From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Sep 02 2002 - 21:35:48 MDT
Actually I still don't know what Latour really said, because I haven't been
able to find his paper, but here's a somewhat useful paraphrase/extension
from, of all places,
http://physicsweb.org/article/world/15/7/2
Robert P Crease of the Department of Philosophy, State University of New
York at Stony Brook, and historian at the Brookhaven National Laboratory,
US, e-mail rcrease@notes.cc.sunysb.edu sez:
============
So was there energy before 1800?
The common-sense answer is "yes". Nature does not change, only our ideas
about it. Radical "social constructivists", however, would say "no",
arguing that nature is how we represent it and that the real depends on the
consensus of the scientific community. Bruno Latour, for example, argues
that things - not just words - have histories. He claims that microbes did
not exist before Pasteur discovered them and that Pharaoh Rameses II could
not have died of tuberculosis (as now thought) because the bacillus was
only discovered in 1882.
These two positions represent different ways of interpreting the above
events. Permit me to act annoyingly like a philosopher and say that there
is truth in each. The formulation of concepts relies not only on purely
theoretical considerations but also on a practical world that is rich in
technological devices, such as (in the case of energy) steam engines and
temperature-measuring instruments. The network of theoretical
considerations and the practical world form a context in which scientific
claims can be tested as true or false.
If we emphasize the practical values that permeate this context at the
expense of the theoretical considerations, we promote a position similar to
that of Latour. If, on the other hand, we emphasize the theoretical
considerations rather than the practical and technologically rich horizon,
we imply that science represents an ahistorical "reality" apart from a
worldly context.
=======================
What amusing here is that Crease stresses Latour's very *practical*
approach to these topics. He's not making some hifaultin point about the
world being in our heads. He's saying that our concepts derive from
practice, from practical gadgetry--a position I'd expect people here to
find congenial.
To get inside the conceptual arena of someone like Latour takes an *emic*
provisional assert to his discourse, an attempt at empathy, rather than a
strictly *etic* anatomization `from outside and above'. If those important
words `emic' and `etic' are unfamiliar, go google.
Damien Broderick
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