Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science
October 26, 2018 5:46 AM   Subscribe

In the summer of 1996, during an international anthropology conference in southeastern Brazil, Bruno Latour, France’s most famous and misunderstood philosopher, was approached by an anxious-looking developmental psychologist. The psychologist had a delicate question, and for this reason he requested that Latour meet him in a secluded spot — beside a lake at the Swiss-style resort where they were staying. Removing from his pocket a piece of paper on which he’d scribbled some notes, the psychologist hesitated before asking, “Do you believe in reality?”
posted by Pyrogenesis (21 comments total) 31 users marked this as a favorite
 
Great article. From within, his latest production is a theatre piece described thus:

The effect was a bit like watching “An Inconvenient Truth,” if Al Gore had been a coltish French philosopher who said things like “Scientists, artists, and social scientists like myself are beginning to propose what we call — and maybe it’s too exaggerated — a new cosmology.”

[T]he show, which he has performed in several cities across Europe and will bring to New York this week, is called “Inside.”

I first ran into Latour's work a few years ago and it shocked me, but as I grew to know it, it has changed me at a fundamental level.
posted by stonepharisee at 5:57 AM on October 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


so-called science wars, a series of heated public debates between “realists,” who held that facts were objective and free-standing, and “social constructionists,” like Latour, who believed that such facts were created by scientific research.

My history-of-recent-science is sorely lacking but is this kind of thought/discussion not an example of very smart folk basically falling into the trap of mistaking the map for the territory?
posted by sammyo at 6:55 AM on October 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


falling into the trap of mistaking the map for the territory

sammyo, I think you've got it. It sounds like Latour has always been talking about epistomology (how we know what we know), but because of language-interpretation problems or something, people thought he was talking about ontology (what's really there). I can't help but wonder though, if the "social constructionists" are to blame for this: it should have been clear for decades that the big fight was due to a fundamental misunderstanding, but they allowed the misunderstanding to stand because it got them more attention.
posted by heatherlogan at 7:04 AM on October 26, 2018 [10 favorites]


"We Have Never Been Modern" is a pretty incredible piece of work.

This article makes the same mistake about the whole social constructionists vs. realists thing that the popular press has done since the nineties - it's a false and reductive dichotomy that misrepresented one "side" and gave the Sokal side way too much credibility.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:45 AM on October 26, 2018 [7 favorites]


To hint at any of the contention and compromise that went on behind the scenes, the realists feared, would give succor to the enemies of progress: creationists, anti‐vaxxers, flat‐earthers and cranks of all stripes. If scientific knowledge was socially produced — and thus partial, fallible, contingent — how could that not weaken its claims on reality?

Conservative politics hides its deeply religious orientation, which now offers its alternate economics without serfdom, but it is really just the old social ordering that innovation left behind, simply attempting to survive in a different era. Likewise, post-modernism hides its deeply religious orientation, which now offers its alternate reality without God, but it is really just the old intellectual ordering that innovation left behind, simply attempting to survive in a different era.
posted by Brian B. at 7:51 AM on October 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


Likewise, post-modernism hides its deeply religious orientation, which now offers its alternate reality without God, but it is really just the old intellectual ordering that innovation left behind, simply attempting to survive in a different era.

This sounds fascinating, could you elaborate?
posted by PMdixon at 8:03 AM on October 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


Yeah, what?
posted by aspersioncast at 8:51 AM on October 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


epistomology --> epistemology. *facepalm*
posted by heatherlogan at 9:08 AM on October 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


Latour is one of those thinkers with whom I seem to resonate so strongly that everything I read by him feels "obvious". I guess the stereotype is for realists to be flabbergasted by instrumentalists (or whatever opposite group) in the spirit of G.E. Moore's common sense realism, but the idea that truth is "out there" for us to find has always been alien to me. To me, the very concept of "out there" is clearly just the result of evolution and learning trying to make sense of the buzzing blooming confusion of our sense data.

Truth making is a complex process, and science is a social activity. Is that really weirder than assuming our cognitive manifold grants us special, and completely ineffable access to the noumena?

Anyway, very nice article. It's interesting to read that apparently many scientists are coming around to this way of thinking, especially as it relates to communicating the impact of climate change.
posted by Alex404 at 9:19 AM on October 26, 2018 [6 favorites]


post-modernism hides its deeply religious orientation

Postmodernism is a descriptive term for the current social and cultural situation. It doesn't "do" anything.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 9:31 AM on October 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


I'm trained as a physical scientist and when I read Latour, yeah, what he's saying I'm doing is what I'm doing. It is obvious.

I'm also amazed that Latour's ideas are considered radical or daring. Thus I'm continually surprised when anyone else makes statements about how science works or how science is practiced.
posted by happyinmotion at 11:29 AM on October 26, 2018 [12 favorites]


epistomology --> epistemology. *facepalm*

I'm due for an epistemoscopy, that reminds me
posted by thelonius at 11:41 AM on October 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


These two paragraphs go a long way toward clarify things (for me anyway):

As he wrote his doctoral dissertation, he taught philosophy at a technical school in Abidjan and volunteered to work on a study commissioned by the French government. His task was to find out why French companies, which still owned and operated many of the factories in postcolonial Abidjan, were having such difficulty recruiting “competent” black executives. It took less than a day for Latour to realize that the premise was flawed. “The question was absurd because they did everything not to have black executives,” he told me. In the French-run engineering schools, black students were taught abstract theories without receiving any practical exposure to the actual machinery they were expected to use. When they were subsequently unable to understand technical drawings, they were accused of having “premodern,” “African” minds. “It was clearly a racist situation,” he said, “which was hidden behind cognitive, pseudohistorical and cultural explanations.”

In Abidjan, Latour began to wonder what it would look like to study scientific knowledge not as a cognitive process but as an embodied cultural practice enabled by instruments, machinery and specific historical conditions. Would the mind of a scientist or an engineer from, say, California seem any more “modern” or “rational” than that of one from the Ivory Coast if it were studied independent of the education, the laboratory and the tools that shaped it and made its work possible?


I love how in the end he's more or less turning scientific method loose on scientific method. How dare he?
posted by philip-random at 11:50 AM on October 26, 2018 [11 favorites]


Teach the bomb…phenomenology…
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 1:05 PM on October 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


The problem with oversimplified versions of Latour is you get people thinking "there is no (accessible) objective truth" which is a literally incoherent claim as itself is an objective truth claim.

So you can apply this to some interpretations of Latour such as "science is a social network". It's reductive. I think the problem is that if you accept Latour without letting it challenge and disturb down to your own ethical sensibilities then you haven't fully worked through and explored the implications. I think the article makes this mistake somewhat, the process of reconciling this as a scientist or knowledge worker should be harder than "let's do science while paying lip service to Latourean narratives."
posted by polymodus at 1:23 PM on October 26, 2018 [5 favorites]


I'm pretty excited about this book. IMHO Latour was a lot more fun in the 70s and 80s; I hope this is a return to form. This is a great place to start.
posted by ethansr at 3:24 PM on October 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


Dumb question for people who know better: is his approach comparable to Paul Feyerabend‘s (Against Method)? It sounds a bit like it but maybe someone here can clarify. Super interesting in any case.
posted by The Toad at 8:44 PM on October 26, 2018


that's the second time this week Latour has surfaced to more popular media than my dissertation reading and I have had the "HE'S NOT DEAD IS HE ok, whew" jolt

while I was doing my dissertation Columbia's journalism school invited him over for a seminar and a bunch of us grad students ended up at dinner with him, unsupervised by our elders, and someone said to Latour "in your field, Science and Technology Studies" and Latour said "there is no such thing as Science and Technology Studies!" and we said "what are you then" and he said, with adamant Frenchness, "I am a philosopheur!" and I think we all had a twinge of envy, from our horribly gerrymandered American academic fiefdoms, that anyone not properly in a Philosophy Department could have the leeway to make such a grand claim

posted by gusandrews at 8:49 PM on October 26, 2018 [9 favorites]


Has Latour turned his microscope on himself? He sees science as a situated and embodied practice that is engaged in politics, but he is complaining that his papers have been misused in politics. This seems ... dumber than I would expect, so I hope I am missing something. His work was/is also inherently political, situated, and embodied, and it had an effect. To paraphrase Latour, in science you don't get to choose the actions without implicitly choosing the political effect, and yet he seems to be trying to do just that as he assesses his own work?
posted by pmb at 3:01 AM on October 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


Dumb question for people who know better: is his approach comparable to Paul Feyerabend‘s (Against Method)? It sounds a bit like it but maybe someone here can clarify. Super interesting in any case.

In a broad sense, yes, Feyerabend is similar, but he was still entirely about scientists themselves and their discourse. I guess one way of putting it with respect to Against Method would be that for Feyerabend there is no unversal Scientific Method because scientists use all sorts of discursive means and methods and tricks, but for Latour there is no universal Scientific Method because all sciences are always involved with all sorts of different actors, both human and nonhuman, and because of this there is always something different in every particular study or field.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 5:09 AM on October 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


Latour is a man with a good point - but his acolytes try to use it as a sword and even he appears to sometimes try to use it as a cutting tool. To quote from the very end of the article:

Gravity, he has argued time and again, was created and made visible by the labor and expertise of scientists, the government funding that paid for their education, the electricity that powered up the sluggish computer, the truck that transported the gravimeter to the mountaintop, the geophysicists who translated its readings into calculations and legible diagrams, and so on.

Not even close. Gravity predated modern scientists or even the whole of humanity. And when Newton compared an apple falling from a tree to the movement of the planets in the heavens and attached some mathematics he was very much not using computers to do so - and gravity as a phenomenon is very real whether or not people choose to investigate it. Now that it is seen as worthy of further investigation and that it has a high profile is very much a political choice as is where and how to investigate.

When people wonder whether he believes in reality it is because of statements like this by himself and his supporters more than it is by his opponents. And as pmb points out, when he is about the political impact then the political impact of his own work is a part of that.
posted by Francis at 3:38 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]


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