An Adept and Amusing Analysis of Science

Science in Action. Bruno Latour. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987. 274 pp. $25. Sacrebleu! This is science? Forget those preconceptions now comfortably a part of how you see science and the sociology of it, or how you see nature and society. Here instead we have sketches of Janus: on the left a graybeard tells us that "Nature is the cause that allowed controversies to be settled"; on the right, a more youthful half-face tells us that "Nature will be the consequence of settlement." A

Written byThomas Gieryn

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For Bruno Latour, a Parisian anthropologist at the Ecole National Supérieure des Mines and not yet a graybeard, everywhere. Forget that science is a body of factual knowledge about reality, and forget too a sociology (or history) of science hung up on whether scientific knowledge is determined by nature, or by society, or by some of each. That is science out of action. Putting science back in action means to consider facts before they are facts and machines before they are machines, focusing on the controversies, the persuasions, the mustering of support, the gathering of resources, the denunciation of nay-sayers that precede the finished and usable fact or machine.

Latour makes us see science (a softish and loosely-tied network of alliances linking people in laboratories to consumers or politicians in a seamless web of mutual interests) before it becomes Science (disinterested researchers pursuing hard truth in autonomous and expensive universities). ...

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