Last week: a beautiful piece in the NY Times on Bruno Latour, post-modernist philosopher who famously critiqued the way we think about science going back to the ’70s — that its findings are not objective, but based on a network of human relations that agree to support certain processes of scientific inquiry — that those networks and agreements and processes can be called into question — that what we call a fact in one social environment might be created or construed rather differently in another —
all of which naturally put him in an uneasy relationship with the scientific community (he’s been memorably asked if he believed in reality) —
and which, naturally, these days, seems like it might have been an irresponsible line of questioning to have started down, seeing the corroded state of institutional authorities and what passes for truth now in our politics.
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The gist of the article, however, being that Latour is returning to science now, in the post-truth political moment, not with his tail between his legs, but perhaps with answers. If post-modernism breaks down authority, it does it to reveal how authority is (or should be) constructed.
“Latour believes that if scientists were transparent about how science really functions — as a process in which people, politics, institutions, peer review and so forth all play their parts — they would be in a stronger position to convince people of their claims …. [emphasizing] the large number of researchers involved in climate analysis, the complex system for verifying data, the articles and reports, the principle of peer evaluation, the vast network of weather stations, floating weather buoys, satellites and computers that ensure the flow of information. The climate denialists, by contrast … [have] none of this institutional architecture …. [These are] the beginnings a seismic rhetorical shift: from scientists appealing to transcendent, capital-T Truth to touting the robust networks through which truth is, and has always been, established.”
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There is, of course, capital-R Reality. It sits around us all the time, letting us stub our toes, and doesn’t talk much.
When we start talking about it, though, we start creating a social reality. And there’s an awful lot of Reality that we can’t very well comprehend unless it comes mediated to us by some story that we socially create. I can stub my toe on this rock and pretty well comprehend an aspect of physical reality. But if I’m to understand that said rock is 99% empty space between its atoms, we’re going to need to tell a whole chain of stories to get me there.
Those stories are only as good as the networks, agreements, processes we use to create them. These determine how closely or usefully that social reality gets to Reality. It’s in interrogating that process (taking it out of its “black box,” Latour would say) that we can really assess the quality of our facts.
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There are going to be competing social realities. That’s the dirty social truth implied in Latour’s early work critiquing scientific authority. It’s not enough to claim self-sanctifying objectivity, because you don’t have it. And if you can’t admit to the subjectivity of all processes, you’re not prepared to win an argument about why yours is comparatively better.