 1989)Google Scholar.

8 The relation between belief dissemination in scientific society and in general society is an interesting one. Brian Bagrie (private communication) remarks: ‘Latour conflates two distinct scenarios: the process whereby beliefs are certified in the scientific community and the process whereby beliefs are disseminated throughout the population at large. The question is how and why expert beliefs are accepted by non-experts; but Latour collapses the first question into the second and asks: why do beliefs that are widely accepted seem to arise from a special community of experts. He takes the second question to be fundamental and so holds that what is true for a community as a whole is true of specialized groups. There is no diversity, on this view, and no real expertise. Just the dissemination of knowledge.’

9 Bloor’s symmetry principle calls for the same type of explanation for any belief regardless of its truth or falsity, its rationality or irrationality, etc. See Bloor, David Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1976), 5Google Scholar and Brown, James Robert The Rational and the Social (London: Routledge 1989)Google Scholar, ch. 2 for a critique.

10 Barnes, Barry About Science (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985)Google Scholar

11 The locus classicus on the topic is Davidson’s, Donald ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes,’ reprinted in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1980)Google Scholar. A brief discussion of this issue in connection with the strong programme can be found in Brown, The Rational and the Social, 24ff.

12 Longino, Helen Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989)Google Scholar

13 I am very much indebted to Brian Bagrie and Kathleen Okruhlik for comments on an earlier draft, and to Ian Hacking for several conversations on Latour. I am especially indebted to Mohan Matthen for suggesting this essay in the first place and for numerous helpful comments on a late version.