The New York Times does Bruno Latour, part 1: Why we should care about STS

So the New York Times has published a long form article by Ava Kofman on Bruno Latour and his forthcoming book on climate change science, and, well, all of Latour’s range of stuff.

I’ve been tweeting far more than is healthy lately, so I was inclined to start this post by saying “TFW you have so many thoughts to say all at once that they get into a jam trying to get out of your head.”

I’m delighted – I get tired of saying people need to pay more attention to STS (science and technology, and society, the field of study which Latour has helped pioneer), and ANT (actor-network theory, the particular ontology, epistemology, and methodlogy which Latour developed with Michel Callon) so the fact that the Paper of Record decided to devote this many column inches to it.

I’m annoyed – the article is 90% really good, but in an attempt to situate Latour’s position in the “Science Wars” and so forth, lumps him together with the postmodernists and deconstructivists. (Being annoyed at the Times is pretty much a continuous state these days, given their utter obtuseness in response to Trumpism, but anyway…)

I’m excited – Latour getting a big boost in the popular press right now would, I have to say, be really good for my career. There are many people who know more about Latour than I do at this point, but I can at least speak ANT and STS pretty fluently at this point. So, yay?

There’s so many things to unpack in this article I’m going to do this as a series of blog posts that will touch on different things. I’m planning on keeping this post updated (if the Jekyll blog software will let me) with links to all of them.

I’ll start here with why I think STS (with ANT a big part of that) is so important. In later blog posts I’ll get more into why the New York Times article’s mistakes, while understandable and certainly not original, are really bad for understanding the position Latour occupies. I’ll also hopefully spend some time on unpacking how Latour seems to set off such strong reactions in people, and getting into why that is.

Latour, STS, and why we need to get used to the idea that science is social

Science is socially constructed. Facts are produced by social endeavors. This should be considered established, uncontroversial scientific fact at this point.

In saying this, I am being completely un-ironic while at the same time realizing how much this will seem self-contradictory to many on first read, and that needs a lot of unpacking. Which, it turns out, is kind of the point of STS in the first place.

The Times article nicely goes into Latour’s experiences in Cote d’Ivoire and how, effectively, this trained his ethnographer’s eye. In his most widely read book to date, We Have Never Been Modern, Latour gives a brief recounting of how he saw his early career at that point. He’d learned ethnography in West Africa, then went to the Salk Institute and did ethnography on the scientists there. As the Times article recounts it,

When he presented his early findings at the first meeting of the newly established Society for Social Studies of Science, in 1976, many of his colleagues were taken aback by a series of black‐ and‐white photographic slides depicting scientists on the job, as though they were chimpanzees. It was felt that scientists were the only ones who could speak with authority on behalf of science; there was something blasphemous about subjecting the discipline, supposedly the apex of modern society, to the kind of cold scrutiny that anthropologists traditionally reserved for “premodern” peoples.

This particular tension will become not just a permanent feature of reactions to Latour’s work, but as fertile for digging into just what’s going on in how we understand science. The “blasphemy” that Latour is committing here is taking the methods of ethnography, which were developed through the 19th and 20th century with all the trappings of scientific objectivity and observation, and turning them on the scientists themselves.

(As a quick aside, while Latour is now discussed as a philosopher, it should be noted that the main title he’s claimed for himself for most of his career is that of an ethnographer. He considers himself a social scientist first, and ethnography is is method. While his work directly addresses some central questions of philosophy and has been addressed as such (unfortunately, in my opinion, largely by Graham Harmon, who I think gets a lot wrong), Latour should be considered at least somewhat apart in that his work has always been inherently empirical in a way that most philosophy I encounter is not.)

Kofman gets this bit exactly right, in my view. The primary critique of Laboratory Life was not that it was wrong or poorly done, but that it showed the sausage factory involved in the production of science.

Day‐to‐day research — what he termed science in the making — appeared not so much as a stepwise progression toward rational truth as a disorderly mass of stray observations, inconclusive results and fledgling explanations. Far from simply discovering facts, scientists seemed to be, as Latour and Woolgar wrote in “Laboratory Life,” “in the business of being convinced and convincing others.” During the process of arguing over uncertain data, scientists foregrounded the reality that they were, in some essential sense, always speaking for the facts; and yet, as soon as their propositions were turned into indisputable statements and peer‐ reviewed papers — what Latour called ready‐made science — they claimed that such facts had always spoken for themselves. That is, only once the scientific community accepted something as true were the all‐too‐human processes behind it effectively erased or, as Latour put it, black‐ boxed.

Further, the “unmasking” came not at some fringe facility or in some discipline that could be dismissed by “real scientists” as pseudo-science. It came at the unimpeachably regarded Salk Institute, studying microbiologists.

So, about the fact of the social construction of sciences…

I said at the beginning of the last section that the social construction of the sciences is an empirical fact. I say this with confidence as someone who has seen the insides of a number of different science labs and field stations, where absolutely outstanding science got done.

But more to the point, when people object to the assertion of science being a social construct, they do so not from any standpoint of empiricism. It’s an appeal to the need for the authority of science. (Which, while perhaps understandable in a time when scientific authority can seem like the only way to stop catastrophic climate change, is misguided.) The social construction of science is easily discoverable by any review of not just any extant scientific lab, but also the intellectual history of now-discredited scientific “facts” like scientific racism and the existence of “great races.” No, the mistake that at least good-faith opponents of social constructivism accuse STS of making is of breaking the fairy tale of neutral, scientific objectivity, believing that it’s the only thing that holds up scientific authority.

I’ll get into the problems with the NYT article in the next post, but for this one, I’ll simply note that the claim that Latour was ever a “post-truth” philosopher who called for the “deconstruction” of the sciences is a very poor understanding of the intellectual history behind STS and the “Science Wars.” For now, importantly, Latour has never seen himself as an enemy of scientific authority or of science as our best representation of objective reality. Rather, he’s been cognizant of being honest about how we build that, and defending how science actually happens rather than pretending it happens some other way.

In conversations last year about this with some other scientists, several of them raised the same concern that the Times article addresses, and which Latour most directly addressed in his 2004 paper, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” That is to say, by raising these concerns, even if Latour doesn’t mean to, will these critiques end up being used by science’s true enemies like the fossil fuel-funded climate change denialists?

My objection at the time was that Latour didn’t originate these critiques, and that while it’s a bit of a gross oversimiplifcation of their views on science, philosophers like Nietzsche and Lyotard are far closer to saying something like, “science has no basis in objective fact, it’s just socially invented” than Latour. (They’re not quite saying that either, but they’re a lot closer to doing so.)

But really the objection I should have gone with was to point to quacks like Jordan Peterson, who has repeatedly both mocked STS and any questioning of science as the arbiter of fact while at the same time putting in work on climate change denial. The “infamous” East Anglia emails, which to anyone with a passing familiarity in how science works, showed some ordinary scientists hard at work doing good science. However, the “fairy tale,” as I’ve called it, of pure scientific objectivity and dispassionate method, was hauled out to beat the climate scientists about the head. In the end, no social constructivism was needed deal a crippling blow to climate consensus at a critical time; the damage was instead done by the unreasonable standard of scientific objectivity!

Charlatans like Peterson claim to be the true holders of scientific objectivity (with no empirical grounding for that claim, it must be said), and because we have allowed this fairy tale to persist, they then hold up the unreasonable standard and accuse real, true science of falling short of that standard.

If science is social, how does it depict reality?

I’ll get into this more in other posts, hopefully, but for now I’ll give the two-minute tour through Latour’s theory of science (and technology, but we can get to that later).

The essence of Latour’s philosophical program, articulated most directly in We Have Never Been Modern, is effectively that modernism has been built around a “constitution” which sets itself up as setting human concerns to one side for study and natural concerns to another. Humanism and the social sciences deal with humans, natural and physical sciences deal with the other, and their methods and concerns are entirely separate. (A note here: “modernism” has a more specific meaning in French discourses in which Latour was trained, but it’s not far off to think of it as “Western rationalist thought” here, although as I’ll get into later, it gets bigger than that too.)

This, for Latour is where the problems begin. We have trouble thinking about where scientific facts might exist if they don’t either exist as “outside” or “inside” human thought. Are they “outside,” objective and immutable and just waiting to be “discovered,” or on the other hand, “inside,” and just invented, as Alan Sokal mistakenly thought Latour and others were arguing?

Latour says, effectively, neither and both. The modernist process, in his theory, is to publicly “purify” onto one side the human, social, constructed, mind-dependent, conceptual, transcendent, and thought-based and onto the other the natural, physical, concrete, reality-based, and immanent. But, he argues, while this public process of purification is going on, behind the curtain there’s the constant “hybridization” of the human and the natural to produce new things. The hybridization is critical – modernity can’t be without it – but it must never be acknowledged. Hence the “black boxing” of the Salk Institute’s labs and the process for normalizing two series of average global temperatures to each other.

The notion of facts being produced rather than independent is actually quite old, and in fact hiding in the word itself. “Fact” shares the same etymological roots as “factor” and “manufacture.” In French, Latour uses the punny phrase, les faits sont faits, (the facts are made) which while not quite as pithy in English, plays on the same common etymology. The notion of fact as a thing which is beyond dispute emerges not from science, but rather from the adversarial judicial system, in which a fact in court is an assertion which is no longer in dispute by either side or by the judge. That fact has to be established first by the oppositional process – it must be called into being with judges, a courthouse, evidence, and dispute.

To move back into science, what Latour argues is not that with enough arguing gravity can be made to accelerate objects at something markedly different than 9.8 m/s². Rather, that fact was brought into existence by the work of physicists and mathematicians working together with actual objects and the planet itself. So the fact is social, but Latour insists on re-defining “social” to include the planet and the scientists and their letters to each other and so on and so forth. (His most extensive work in this vein is The Pasteurization of France, which I won’t get into too much here.)

So the fact isn’t only in the human realm. It isn’t only in the natural realm. It exists as an entity, supported by a network of actors, both human and non-human (hence name “actor-network theory) who get a say in what the fact in the end looks like.

And more to the urgent point at hand, in the absence of these networks, the fact can disappear.

Next…

I think that’s enough for one way-too-long post. I’ll get into my beefs with the New York Times article (again, it’s mostly very good), specifically why applying the “post-truth” and “deconstructionism” labels to Latour is such a mistake. We’ll see where we go from there.