For one, it seems science studies has sent its missionaries into every field of practice and Latour himself is painting in broad strokes 2 Latour declares actor-network theory dead although it seems prepared to walk again in a new book due out in from Oxford University Press.
Book Review these days, extending his reach into religion, law, politics, environmental- ism, and museum installations among other interests. Secondly, Latour is famous for having described intellectual inquiry in militaristic terms, speaking of allies, battles, self-aggrandizing heroes, strategic networking, and unseemly struggles for persuasion.
Third, Latour does not appear familiar or much concerned with any of the environmental work done in political theory, sociology, communication, critical theory, geography, or the diverse histories of environmental movements and activism. He characterizes such work broadly and often dismissively, references only sporadically, and consid- ers no specific issue or example in any extended detail.
Finally, in a move Downloaded by [ Does Latour, as Hacking put it, have his own agenda p. Or does he adequately charac- terize the experience of publics implicated in complex environmental issues? Our usual epistemological tendencies would not only reinforce each other, such that when celebratory faith meets uncritical skepticism each gain strength and confidence only in the weaknesses of the opposing posi- tion, but would paralyze our ability to respond to pressing problems.
It failed. In fact, it failed so miserably when pragmatist views on dialogue and communication were revived by James Carey, Richard Rorty, and Jurgen Habermas, the inquiry part got left out. Latour sees the problem exactly as Dewey did. He is certain the one you have is deeply impoverished and in large part responsible for the evisceration of public life.
Neither of these is quite right and there is no going forward until we have a more adequate account of scientific practice. Latour has worked hard now for over Twenty-five years attempt- ing to dislodge prevailing views with a provocative blend of empirical fieldwork, methodological rules, and some illuminating—not to mention funny—rhetorical redescription. Perhaps only half the period Dewey spent, but still a prodigious effort to be sure!
Latour states the ongoing difficulty this problem poses most directly as a decision: Either we can keep on offering the same introductions, to modify the image that readers have of scientific practice, or we can take this liter- ature for granted and tackle the truly interesting problems that arise in Downloaded by [ What is this paralyzing image of scientific practice? What are the bad consequences entailed by adhering to it? What might change in giving it up? What literature, arguments, and evidence can he offer in support of it?
What blockages are there to doing so? Depending on where you side, Alan Sokel or Bruno Latour is public enemy number one. Probably not.
We might as well tackle the problem head-on then. That concern was fostered by the belief that to do so would require no longer invoking empirical evidence and that this ten- Downloaded by [ From the study, to the attempt to bypass the sci- ence wars, to this work, Latour maintains empirical evidence is real and truth exists. In his earliest science study, Latour and Woolgar used the example of an assembly line to suggest the stance they took regarding how facts were made.
I prefer to see Latour as proposing a life cycle analysis of the products of science—its truths and falsities—such that we see how verity emerges from procedures and operations of verifi- cation pp.
Salk did, however, share the same sorts of concerns that Sokel expresses in citing rule three from Science in Action.
The demystification of the difference between facts and artifacts was necessary for our discussion at the end of Chapter 4 of the way in which the term fact can simultaneously mean what is fabricated and what is not fabricated. By observing artefact construction, we showed that reality was the consequence of the settlement of a dispute rather than its cause. Everything rides on if and how we accept this finding or the rule or the experimental metaphysics Latour develops to accommodate them in The Politics of Nature.
This becomes an extraordinarily complex Downloaded by [ But perhaps some clarity might be had. Is this the case? Here is where the serious entanglements arise. The Politics of Natureseems to advocate this in the stron- gest possible terms.
When Latour points to comparative anthropology c, pp. What is Latour doing here? The finding or rule find their meaning through observation of the following tendency: to take what is the product or outcome of inquiry and read it back into the process of inquiry.
That is simple enough to grasp. The difficulties are introduced as we try to evaluate the status of the claim and the consequences this creates. The first consequence of this tendency is that we badly misconstrue our processes of inquiry as a result. We forget all the mediations and operations we went through and the transfor- mations these had on our thinking. You can say people believe global warming by saying it is true or a fact.
But if you are careful, and if you watch the process by which that fact emerges, you will list all the arguments and evidence that support this belief and its acceptance, and you will notice that never once does one say you must believe global warming simply because it is a fact or the truth.
To say that adds nothing to the arguments and evidence that support the belief is Downloaded by [ Latour claims his work demonstrates how state- ments become facts through a series of technical mediations and practical operations, such that facts genuinely emerge and are constructed through these practices.
If you watch closely how inquiry works—if you really study scientific practices as practiced—you will see that the distinction between objective fact and subjective thought is often variable, often not clear, and only becomes stable and clear through a process of inquiry. You will see how matters of fact emerge from matters of concern, how any given state of affairs was at one time a proposition for dealing with a problematic or perplexing situation. This would seem to indicate that facts are not timeless and in no sense precede the processes of inquiry.
The belief that facts are timeless is an issue worth battling over since, for Latour, what then happens is we generalize it into a statement about the nature of reality. Bourg, D. Paris: Seuil. Brown, M. Book Google Scholar. Disch, L. Parallax 14 3 : 88— Article Google Scholar.
American Political Science Review 1 : — Dobson, A. In: W. Lafferty and J. Meadowcroft eds. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, pp. Political Studies 58 4 : — Eckersley, R. Ekeli, K. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 18 5 : — Ernst, H. Gutmann, A. Harman, G. Melbourne: re. Jennings, B. In: B. Jennings and D. Callahan eds. New York: Plenum Press. Lash, S. Latour, B. American Behavioral Scientist 37 6 : — That's the question.
In: N. Castree and B. Willems-Braun eds. London and New York: Routledge. Contemporary Political Theory 2 2 : — A commentary on Ulrich Beck. Theory, Culture and Society 20 2 : 35— Le Monde , 9 January.
The timber company can put a dollar value on a tree, of course, but this does not count the contribution of its water transport and transpiration services to water cycling, or maintenance of water tables. At one level of ecological theory, the tree is something that is part of a larger system of nutrient and water cycling; at another level, its roots and their symbiotic funghi are complex systems in their own right, as is each leaf with all its complex machinery of transpiration and photosynthesis.
The result is that a tree, a forest, or an estuary can be priced in many ways, corresponding to the different levels in which it is analysed. So there is no one way to put a price on these things, let alone on the whole of nature itself. Nor is there any way to add together the prices put on items identified at different levels of theory, for these all intersect, overlap and interact causally in marvellously complex ways, some of which we are only just starting to unravel.
Put another way, the cost- benefit approach treats the forest, the lake or the national park as if it is no more complex than a pile of goods in a supermarket trolley, and this just misses the whole point of thinking ecologically in the first place. Yet Latour draws a quite opposite moral from mine.
Indeed, the sciences portray themselves as able to speak for, tell the truth about, and give the facts of, the world of matter — the totality of nature. Back in the Cave, the scientist brings authority to the chatter of the confused crowd, using the powerful appeal to reason and the facts to undermine any attempts at democratic and open debate.
The deep greens, he claims, accept the old separation of facts and values, pleading for us to take nature as our guide to value. By contrast, a properly political ecology unsettles the division by showing how unsmooth the objects of study in biology, ecology and public health are.
CFCs, asbestos, prions have all proved unruly things, linking up with us and other things in quite unexpected ways that threaten our health and flourishing. The notion that the sciences investigate a world of smooth, bounded, well-defined objects, is simply an illusion. What, then, is the chatter back in the Cave all about? Such assessment is itself tentative, experimental and open to further probing. The diplomat, in other words, is a kind of collective existentialist: she regards what is essential as what is manufactured through collective parley, not what is antecendently given by some mythical science of a mysteriously unified nature.
This is all rather quaint and skewed. The reader is left wondering where Latour has been these past thirty years or so, and whether he knows anything about ecology. Few practising scientists in any field would object to the idea that the sciences and technology proceed tentatively by trial-and-error.
Indeed, some recent work on science policy studies has bewailed the fact that the sciences have too little authority in setting the agenda for government and corporate policy a complaint echoed by many scientists themselves.
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