1. Science: Its own Master?
Until the relatively recent emergence of the study of science as a field of scientific research and perhaps since the triumph of the French Revolution’s rational principles, the questions of truth, knowledge and reason have been entrusted to the care of the ‘nobility of science’, the princes, duchesses and counts donned in their uniform mantles of ‘white lab coats’ and the scholastic decrees issued by these scientists have been accepted as the correct and the only plausible interpretations of the world surrounding us. With the appearance of Thomas S. Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” in 1962, a revolution of its own swept through Francis Bacon’s fort of ‘una scientia universalis’ (Bacon), fracturing it into the myriad fragments of postmodern thought and inquiry. Latour – fortress of sociology? The objectivity of science and its established principles are today in the impregnable ivory towers of the scientists themselves being continually evaporated though it is still feasible to say what Robert Merton stated in 1970, that “even now, there are scholars who would argue that science goes its own way, unaffected by changes in the environing social structure” (Merton 1973: 176).
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Since Edward Burnett Tylor English anthropologist, defined culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Tylor 1889: 1), and Franz Boas, German-American anthropologist, stated that it was “the totality of the mental and physical reactions and activities that characterize the behaviour of the individuals composing a social group collectively and individually in relation to their natural environment, to other groups, to members of the group itself, and of each individual to himself” and that “it also includes the products of these activities and their role in the life of this group” (Boas 1938: 159) anthropologists have perceived knowledge as pertaining to various cultures, thus rendering it a social explanation. The scientific culture of the Western world has, particularly since the Age of Enlightenment, justified the beliefs and suppositions of what it considers to be scientific ‘knowledge’ as being ‘universal’, ‘rational’ and ‘true’. The questions this thesis explores are in accordance with those of the sociology of science as they seek for answers, similar to those of anthropology, which provide social explanations for the production and construction of scientific knowledge but they even go further than that. Bruno Latour is a widely recognised proponent of the Sociology of Science. My thesis inquires in what manner the Sociology of Science is represented by Latour, whether he has introduced anything new with which he has changed the course of Sociology itself. Latour has baffled scientists and scholars with his, in the words of Harry Collins, “sparkling writing” and when readers are faced with the philosophical challenges and literary metaphorical puzzles of the writings such as his “Sociology of a Door” it is little wonder academics debate over whether to define him a genius or a ‘joker’ (Amsterdamska 1990). In this thesis I set out to present the ‘paradigm’ of Bruno Latour by describing a few of his main ideas, by following, in chronological order of appearance the evolution of his concepts and of contemporary Sociology of Science. I shall do this by looking at a well-known essay, a critical debate and, in the end, by displaying a relatively recent work which I perceive as giving, if not an ultimate answer, certainly a comprehensive one of his “philosophy”. I will argue that with this final piece Bruno Latour opens the possibility to switch by 180 degrees the path Sociology is now taking.
2. From Scientific Truth to Social Construction
The study of science is divided into three main disciplines; the philosophy of science, which is concerned with the epistemic and metaphysical aspects of science, the history of science, that devotes its studies to the events and circumstances that has led to the present state of ‘knowledge’ and the sociology of science, which examines the social conditions and processes that influence science. As the ‘paradigms’ of these disciplines may perhaps be compared to Max Weber’s ideal types, in that an ideal type “is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of (…) concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasised viewpoints into a unified analytical construct” and that “in its conceptual purity this mental construct cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality” (Weber 1949: 90) so in reality the borders of these ‘paradigms’ are not constituted of strict lines but rather of hazy seams therefore it is not a problematic task to descry, though perhaps all the more difficult to explicate their interdisciplinary nature.
Though it may seem that the definition of “science studies” is easily explained by merely saying it is about studying science and that it has “its own methodology, epistemological status, institutions, textual genres, and funding agencies”, the fact that it is “difficult to draw the boundaries of contemporary science studies” and that “it is no easier to map science studies’ institutional ecologies, as its practitioners are dispersed over the widest range of departments and programs” (Biagioli 1999: xi) shows us not only that it cannot be entrapped in the narrow and perhaps even oppressing limits of a single discipline’s enclosure but that, as it exists without, outside of and in a certain paradoxical sense is simultaneously a part of it, there is a need to go even beyond the boundaries of Science Studies, to ‘think outside the box’.
Though the new studies of science are most closely linked to the American intellectual, Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, the first developments of the social-historical approaches to science can be traced back to Ludwik Fleck, Polish medical doctor and biologist. In the 1930s Fleck introduced the concept of ‘thought collectives’ with which he explained his assertion that the construction of scientific ‘truths’ and ‘facts’ were tied to the ‘thought collective’, in other words “a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction”. Individuals of a thought collective are connected together by the ‘thought style’ they share, that is by “the special carrier for the historical development of any field of thought, as well as for the given stock of knowledge and level of culture” (Fleck 1979: 39). These thought styles therefore direct one’s way of thinking as they also constrain one from thinking in any other way.
The concept of the ‘thought collective’ can be likened to Thomas Kuhn’s ‘paradigm’ though it cannot be synonymous with it because it is a term that did not find its ‘Kuhnian’ meaning until the author himself defined it in 1977 by saying it was “what members of a scientific community, and they alone, share” that is he explained it was “in close proximity to the phrase ‘scientific community’” (quoted in Aronowitz 1988: 261). As this thesis is not an attempt to interpret this later explanation of Kuhn’s ‘paradigm’ or to indulge in ‘Kuhnian philosophy’, though indeed this redefinition called for the reinterpretation of the original, I will merely outline the main ideas of his 1962 work “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, which paved the way for some of the many roads of the recent studies of science after I also briefly mention Michael Polanyi, Hungarian-British philosopher and scientist, who states that all knowledge stems from ‘tacit knowledge’. This knowledge dwells in us, is unique to each individual and all else, such as an acquired skill or a cultural heritage, that is incorporated into our lives draw a framework within which we live but also which serves as a matrix to defining a common-minded group. This applies to scientific groups as well, nevertheless between different groups there will always be a “logical gap…they think differently, speak a different language, live in a different world” (Nagy 2005: 8-12).
Thomas Kuhn’s notion of science explains it is what natural scientists do and this activity is determined by the pattern of rules and by the orientation or ‘paradigm’ a certain scientific community agrees upon as being the right way to see things and with which to explain their research with. As ‘normal science’ is the enterprise that “seems an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box (Latour box) that the paradigm supplies” (Kuhn 1962: 24) it attempts either to explain away or to entirely ignore any ‘anomaly’ or piece that does not logically fit into the puzzle of this ‘puzzle-solving’ process. It is only when the accumulation of anomalies becomes so problematic that a rare ‘crisis’ occurs and the only solution to be found results when a change in worldview comes about and a ‘paradigm shift’ or ‘scientific revolution’ occurs. The new ‘paradigm’ is incommensurable with the old one therefore they cannot be compared to each other nor can the scientists pertaining to one communicate with those belonging to the other (Kuhn 1962). This ‘thesis of incommensurability’ was excavated by scholars of the humanities and social sciences and eagerly gathered as evidence to the existence of that hidden city of Relativity’s Atlantis, in certain senses contrary to and in others quite the equal of the “New Atlantis” of Francis Bacon.
In the eyes of these ‘archaeologists’ this city, though unseen, had always been present and was merely waiting to be discovered in the form of the new ‘Sociology of Scientific Knowledge’ (SSK); ‘new’ in that it broke with the traditional Mertonian ‘Sociology of Science’ which, according to Latour, did not account for the content of science itself, touched only upon the application of social sciences to the practice of science, believed that the study of scientific practice could not be possible and which was, in reality, nothing more than a ‘Sociology of Scientists’ (Latour 1999: 276-278). The study of scientific knowledge from a sociological perspective was approached by the influential Edinburgh School of David Bloor, Barry Barnes and others and their ‘Strong Programme’, which attempts to explain the content of scientific knowledge not only by examining the scientific ‘facts’ that were ‘proved’ to be false, as in the ‘sociology of error’, a programme considered to be weak, but also by critically investigating those claims which are held by scientists to be ‘true.’ The Strong Programme formulated four principles, the first of which is the principle of Causality where the conditions, social or non-social, that bring about scientific knowledge are examined. Impartiality examines both true and false claims by remaining impartial to either. The third principal, Symmetry states that the same types of causes must be given to both true and false scientific claims. Finally, Reflexivity says it should be applicable to sociology itself. The Strong Programme rendered a basic framework for ensuing theories of social scientists. (Niinuluoto 1999: 252-254).
3. The ANT of the Laboratory That Engulfed the World
In the 1970s-1980s, the scholars of the interdisciplinary studies of ‘Science, Technology and Society’ (STS)[1], who were preoccupied with examining the broader topics of Science such as science policy, scientific institutions and similar larger problems criticised the ‘laboratory studies’ of Bruno Latour and Karin Knorr-Cetina owing to their ‘microscopic’ nature as opposed to the ‘macroscopic’ of STS. In the famous study “Give Me a Laboratory and I will Raise the World” and in attempt to go beyond Kantian dichotomies, Bruno Latour argues not only against the exclusivity of ‘macro issues’ but against the one-sided viewpoints related to the ‘microlevel’ as well and elaborates how laboratories dissolve the differences between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ and ‘micro’ and ‘macro’. Latour explains that on the one end of the spectrum there are analysts who refuse to enter into discussions regarding the content of science while on the other end scholars are only preoccupied with the scientific controversies of scientists (such as Henry Collins) or claim that society does not even exist. The author views this as an altered echo of the “age old polemic between ‘internalist’ and ‘externalist’”, which “opposed ‘social influences’ to purely ‘internal development’ in accounting for the movement of scientific disciplines” (Latour 1983: 141-143).
Latour’s solution can be found by following the three themes of his argument. The first breaks down the wall between the inside and the outside; the second demonstrates how scales and levels can be inverted while the last describes the process of inscription. The three threads identify “how a few people gain strength and go inside some places to modify other places and the life of the multitudes” (Ibid. 163). The author performs this by re-enacting the laboratory work of the famous chemist and microbiologist, Louis Pasteur, at the time when he worked on the vaccine against anthrax, which was present in cattle. In 1881 the press is full of articles that divulge the mysterious work being carried out by the laboratory of Pasteur at the École Normale Supérieure while the interests of many social groups of outsiders are captured. This interest is the result and consequence of Pasteur himself, who ‘enrols’ and ‘enlists’ (Ibid. 143) them as the leader of a military regime might do. It is precisely this language of Latour that prompted his critic Olga Amsterdamska to accuse him of using a ‘vocabulary of war’ and of purposely blurring the differences between what she calls ‘science and non-science’ with his linguistic turns of metaphors so as to prove that in science all that matters is victory and that his sociology does not distinguish between the numerous types of means employed in order to achieve domination over both people and things (Amsterdamska 1990). Indeed, Latour goes on to assert that sciences are capable of convincing others of ‘who they are and what they should want’ and that the only possible manner in which the sociology of science can function is not by endeavouring to explain sciences with what some scholars call the single ‘credible’ science, namely sociology but by following “how sciences are used to transform society and redefine what it is made of and what are its aims” (Latour 1983: 144).
But how does science itself become a construction and how does it construct? As diseases were considered to be the results of several factors a single disease was not linked to a single cause, such as to a single microbe and therefore, in the nineteenth century, anthrax could not be associated with a laboratory. Latour explains how Pasteur overcomes the division of two separate and quite opposing entities, that of a meticulously spotless laboratory and that of a dirty and disorganised farm, by building a makeshift lab on the farm itself where cattle are ‘grown’ and where the microbiologist too ‘grows’ his microbes while ‘translating’ the language of the farmers to that of the laboratory.
The changes of scales, says Latour, can be seen when Pasteur eventually moves back to his main lab in Paris with the cultivated bacillus and sees to making something happen to the bacillus that has never happened before, that is growing anthrax bacillus in isolation and in such large quantities that they become visible to the eye and so the ‘invisible’ becomes ‘visible’. With this transfer of the single microbe to his laboratory Pasteur is telling the farmers, and thus sparking a greater interest, that the solution to the anthrax disease can be only be found in his laboratory where he is capable of inoculating fewer cattle with a greater amount of anthrax and also of reversing the roles of the actors, since man now controls and sees the disease not as in the instance when unseen anthrax controlled the animals, farmers and veterinarians. Since Pasteur is able to imitate the variation of virulence (the capability of causing disease) that is he can make a microbe weak as he can make it strong he, according to the author, succeeds in achieving on the small scale of the laboratory what was unattainable on the large scale by social movements such as those of hygienists or doctors who could not stop the spread of epidemics. It was this inability to imitate variation that had separated the outside from the inside, the practical from the theoretical level. Social groups eventually recognise that only the Pasteurian lab and thus the science of microbiology is capable of understanding epizootics and consequently of epidemics and now they are interested, but all does not end here.
The laboratory is once again swept off the platform of the micro and placed onto the world stage of the macro while the interests of Pasteur and the other social groups are ‘translated’, says Latour, since the problems of both are now identified. Nevertheless, the conditions for the vaccine of the laboratory in Paris
The author says that it is through these various ‘displacements’ or ‘translations’ that inside and outside dissolve as their forms have constantly changed as well for they were never identical. On the first farm a few microbes were captured, in the Paris lab controlled epizootics were carried out on a few animals and only certain inoculation gestures and vaccine inoculants were taken to the farms where eventually it became commonplace for every farm to possess vaccines. The farms of yesterday, therefore, have become a sort of hybrid “lab-farms” of today. Thus, according to Latour, this ‘metaphorical drift’ is the source of all innovations. Those who state that the settings of a Petri dish (the ‘scientific level’), where apparently the true interpretation of the anthrax disease is, and that of Paris
But where did such words of Latour as ‘actor’, ‘inscription’ and ‘translation’ tend? In the mid-1980s Bruno Latour, Michael Callon and John Law developed their renowned Actor-Network-Theory, sometimes called ‘sociology of translation’ but most often simply referred to as ANT, which examines socio-technical processes while making no distinction between science and other social activities and accepting neither realistic nor social constructivist approaches. Its main assertion is that science is a heterogeneous network, a mixed combination of entities such as machines, texts, ideas, people, things and animals. The theory does not agree with dichotomic perceptions, therefore it does not differentiate between such concepts as nature/society, fact/fiction, truth/falsehood, and above all between human and nonhuman and sees all of these to be as the outcomes of collective activity. ANT theory promotes the notion that nonhumans possess the power to act and the term ‘actant’ are those actors, human or nonhuman, which can voluntarily make decisions within the network while the networks are what give them their nature. ANT is not only a theory but a method as well and has three main principles, some of which resemble those of the Strong Programme. The first principle is Agnosticism, which is similar to Bloor’s impartiality as it states that you cannot have presuppositions when examining the actors. The following principle, Generalised Symmetry, also resembling the symmetry thesis of the Edinburgh School, requires that actors be analysed using the same framework regardless of their being human or nonhuman while the last principle, Free Association, makes no distinction between social and natural phenomena (Ritzer: no date).
4. Science, Society and Chickens: Did the Chicken Ever Cross the Road?
One of the main proponents of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge is Harry Collins who adheres to the view that scientific knowledge is determined by social factors and who was, along with Steven Yearley, the starting contributor to what became known as the ‘Epistemological Chicken’ debate, one of the very first debates in the field of science studies where the ‘Bath School’ representing SSK confronted the ‘Paris School’ of STS by choosing to argue with some of the concepts of Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, a debate which Dick Pels attempts to unravel as an unaccountable ‘urge’ to “prescribe methodological rules” and, above all, as a reflection of their “ambitions to rule over the field”. (Pels 2003: 132, 134). Pierre Bourdieu also regards these debates of the subfield of sociology of science, within which innumerable conflicts prevent the progress of social science, as nothing more than a “pursuit of distinction at any price” so as to win the victorious laurel wreath of “bearer of a ‘new’ paradigm’”, which he considers to be ‘artificial’ and thus a potential, common paradigm is stopped from ever stabilising (Bourdieu 2004: 8).
But these words of Bourdieu cannot be heard by the ‘new’ sociologists of science for their paradigm places him in the context of an ‘old’, Mertonian paradigm that speaks a language undecipherable by their own.[2] Remaining in the confines of the ‘new’ paradigm, which continues to search for answers to the content of science, and following some of the themes of the argument, a clearer outline of the ‘new’ in ‘Latourian sociology’ can be more distinctly identified as can some of the criticism against it.[3]
In the work of Collins and Yearley entitled “Epistemological Chicken”[4], the authors set out to gain superiority over the ‘complicated case’ of the French school by throwing down the glove of heroic confidence in what they call the “meta-alternation” principle that should rule the field of social studies of science as opposed to the cowardly players in the game of chicken who ‘treat it as a failing’ (Collins 1992: 302). By referring to Peter Berger’s “alternation” process, the capability of sociologists to alternate between frames of reference, that specificity of their profession which allows them to jump, so to speak, from one viewpoint to another with relative ease is what, according to Collins, differentiates the science of sociology from all the other sciences and so raises it above them. Collins believes that SSK is an “extension of this ability to ‘alternate’” and, in this manner, is capable of better understanding the beliefs of scientific knowledge (Ibid. 302).
One of the most important principles of relativism in SSK was that of the symmetry of the Edinburgh School, which equally analyses ‘true’ and ‘false’ scientific claims. According to Collins, the purpose of this principle was to draw up the plan for the program of SSK, which has for its topic the boundary that divides ‘true’ and ‘false’ and does not take it for granted, as had previous schools of thought in the sociology of science. Collins argues that the ‘French school’ of Latour and Callon sees the world as made up of a ‘system of signs’ and so does not believe in the existence of any boundary, arguing the boundary too is but a construction. Collins claims the ‘radical symmetrism’ of the French school is in fact nothing short of ‘relativist regression’ (Ibid. 302-303).
Collins sketches a short history of the ideas of SSK, which evolved into more and more radical forms, by relating how in the 1970s relativist viewpoints succeeded in gaining ground in philosophical debates, not by asserting it was ‘true’ but by showing how it was ‘tenable’ for studying science. The constructivist school of thought, that accentuated the importance of ‘epistemological agnosticism’, the impartiality of the various types of knowledge, naturally implied that its theories could be applied to itself but discussions of how the ideas themselves of SSK could also be social constructions were not found to be as interesting as the examination of scientific knowledge in comparison to other types of knowledge. Collins believes that ‘discourse analysis’, the program of Mulkay, Potter and Yearley, which critically examined the work of SSK scholars and considered it to be ‘methodologically flawed’ because it could be deconstructed failed owing to the fact that it refused to question its own assumptions. Discourse analysis eventually led to ‘reflexivity’, which endeavours to avoid any statements of certainty. Collins gives an example of how reflexivist authors write literature where they present several-sided arguments that never reach a decisive conclusion. He admits that “the interest in the social conditioning of knowledge can evidently be extended to our own knowledge claims” and that “we have no right to exclude ourselves” (Ibid. 306) but he also shows that Bloor puts science studies on equal terms with natural science while reflexivists see more new questions to be discovered in epistemology.
SSK does not seek to declare the right way of perceiving nature, it looks at how natural scientists follow rules and conform to assigned types of behaviour and doubts these to be the causes of the ‘success of science’. Collins does not want to follow the path of reflexivists, such as Stephen Woolgar, for he is convinced that its road can lead to ‘self-destruction’ since, if SSK cannot access ‘truths of nature’ so neither can reflexivists gain admittance to the ‘truths’ of the ‘social world’. Collins therefore suggests that SSK does not seek to ask “for the meaning but for the use” of its research and so does not take an ‘epistemological stance’ at all. In short, he believes that natural scientists should remain ‘naïve realists’ while social scientists should be ‘social realists’ with the capability to ‘alternate’ between the two viewpoints. In this manner, science can escape from the realm of enigmas and, by gaining inside into the minute details of its routine actions, ought to be seen as any other human activity, skilled in its own right (Ibid. 308-309).
Collins asserts that attraction to the ‘French school’ of Latour and Callon lies in the appearance of consistency but he argues that the application of Bloor’s symmetry to other dimensions cannot be feasible if it does not remain in a “human-centred universe” (Ibid. 311). Collins explains that the term ‘inscription device’ which Latour and Woolgar began to use in the book “Laboratory Life” denoted the ‘autonomous power’ deriving from the amalgamation of various inscriptions and transcriptions, which were constructed in the laboratory by devices which can inscribe but by this transformation and after publication, the everyday life of the laboratory took on a whole new meaning. Collins argues that to Latour these inscription devices gave the appearance of possessing a certain power only because Latour was not an expert in the field, not a scientist who could understand their meaning. Latour later styles the same idea by referring to the ‘immutable mobile’ where “agency is granted to pieces of paper – the first step on the road to granting agency to things” (Ibid. 312).
The challenge that Collins confronts Latour with is what he describes as the methodological problem of radical symmetrism, since it is impossible for sociologists to gather evidence for and gain insight into the ‘lives’, so to speak, of nonhuman entities. Collins demonstrates this problem by taking a closer look into Latour’s work “Where are the Missing Masses? Sociology of a Door”, the seriousness of which Collins was not convinced at his first encounter with it. He relates how Latour gives agency to the actor; the door. This feat is accomplished by examining social order and the respective role that objects play in it. The reason that existing political and social analysis cannot adequately explain certain constraints, which are imposed upon people, is because these explanations fail to account for the “missing masses”, which are equal to things. A door, for example, determines how we can pass through a wall, in what speed, dictates the exact position we should use – since we cannot go through that wall anywhere else and therefore governs our actions in many ways as do numerous other objects, such as a computer, which commands us to type certain formulas since it refuses to accept any other forms of writing. But Collins is quick to give warning of this methodological error, since he explains that as we give a human interpretation of the agency of objects the problem of asymmetry is not resolved; we cannot interpret the ‘world of things’ as ‘strangers’ in it. He continues to argue that another dilemma is to be found in the ‘counterfactual method’ of Latour, which uses “imaginative license to the full” by conjuring ‘what if’ situations, such as the example of ‘what if there were no door in the wall’ then we would be forced to create a hole, and it is from the burden of having to hammer down the wall that the ‘door’ frees us. (Ibid. 317-319) Collins does not go so far as to explore the possibility of ‘what if there existed no wall’ to begin with?’
The verdict of Collins is in: the “French actor-network model is philosophically radical, but when we ask for its use, it turns out to be essentially conservative” (Ibid. 323) since he believes it is nothing more than prosaic, historical accounts of science and technology, sprinkled with imagination and updated with replaced vocabulary. He therefore concludes that both the reflexivists, who fell down an inescapable hole while trying to cross the road, and the ANT proponents, who managed to run across like “chickens” before the traffic came near them, left out explanations from their theories and that “meta-alternation” is the only true road for SSK to follow but can it be possible that Collins never crossed the road to begin with? The arguments of Collins, that Latour is neither an expert in the fields of the scientists he examines nor a citizen of the world of things, do not necessarily mean one must be a chicken in order to make sense of the egg.
If Collins was quick to judge, Latour is even quicker to resort to his burlesque rhetoric in an attempt to not only defend his position but perhaps also to implicitly evince a slight offence taken by assuming that the attack of Collins was a cultural one, discriminating Latour and the entire “French” school for being “bloody foreigners” who “dabble in a field where the British have been firmly in command for so many years” (Latour 1992: 343). Of course, this retort could also be interpreted as a manifestation of Latour identifying himself with the character of his own creation, the “outsider” who, in the words of Amsterdamska, “where others see reasoned arguments or evidence or interpretation or experiments (…) (he) sees only attempts to dominate, strategies for winning battles, means of attack, trials of strength, and other forms of violence. Moreover, in his attempts to represent science, he is also quite willing to employ some very peculiar means and arguments in order to try to enrol us in his vision of science” [emphasis mine] (Amsterdamska 1990: 496). But is Latour, in truth, capable of enlisting numerous followers in his ‘vision of science’ not merely because of his militant rhetoric but perhaps also because of his radical logic of “social relativism”?
Latour recalls Collins’ own admission of there being numerous problems in science studies, such as those related to reflexivity, symmetry, and the possible conflicts between relativism and social realism. These problems, he stresses, cannot be tucked away and stored in the safe confines of “blithe ignorance” and he wishes to address them not by throwing the “baby out with the bathwater” (Latour 1992: 343-344) but by keeping both and suggesting a new program, or rather maybe Latour means to say an “extension” of the existing school of Bath and of Edinburgh, such as his idea of extending the laboratory so as to fit the entire world into it. At any rate, Latour embraces various types of knowledge one can gain from other disciplines and fields of science and does not declare sociology, to be the sort of Comtian “queen of sciences” as he implies Collins has done. In fact, as I will later demonstrate, Latour will have an entirely different perception of sociology itself. For the present, Latour is content to set out and construct his program for the studies of science by first demonstrating the linear one of Collins. It is possible then, that in spite of Collins having referred to sociology’s unique ability to switch frames of reference that Collins has in fact exempted himself and his school from having to do so as he seems to have brushed those who turn to “nature” to the reactionary end of the pole and those, such as those of the Bath school, who embrace the “social” to the radical end. This can be seen in Figure 12.1 of Latour.
“Natural realism” says that by starting from the world of objects one can understand why humans agree about them and so explains the social from the natural while “social realism” uses society to account for why we “collectively settle on matters of fact”, explaining the natural from the social (Ibid. 345). It is difficult to see how the Bath
Regarding Latour’s use of vocabulary, the author calls on the necessity of using different words for it is evident that those with which he replaces with his own do not express clearly the “hybrid terms that blur the distinction between the really social and human-centred terms and the really natural and object-centred repertoires” with the following replacements such as actoràactant, social relationsàactor network, interactionàtranslation, discoveryànegotiation, social rolesàdelegation, proofàimmutable mobiles and dataàinscriptions (Ibid. 347). Whether “blurring the distinctions” between certain concepts truly creates a new concept or not will be a decision most assumedly made by the majority group of people and so, the greater this consensus will be, the more likely it will become “true”. But this leads us back to the paradigm of Collins since those making this decision will be human. On the other hand, if we include the influence of nonhumans, which will assist humans in making that decision, will this not shift us back to the paradigm of Latour?
Latour illustrates his version of general symmetry that does not alternate between nature and society but sees them both as outcomes, as ‘twin results’ of what he calls “network-building, or collective-things” (Ibid. 348). This symmetry calls for a reconfiguration of Collins’ “one-dimensional yardstick” by going beyond the social in extending the diagram to a two-dimensional one and adding the vertical axis of stabilisation. In this manner, it can be discerned whether an entity is not only natural or social, but whether it is stable or unstable. This is presented in Latour’s Figure 12.3 (Ibid. 349).
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The studies at the higher end of the vertical axis are those that differentiate between the concepts of nature and society and thus that are, according to Latour, the “reactionary” ones but the studies “down the stabilisation gradient” do not endeavour to determine whether the origin of entities are social or not. The “
1.) The horizontal yardstick knows only two types of entities; natural and social and their pure combinations. With the two axes, the curves means there are innumerable forms of agencies (an agency, says Latour is “the semiotic definition of an actant devoid of its logo-and anthropocentric connotations”) not pure combinations and examinations do not begin with saying what these agencies are “from the very act of distributing or dispatching agencies”.
2.) The one-dimensional yardstick revolves around humans or nonhumans. The Paris
3.) Explanations of the horizontal axis move from both ends towards the middle since nature and society are causes of scientific activity while the vertical axis itself begins at the middle stating that scientific and engineering activity and all their human and nonhuman allies are the cause of various states of nature and society. This latter explanation of Latour, nonetheless, broadens the cause by adding “allies” human and nonhuman, but he fails to account for who these allies are and where they come from.
4.) The first school gives explanations for scientific activity by using unobservable states of society or of nature and all they can observe are traces of these things while the Paris
What Latour fails to understand of Collins’ attack on his lack of scientific expertise in the area of natural sciences is the fact that it would make sense if this retort were coming from one who advocated Mertonian sociology of science, which truly does not attempt to touch upon the matters of science, but this is not the case of the Bath school, sociologists of science who claim to explain the content of science, lacking the “scientific credentials” themselves (Ibid. 357). Latour does not mention this but this flow of thought can lead us to ask the same of natural scientists who work with nature but think as humans. Nature had not handed them a certificate acknowledging their understanding of the way nonhumans act and think therefore, by this logic, they should not be allowed to attempt to understand it, not to mention actually transform it. Latour admits that the counterfactual method may not be the best method but adds that “thought experiment is about the only way with which we can estrange ourselves from total familiarity with mundane artifacts” (Ibid. 359).
It is evident that the question of whether the chicken or the egg came first has remained unsolved and that only from the paradigm of one of the schools can we begin to find explanations for the construction of scientific “facts”, for scientific controversies and their closures. What else is apparent is the equal significance Latour grants to both nonhumans and humans and it is in Latour’s paradigm that we find a new approach to sociology and to the social, which is what differs it from that of the Bath school. The third part of the “Chicken Debate” will not be examined, but its main theme, which Collins links together with the title of his work, called “Journey Into Space”, might have been more of a prophecy than even Collins could foretell when he wrote it, admitting the previous dilemmas he had faced of whether to take at face value the writings of Latour, which was not a “straightforward matter” (Collins 1992: 370). What does, after all, Latour and Callon mean with their objects and nonhumans being given such undeserved attention? Collins relates that “Journey into space” was a radio series on BBC in the 1950s that told the tale of travellers who had believed they were on another planet when in fact they were still on earth only in a period of the past. Was the jump of Latour into a new dimension in fact not a journey into space but a travel back in time?
5. The Social After and Before Bruno Latour
The very purpose of Bruno Latour’s “actor network theory” is to replace the word “social” with the word “association” and perhaps it is not by chance that the acronym ANT marched in to take over the hegemony of the elephant, called Society. But convincing sociology of its having made a huge error in creating the “social” and endeavouring to keep the science alive while killing its subject is not a simple task and Latour is more than happy to humbly oblige a scholar of reputable prestige in aiding him. In order to achieve this, Latour turns back the pages of time and resets the foundation of sociology as an academic discipline; the error was made then. The title of founder must be effaced from the name of Durkheim and duly handed over to a sociologist of another name. Bruno Latour remains master of persuasion in his work “Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social” (Latour 2002).
Latour relates how Tarde, in the end of the 19th century, had been a leading figure of sociology before Durkheim entered the scene and until his reputation was diminished to the point that he was considered only a ‘precursor’ of sociology at best and a proponent of ‘psychologism’ and ‘spiritualism’ at worst. What prompted Latour to make, yet again, a counterfactual thought experiment was his having read Tarde’s Monadologie et sociologie, a book republished only recently and thus, not only having made the “blithe” discovery that Tarde is the long-lost grandfather of Latour and ANT, but precisely of having found in Tarde’s writing the two main arguments of actor-network-theory, namely that “a.) the nature and society divide is irrelevant for understanding the world of human interactions” and that “b.) the micro/macro distinction stifle any attempt at understanding how society is being generated” (Latour 2002: 2).
Latours explains that in Tarde’s view the danger of universal sociology is the “ghost of ideas”, such as the perception of society existing as an abstract entity. Tarde does not want to break with other disciplines such as philosophy to create a distinct, separate being called sociology but he wishes to link social theory with “monadology”, a research agenda based on “monads”, “Leibniz’ daughters”, the entities which build up the universe and which Latour likens but does not equate to the memes of Richard Dawkins. These monads are material entities and are guided by no goal for they each have their own, individual goal but they are spiritual in that they have faith and desire. But, continues Latour, the small in this Tardian reductionism is, contrary to being simple, absolutely the most complex. It is not only a microcosm but a universe in itself and “in the bosom of each thing there reside every other thing real and possible” (Tarde quoted in Latour 2002: 4) and so the smaller is the entity, the more unique and individual, the more ‘big’ it is. Latour explains that Tarde does not believe in borders between the sciences, between nature and society precisely because he does not explain “the lower levels by the higher levels”, therefore social explanations cannot render sufficient meanings to things if “all things are social.” Sociology is meant not to dominate all the other sciences but means that it seethes through them all since “every science has to deal with assemblages of many interlocking monads” (Latour 2002: 5).
Human societies are only distinct from all the others because we are a part of them and view the world from within them but there never emerges a collective self from these human aggregations. Also, in comparison to other groups of monads such as the group of a brain or a star, human societies are composed of very few elements. Even a speck of dust is made of more basic components than, as Latour draws an example of Tarde, the population of China[5] but “since for the only case we know well, human societies, the small holds the big, it must be the same, Tarde argues, for all the others, except we don’t have the slightest idea on how to reach the monad levels of stones, gas and particles without changing scales. We embrace them only statistically” (Ibid. 6).
The big therefore is only a simplified and ‘smaller’ part of the small. One of the best ways to understand this is to quote Tarde himself, who says that “if we look at the [human] social world, the only one we know from the inside, we see the agents, the humans, much more differentiated, much more individually characterised, much richer in continuous variations, than the governmental apparatus, the system of laws and beliefs, even the dictionaries and the grammars which are maintained through their activities. An historical fact is simpler and clearer than any mental state of any of the actors [participating in it]” (quoted in Ibid. 7). Latour explains that social order is thus shown as constantly being “threatened by immediate decomposition because no component is fully part of it.” Tarde claims, according to Latour, that every thing “has begun in the secret of a solitary brain” (Ibid. 11). Nonetheless, this sociology of Tarde, says Latour, is not individualistic either because it states that in a society, a monad alone cannot achieve anything without working in the network of other monads so in order to act socially, it is necessary to collaborate with other individuals. A great theory is nothing without all the accumulated work of those “organisms” that had helped create the conditions for that theory to come about and to continue. This is where the pieces of Tarde, who also wanted science studies to be the basis of social theory, and ANT theory fall into the same puzzle; “in ANT, whenever you want to understand a network, go look for the actors, but when you want to understand an actor go look through the net the work it has traced” (Ibid. 12).
Latour believes he has found the definite reply for one of the strongest criticisms against ANT, which questions why nonhumans are of such great consequence in Latour’s theory. With the help of Tarde that boundary is again smoothed out between humans and nonhumans for not only do monads offer an answer by their presence in all of “society” but by discarding the “philosophy of identity” the “to be or not to be” of Shakespeare becomes “to have or not to have” of Tarde, an entirely different philosophy altogether. Latour, recalling the thoughts of Kant and Descartes, affirms that since we cannot know what it is to be a “stone” then we cannot say there exists such a thing but, if following Tarde, we say that we look at the properties and the proprietors of monads and not at its essence, then we will be led to find the whole cosmos, or in other words, to discovery the “Sociology of Bruno Latour” (Ibid. 15).
6. Sociology:
I have only but scratched upon the surface of the content of Latour’s numerous thoughts and writings. Whether Bruno Latour has succeeded in discovering the “Higgs boson” of not only Sociology but of all the sciences, as the ultimate “theory of everything” or not is impossible to answer in the frame of this short work and perhaps, even outside of it, the answer might have to wait for the LHC to discover the “Higgs boson” and all its parallel worlds, nonetheless what can be posited is that Latour has indubitably had a significant influence, especially in the postmodern sense, on the direction sociology is taking. In spite of his renouncing the “social” as it is understood by most sociologists, Latour was the 10th most cited author in humanities in the fields of both sociology and anthropology with 944 citations to books in 2007 and is a main proponent of the “Tardean revival” in the social sciences and humanities. The new book entitled “The Social After Gabriel Tarde” was published very recently in February of 2010 and is certain to offer greater insight to the numerous questions that wonder where this “alternative beginning for an alternative social science” might lead.
Nonetheless, returning to the main purpose of science studies that Harry Collins and Steven Yearley outlined, which states that we should not so much search for the meaning of these studies but rather for their use, it is relevant to ask of what use the sociology and philosophy of Bruno Latour is and can be to what we know as contemporary society. By having blurred the distinction between nature and society, between micro and macro, further research could manifest if Bruno Latour has succeeded in rendering both human and nonhuman society a research program that will allow the public to participate in policy-making where the very concerns of humans, of the environment, of sustainable development, climate change, nanotechnology, biomedical research, power plants, space exploration, of computer science and the internet where, in the intangible space of virtual worlds, in and on which more and more time is being spent by science, technology and society…indeed where all of these issues elaborately intertwine and ceaselessly flow in that net of the tangled web we weave…
BIBLIOGRAPHY
· Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max (1997): Dialectic of Enlightenment. London
· Amsterdamska, Olga (1990): Surely You Are Joking, Monsieur Latour! Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 15, No. 4: 495-504.
· Aronowitz, Stanley Minneapolis : University of Minnesota
· Biagioli, Mario (1999): The Science Studies Reader. New York
· Boas, Franz (1938): The Mind of Primitive Man. New York
· Bourdieu, Pierre Chicago : The University of Chicago
· Callon, Michel and Latour, Bruno (1992): Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School! In Pickering, Andrew (ed.) Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press p. 343-366.
· Candea, Matei (2010): The Social After Gabriel Tarde. Debates and Assessments. London: Routledge
· Collins, H.M. and Yearley, Steven (1992): Epistemological Chicken. In Pickering, Andrew (ed.) Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press p. 301-327.
· Collins, Harry and Yearley, Steven (1992): Journey Into Space. In Pickering, Andrew (ed.) Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press p. 369-390.
· Fleck, Ludwik (1979): Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago : The University of Chicago
· Kuhn, Thomas (1962): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press
· Latour, Bruno (1983): Give Me a Laboratory and I will Raise the World. In Knorr-Cetina, Karin and Mulkay, Michael (eds.): Science Observed. London: Sage Publications Ltd p. 141-169.
· Latour, Bruno (1999): One More Turn After the Social Turn…In Biagioli, Mario (ed.): The Science Studies Reader. New York
· Latour, Bruno (2002): Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social. In Joyce, Patrick (ed.) The Social in Question. New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences. London: Routledge p. 117-132. Internet version: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/82-TARDE-JOYCE-SOCIAL-GB.pdf. (Retrieved: 2010.03.12.)
· Merton, Robert K. (1973): The Sociology of Science. Chicago : The University of Chicago
· Nagy, Endre (2005): The Hungarian Context of Michael Polanyi’s Thought. In Jacobs, Struan and R.T. Allen (eds.): Emotion, Reason and Tradition. Hampshire , England
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· Pels, Dick (2003): Unhastening Science. Liverpool: Liverpool University
· Ritzer Encyclopedia (no date). Actor Network Theory. Sage Publications Internet: http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/5222_Ritzer__Entries_beginning_with_A__%5B1%5D.pdf (Retrieved: 2010.03.17.)
· Tylor, Edward B. (1889): Primitive Culture. New York
· Weber, Max (1949): The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Glencoe , Illinois
(Retrieved: 2010.03.21.)
[1] The precise differences between Science, Technology and Society and Science and Technology Studies is difficult to discern in the numerous writings that address or mention these studies, both known as (STS).
[2] The idea of the distinction between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ sociology of science comes from Bourdieu himself (see Bourdieu 2004: 8).
[3] Since I do not feel quite privileged enough to abbreviate the names of the eminent scholars to C&Y and C&L, when referring to Collins and Yearley I shall speak of Collins and when mentioning Latour I will be meaning both Callon and Latour but as I am primarily discussing Latour, I am searching more for writing related to the author of ANT than of Callon.
[5] At the time of Tarde the population of China was 300 million
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