Obituary: Remembering philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour, who revolutionized ideas about science in practice
Bruno Latour upended received wisdom on the nature of scientific truth. His proposition that scientific facts are constructed through networks of human and non-human actors initially outraged many. Rather than seeking objective facts, scientists were, he argued, “in the business of being convinced and convincing others”. Applying his thinking to climate change, he argued that nature could not be observed from a distance, because humanity is part of it.
He was the youngest son of a large winemaking family . He took pride in the story of his great-grandfather’s triumph over the vine insect pest phylloxera, and in the consternation of his siblings when he opted to become a philosopher rather than “inherit the vines”. Imagery from winemaking informed his arguments. He asserted that, like fine wine, good ideas suffer when exported across the English Channel.
The network comprises actors as diverse as laboratory equipment, records, paper traces, material samples, citations and research grants, as well as individual scientists. An important consequence is that the strength of a scientific fact is no more than the work needed to unpick the alliances and disassemble the network. ANT transformed social analysis and offered a new way of doing social science.
Bruno largely avoided the absurd ‘science wars’ — the intellectual exchanges of the 1990s in which a few scientific realists mistakenly construed him as a postmodernist. But his radical reworking of accepted positions, his apparently anti-humanist levelling of the distinction between people and things, and his scepticism about the very concept of society made him a controversial figure.
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