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| bruno latour science in action: Science in Action Bruno Latour, 1987 From weaker to stronger rhetoric : literature - Laboratories - From weak points to strongholds : machines - Insiders out - From short to longer networks : tribunals of reason - Centres of calculation. |
| bruno latour science in action: Science in Action Bruno Latour, 1987 |
| bruno latour science in action: Science in Action Bruno Latour, 1994 |
| bruno latour science in action: Laboratory Life Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, 2013-04-04 This highly original work presents laboratory science in a deliberately skeptical way: as an anthropological approach to the culture of the scientist. Drawing on recent work in literary criticism, the authors study how the social world of the laboratory produces papers and other texts,' and how the scientific vision of reality becomes that set of statements considered, for the time being, too expensive to change. The book is based on field work done by Bruno Latour in Roger Guillemin's laboratory at the Salk Institute and provides an important link between the sociology of modern sciences and laboratory studies in the history of science. |
| bruno latour science in action: Pandora’s Hope Bruno Latour, 1999-06-30 A scientist friend asked Bruno Latour point-blank: “Do you believe in reality?” Taken aback by this strange query, Latour offers his meticulous response in Pandora’s Hope. It is a remarkable argument for understanding the reality of science in practical terms. In this book, Latour, identified by Richard Rorty as the new “bête noire of the science worshipers,” gives us his most philosophically informed book since Science in Action. Through case studies of scientists in the Amazon analyzing soil and in Pasteur’s lab studying the fermentation of lactic acid, he shows us the myriad steps by which events in the material world are transformed into items of scientific knowledge. Through many examples in the world of technology, we see how the material and human worlds come together and are reciprocally transformed in this process. Why, Latour asks, did the idea of an independent reality, free of human interaction, emerge in the first place? His answer to this question, harking back to the debates between Might and Right narrated by Plato, points to the real stakes in the so-called science wars: the perplexed submission of ordinary people before the warring forces of claimants to the ultimate truth. |
| bruno latour science in action: Politics of Nature Bruno Latour, 2009-07-01 A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology—transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: “Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks.” Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society—and the constitution, in its place, of a collective, a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced. In a critique of the distinction between fact and value, Latour suggests a redescription of the type of political philosophy implicated in such a “commonsense” division—which here reveals itself as distinctly uncommonsensical and in fact fatal to democracy and to a healthy development of the sciences. Moving beyond the modernist institutions of “mononaturalism” and “multiculturalism,” Latour develops the idea of “multinaturalism,” a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming absolute reason but by “diplomats” who are flexible and open to experimentation. |
| bruno latour science in action: Science in Action Bruno Latour, 1987 |
| bruno latour science in action: The Pasteurization of France Bruno Latour, 1993-10-15 What can one man accomplish, even a great man and brilliant scientist? Although every town in France has a street named for Louis Pasteur, was he alone able to stop people from spitting, persuade them to dig drains, influence them to undergo vaccination? Pasteur’s success depended upon a whole network of forces, including the public hygiene movement, the medical profession (both military physicians and private practitioners), and colonial interests. It is the operation of these forces, in combination with the talent of Pasteur, that Bruno Latour sets before us as a prime example of science in action. Latour argues that the triumph of the biologist and his methodology must be understood within the particular historical convergence of competing social forces and conflicting interests. Yet Pasteur was not the only scientist working on the relationships of microbes and disease. How was he able to galvanize the other forces to support his own research? Latour shows Pasteur’s efforts to win over the French public—the farmers, industrialists, politicians, and much of the scientific establishment. Instead of reducing science to a given social environment, Latour tries to show the simultaneous building of a society and its scientific facts. The first section of the book, which retells the story of Pasteur, is a vivid description of an approach to science whose theoretical implications go far beyond a particular case study. In the second part of the book, “Irreductions,” Latour sets out his notion of the dynamics of conflict and interaction, of the “relation of forces.” Latour’s method of analysis cuts across and through the boundaries of the established disciplines of sociology, history, and the philosophy of science, to reveal how it is possible not to make the distinction between reason and force. Instead of leading to sociological reductionism, this method leads to an unexpected irreductionism. |
| bruno latour science in action: We Have Never Been Modern Bruno Latour, 2012-10-01 With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually a matter of faith. What does it mean to be modern? What difference does the scientific method make? The difference, Latour explains, is in our careful distinctions between nature and society, between human and thing, distinctions that our benighted ancestors, in their world of alchemy, astrology, and phrenology, never made. But alongside this purifying practice that defines modernity, there exists another seemingly contrary one: the construction of systems that mix politics, science, technology, and nature. The ozone debate is such a hybrid, in Latour’s analysis, as are global warming, deforestation, even the idea of black holes. As these hybrids proliferate, the prospect of keeping nature and culture in their separate mental chambers becomes overwhelming—and rather than try, Latour suggests, we should rethink our distinctions, rethink the definition and constitution of modernity itself. His book offers a new explanation of science that finally recognizes the connections between nature and culture—and so, between our culture and others, past and present. Nothing short of a reworking of our mental landscape, We Have Never Been Modern blurs the boundaries among science, the humanities, and the social sciences to enhance understanding on all sides. A summation of the work of one of the most influential and provocative interpreters of science, it aims at saving what is good and valuable in modernity and replacing the rest with a broader, fairer, and finer sense of possibility. |
| bruno latour science in action: Bruno Latour in Pieces Henning Schmidgen, 2014-10-15 Bruno Latour stirs things up. Latour began as a lover of science and technology, co-founder of actor-network theory, and philosopher of a modernity that had “never been modern.” In the meantime he is regarded not just as one of the most intelligent—and also popular—exponents of science studies but also as a major innovator of the social sciences, an exemplary wanderer who walks the line between the sciences and the humanities. This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the Latourian oeuvre, from his early anthropological studies in Abidjan (Ivory Coast), to influential books like Laboratory Life and Science in Action, and his most recent reflections on an empirical metaphysics of “modes of existence.” In the course of this enquiry it becomes clear that the basic problem to which Latour’s work responds is that of social tradition, the transmission of experience and knowledge. What this empirical philosopher constantly grapples with is the complex relationship of knowledge, time, and culture. |
| bruno latour science in action: Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, 1995 Illuminating conversations with one of France's most respected--and controversial--philosophers |
| bruno latour science in action: Reassembling the Social Bruno Latour, 2007-09-06 Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world's leading social theorists to how we understand society and the 'social'. Bruno Latour's contention is that the word 'social', as used by Social Scientists, has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stablilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. But Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as 'wooden' or 'steely'. Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling; and a type of material, distinct from others. Latour shows why 'the social' cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a 'social explanations' of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of 'the social' to redefine the notion, and allow it to trace connections again. It will then be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences, but using more refined tools. Drawing on his extensive work examining the 'assemblages' of nature, Latour finds it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly the exact content of what is assembled under the umbrella of Society. This approach, a 'sociology of associations', has become known as Actor-Network-Theory, and this book is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand Actor-Network Theory, or the ideas of one of its most influential proponents. |
| bruno latour science in action: Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics Graham Harman, 2009 Prince of Networks is the first treatment of Bruno Latour specifically as a philosopher. It has been eagerly awaited by readers of both Latour and Harman since their public discussion at the London School of Economics in February 2008. Part One covers four key works that display Latour’s underrated contributions to metaphysics: Irreductions, Science in Action, We Have Never Been Modern, and Pandora’s Hope. Harman contends that Latour is one of the central figures of contemporary philosophy, with a highly original ontology centered in four key concepts: actants, irreduction, translation, and alliance. In Part Two, Harman summarizes Latour’s most important philosophical insights, ... |
| bruno latour science in action: Aramis, Or The Love of Technology Bruno Latour, 1996-04-15 Bruno Latour has written a unique and wonderful tale of a technological dream gone wrong. The story of the birth and death of Aramis—the guided-transportation system intended for Paris—is told in this thought-provoking and fictional account by several different parties: an engineer and his professor; company executives and elected officials; a sociologist; and finally Aramis itself, who delivers a passionate plea on behalf of technological innovations that risk being abandoned by their makers. As the young engineer and professor follow Aramis’s trail—conducting interviews, analyzing documents, assessing the evidence—perspectives keep shifting: the truth is revealed as multilayered, unascertainable, comprising an array of possibilities worthy of Rashomon. This charming and profound book, part novel and part sociological study, is Latour at his thought-provoking best. |
| bruno latour science in action: An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence Bruno Latour, 2013-08-19 In a new approach to philosophical anthropology, Bruno Latour offers answers to questions raised in We Have Never Been Modern: If not modern, what have we been, and what values should we inherit? An Inquiry into Modes of Existence offers a new basis for diplomatic encounters with other societies at a time of ecological crisis. |
| bruno latour science in action: Computational Thinking Peter J. Denning, Matti Tedre, 2019-05-14 This pocket-sized introduction to computational thinking and problem-solving traces its genealogy centuries before the digital computer. A few decades into the digital era, scientists discovered that thinking in terms of computation made possible an entirely new way of organizing scientific investigation. Eventually, every field had a computational branch: computational physics, computational biology, computational sociology. More recently, “computational thinking” has become part of the K–12 curriculum. But what is computational thinking? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers an accessible overview—tracing a genealogy that begins centuries before digital computers and portraying computational thinking as the pioneers of computing have described it. The authors explain that computational thinking (CT) is not a set of concepts for programming; it is a way of thinking that is honed through practice: the mental skills for designing computations to do jobs for us, and for explaining and interpreting the world as a complex of information processes. Mathematically trained experts (known as “computers”) who performed complex calculations as teams engaged in CT long before electronic computers. In each chapter, the author identify different dimensions of today's highly developed CT: • Computational Methods • Computing Machines • Computing Education • Software Engineering • Computational Science • Design Along the way, they debunk inflated claims for CT and computation while making clear the power of CT in all its complexity and multiplicity. |
| bruno latour science in action: Facing Gaia Bruno Latour, 2017-09-05 The emergence of modern sciences in the seventeenth century profoundly renewed our understanding of nature. For the last three centuries new ideas of nature have been continually developed by theology, politics, economics, and science, especially the sciences of the material world. The situation is even more unstable today, now that we have entered an ecological mutation of unprecedented scale. Some call it the Anthropocene, but it is best described as a new climatic regime. And a new regime it certainly is, since the many unexpected connections between human activity and the natural world oblige every one of us to reopen the earlier notions of nature and redistribute what had been packed inside. So the question now arises: what will replace the old ways of looking at nature? This book explores a potential candidate proposed by James Lovelock when he chose the name 'Gaia' for the fragile, complex system through which living phenomena modify the Earth. The fact that he was immediately misunderstood proves simply that his readers have tried to fit this new notion into an older frame, transforming Gaia into a single organism, a kind of giant thermostat, some sort of New Age goddess, or even divine Providence. In this series of lectures on 'natural religion,' Bruno Latour argues that the complex and ambiguous figure of Gaia offers, on the contrary, an ideal way to disentangle the ethical, political, theological, and scientific aspects of the now obsolete notion of nature. He lays the groundwork for a future collaboration among scientists, theologians, activists, and artists as they, and we, begin to adjust to the new climatic regime. |
| bruno latour science in action: After Lockdown Bruno Latour, 2021-09-09 After the harrowing experience of the pandemic and lockdown, both states and individuals have been searching for ways to exit the crisis, many hoping to return as soon as possible to ‘the world as it was before the pandemic’. But there is another way to learn the lessons of this ordeal: as inhabitants of the earth, we may not be able to exit lockdown so easily after all, since the global health crisis is embedded in another larger and more serious crisis – that brought about by the New Climate Regime. Learning to live in lockdown might be an opportunity to be seized: a dress-rehearsal for the climate mutation, an opportunity to understand at last where we – inhabitants of the earth – live, what kind of place ‘earth’ is and how we will be able to orient ourselves and exist in this world in the years to come. We might finally be able to explore the land in which we live, together with all other living beings, begin to understand the true nature of the climate mutation we are living through and discover what kind of freedom is possible – a freedom differently situated and differently understood. In this sequel to his bestselling book Down to Earth, Bruno Latour provides a compass for this necessary re-orientation of our lives, outlining the metaphysics of confinement and deconfinement with which we will all be obliged to come to terms by the strange times in which we are living. |
| bruno latour science in action: Ways of Knowing John V. Pickstone, 2000 This classic MUP text discusses the historical development of science, technology and medicine in Western Europe and North America from the Renaissance to the present. Combining theoretical discussion and empirical illustration, it redefines the geography of science, technology and medicine. |
| bruno latour science in action: Critical Zones Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel, 2020-10-13 Artists and writers portray the disorientation of a world facing climate change. This monumental volume, drawn from a 2020 exhibition at the ZKM Center for Art and Media, portrays the disorientation of life in world facing climate change. It traces this disorientation to the disconnection between two different definitions of the land on which modernizing humans live: the sovereign nation from which they derive their rights, and another one, hidden, from which they gain their wealth—the land they live on, and the land they live from. Charting the land they will inhabit, they find not a globe, not the iconic “blue marble,” but a series of critical zones—patchy, heterogenous, discontinuous. With short pieces, longer essays, and more than 500 illustrations, the contributors explore the new landscape on which it may be possible for humans to land—what it means to be “on Earth,” whether the critical zone, the Gaia, or the terrestrial. They consider geopolitical conflicts and tools redesigned for the new “geopolitics of life forms.” The “thought exhibition” described in this book can opens a fictional space to explore the new climate regime; the rest of the story is unknown. Contributors include Dipesh Chakrabarty, Pierre Charbonnier, Emanuele Coccia, Vinciane Despret, Jerôme Gaillarde, Donna Haraway, Joseph Leo Koerner, Timothy Lenton, Richard Powers, Simon Schaffer, Isabelle Stengers, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Jan A. Zalasiewicz, Siegfried Zielinski Copublished with ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe |
| bruno latour science in action: Down to Earth Bruno Latour, 2018-11-26 The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people. What holds these three phenomena together is the conviction, shared by some powerful people, that the ecological threat is real and that the only way for them to survive is to abandon any pretense at sharing a common future with the rest of the world. Hence their flight offshore and their massive investment in climate change denial. The Left has been slow to turn its attention to this new situation. It is still organized along an axis that goes from investment in local values to the hope of globalization and just at the time when, everywhere, people dissatisfied with the ideal of modernity are turning back to the protection of national or even ethnic borders. This is why it is urgent to shift sideways and to define politics as what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national. Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge. Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today. |
| bruno latour science in action: Bruno Latour Gerard de Vries, 2018-02-12 Bruno Latour is among the most important figures in contemporary philosophy and social science. His ethnographic studies have revolutionized our understanding of areas as diverse as science, law, politics and religion. To facilitate a more realistic understanding of the world, Latour has introduced a radically fresh philosophical terminology and a new approach to social science, ‘Actor-Network Theory’. In seminal works such as Laboratory Life, We Have Never Been Modern and An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Latour has outlined an alternative to the foundational categories of ‘modern’ western thought Ð particularly its distinction between society and nature Ð that has major consequences for our understanding of the ecological crisis and of the role of science in democratic societies. Latour’s ‘empirical philosophy’ has evolved considerably over the past four decades. In this lucid and compelling book, Gerard de Vries provides one of the first overviews of Latour’s work. He guides readers through Latour’s main publications, from his early ethnographies to his more recent philosophical works, showing with considerable skill how Latour’s ideas have developed. This book will be of great value to students and scholars attempting to come to terms with the immense challenge posed by Latour’s thought. It will be of interest to those studying philosophy, anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, and almost all other branches of the social sciences and humanities. |
| bruno latour science in action: A History of Technoscience David F. Channell, 2017-06-14 Are science and technology independent of one another? Is technology dependent upon science, and if so, how is it dependent? Is science dependent upon technology, and if so how is it dependent? Or, are science and technology becoming so interdependent that the line dividing them has become totally erased? This book charts the history of technoscience from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century and shows how the military–industrial–academic complex and big science combined to create new examples of technoscience in such areas as the nuclear arms race, the space race, the digital age, and the new worlds of nanotechnology and biotechnology. |
| bruno latour science in action: Science in Democracy Mark B. Brown, 2009 An argument that draws on canonical and contemporary thinkers in political theory and science studies--from Machiavelli to Latour--for insights on bringing scientific expertise into representative democracy. |
| bruno latour science in action: Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition Paul Lynch, Nathaniel Rivers, 2015-04-20 Best known for his books We Have Never Been Modern, Laboratory Life, and Science in Action, Bruno Latour has inspired scholarship across many disciplines. In the past few years, the fields of rhetoric and composition have witnessed an explosion of interest in Latour’s work. Editors Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers have assembled leading and emerging scholars in order to focus the debate on what Latour means for the study of persuasion and written communication. Essays in this volume discern, rearticulate, and occasionally critique rhetoric and composition’s growing interest in Latour. These contributions include work on topics such as agency, argument, rhetorical history, pedagogy, and technology, among others. Contributors explain key terms, identify implications of Latour’s work for rhetoric and composition, and explore how his theories might inform writing pedagogies and be used to build research methodologies. Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition shows how Latour’s groundbreaking theories on technology, agency, and networks might be taken up, enriched, and extended to challenge scholars in rhetorical studies (both English and communications), composition, and writing studies to rethink some of the field’s most basic assumptions. It is set to become the standard introduction that will appeal not only to those scholars already interested in Latour but also those approaching Latour for the first time. |
| bruno latour science in action: An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies Sergio Sismondo, 2011-08-17 An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, Second Edition reflects the latest advances in the field while continuing to provide students with a road map to the complex interdisciplinary terrain of science and technology studies. Distinctive in its attention to both the underlying philosophical and sociological aspects of science and technology Explores core topics such as realism and social construction, discourse and rhetoric, objectivity, and the public understanding of science Includes numerous empirical studies and illustrative examples to elucidate the topics discussed Now includes new material on political economies of scientific and technological knowledge, and democratizing technical decisions Other features of the new edition include improved readability, updated references, chapter reorganization, and more material on medicine and technology |
| bruno latour science in action: The SAGE Handbook of Geographical Knowledge John A Agnew, David N Livingstone, 2011-03-04 Broad in scope and edited by two massive names in geography, this is a critical exploration of how the field has emerged and fared over the course of its modern institutionalization. |
| bruno latour science in action: Postphenomenology Don Ihde, 1995-06-21 Postphenomenology is a fascinating investigation of the relationships between global culture and technology. The impressive range of subjects to which Don Ihde applies his skill as a phenomenologist is unified by what he describes as a concern which arises with respect to one of the now major trends of Euro-American philosophy--its textism. He adds, I show my worries to be less about the loss of subjects or authors, than I do about [there] not being bodies or perceivers. |
| bruno latour science in action: The Tyranny of Science Paul K. Feyerabend, 2011-05-06 Paul Feyerabend is one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century and his book Against Method is an international bestseller. In this new book he masterfully weaves together the main elements of his mature philosophy into a gripping tale: the story of the rise of rationalism in Ancient Greece that eventually led to the entrenchment of a mythical ‘scientific worldview’. In this wide-ranging and accessible book Feyerabend challenges some modern myths about science, including the myth that ‘science is successful’. He argues that some very basic assumptions about science are simply false and that substantial parts of scientific ideology were created on the basis of superficial generalizations that led to absurd misconceptions about the nature of human life. Far from solving the pressing problems of our age, such as war and poverty, scientific theorizing glorifies ephemeral generalities, at the cost of confronting the real particulars that make life meaningful. Objectivity and generality are based on abstraction, and as such, they come at a high price. For abstraction drives a wedge between our thoughts and our experience, resulting in the degeneration of both. Theoreticians, as opposed to practitioners, tend to impose a tyranny on the concepts they use, abstracting away from the subjective experience that makes life meaningful. Feyerabend concludes by arguing that practical experience is a better guide to reality than any theory, by itself, ever could be, and he stresses that there is no tyranny that cannot be resisted, even if it is exerted with the best possible intentions. Provocative and iconoclastic, The Tyranny of Science is one of Feyerabend’s last books and one of his best. It will be widely read by everyone interested in the role that science has played, and continues to play, in the shaping of the modern world. |
| bruno latour science in action: The Science of Passionate Interests Bruno Latour, Vincent Antonin Lépinay, 2009 How can economics become genuinely quantitative? This is the question that French sociologist Gabriel Tarde tackled at the end of his career, and in this pamphlet, Bruno Latour and Vincent Antonin Lépinay offer a lively introduction to the work of the forgotten genius of nineteenth-century social thought. Tarde's solution was in total contradiction to the dominant views of his time: to quantify the connections between people and goods, you need to grasp passionate interests. In Tarde's view, capitalism is not a system of cold calculations--rather it is a constant amplification in the intensity and reach of passions. In a stunning anticipation of contemporary economic anthropology, Tarde's work defines an alternative path beyond the two illusions responsible for so much modern misery: the adepts of the Invisible Hand and the devotees of the Visible Hand will learn how to escape the sterility of their fight and recognize the originality of a thinker for whom everything is intersubjective, hence quantifiable. At a time when the regulation of financial markets is the subject of heated debate, Latour and Lépinay provide a valuable historical perspective on the fundamental nature of capitalism. |
| bruno latour science in action: Leviathan and the Air-Pump Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer, 2011-08-15 Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. The issues at stake in their disputes ranged from the physical integrity of the air-pump to the intellectual integrity of the knowledge it might yield. Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild. The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer use the confrontation between Hobbes and Boyle as a way of understanding what was at stake in the early history of scientific experimentation. They describe the protagonists' divergent views of natural knowledge, and situate the Hobbes-Boyle disputes within contemporary debates over the role of intellectuals in public life and the problems of social order and assent in Restoration England. In a new introduction, the authors describe how science and its social context were understood when this book was first published, and how the study of the history of science has changed since then. |
| bruno latour science in action: Science Fiction Roger Luckhurst, 2005-05-06 In this new and timely cultural history of science fiction, Roger Luckhurst examines the genre from its origins in the late nineteenth century to its latest manifestations. The book introduces and explicates major works of science fiction literature by placing them in a series of contexts, using the history of science and technology, political and economic history, and cultural theory to develop the means for understanding the unique qualities of the genre. Luckhurst reads science fiction as a literature of modernity. His astute analysis examines how the genre provides a constantly modulating record of how human embodiment is transformed by scientific and technological change and how the very sense of self is imaginatively recomposed in popular fictions that range from utopian possibility to Gothic terror. This highly readable study charts the overlapping yet distinct histories of British and American science fiction, with commentary on the central authors, magazines, movements and texts from 1880 to the present day. It will be an invaluable guide and resource for all students taking courses on science fiction, technoculture and popular literature, but will equally be fascinating for anyone who has ever enjoyed a science fiction book. |
| bruno latour science in action: Science Observed Karin Knorr-Cetina, Michael Joseph Mulkay, 1983 |
| bruno latour science in action: Shaping Technology / Building Society Wiebe E. Bijker, John Law, 1994-09-29 Building on the influential book The Social Construction of Technological Systems, this volume carries forward the project of creating a theory of technological development and implementation that is strongly grounded in both sociology and history. Technology is everywhere, yet a theory of technology and its social dimension remains to be fully developed. Building on the influential book The Social Construction of Technological Systems, this volume carries forward the project of creating a theory of technological development and implementation that is strongly grounded in both sociology and history. The 12 essays address the central question of how technologies become stabilized, how they attain a final form and use that is generally accepted. The essays are tied together by a general introduction, part introductions, and a theoretical conclusion. The first part of the book examines and criticizes the idea that technologies have common life cycles; three case studies cover the history of a successful but never produced British jet fighter, the manipulation of patents by a French R&D company to gain a market foothold, and the managed development of high-intensity fluorescent lighting to serve the interests of electricity suppliers as well as the producing company. The second part looks at broader interactions shaping technology and its social context: the question of who was to define steel, the determination of what constitutes radioactive waste and its proper disposal, and the social construction of motion pictures as exemplified by Thomas Edison's successful development of the medium and its commercial failure. The last part offers theoretical studies suggesting alternative approaches to sociotechnologies; two studies argue for a strong sociotechnology in which artifact and social context are viewed as a single seamless web, while the third looks at the ways in which a social program is a technology. |
| bruno latour science in action: Masters of All They Surveyed D. Graham Burnett, 2000 Chronicling the British pursuit of the legendary El Dorado, Masters of All They Surveyed tells the fascinating story of geography, cartography, and scientific exploration in Britain's unique South American colony, Guyana. How did nineteenth-century Europeans turn areas they called terra incognita into bounded colonial territories? How did a tender-footed gentleman, predisposed to seasickness (and unable to swim), make his way up churning rivers into thick jungle, arid savanna, and forbidding mountain ranges, survive for the better part of a decade, and emerge with a map? What did that map mean? In answering these questions, D. Graham Burnett brings to light the work of several such explorers, particularly Sir Robert H. Schomburgk, the man who claimed to be the first to reach the site of Ralegh's El Dorado. Commissioned by the Royal Geographical Society and later by the British Crown, Schomburgk explored and mapped regions in modern Brazil, Venezuela, and Guyana, always in close contact with Amerindian communities. Drawing heavily on the maps, reports, and letters that Schomburgk sent back to England, and especially on the luxuriant images of survey landmarks in his Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana (reproduced in color in this book), Burnett shows how a vast network of traverse surveys, illustrations, and travel narratives not only laid out the official boundaries of British Guiana but also marked out a symbolic landscape that fired the British imperial imagination. Engagingly written and beautifully illustrated, Masters of All They Surveyed will interest anyone who wants to understand the histories of colonialism and science. |
| bruno latour science in action: Drawing Theories Apart David Kaiser, 2009-11-15 Winner of the 2007 Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society. Feynman diagrams have revolutionized nearly every aspect of theoretical physics since the middle of the twentieth century. Introduced by the American physicist Richard Feynman (1918-88) soon after World War II as a means of simplifying lengthy calculations in quantum electrodynamics, they soon gained adherents in many branches of the discipline. Yet as new physicists adopted the tiny line drawings, they also adapted the diagrams and introduced their own interpretations. Drawing Theories Apart traces how generations of young theorists learned to frame their research in terms of the diagrams—and how both the diagrams and their users were molded in the process. Drawing on rich archival materials, interviews, and more than five hundred scientific articles from the period, Drawing Theories Apart uses the Feynman diagrams as a means to explore the development of American postwar physics. By focusing on the ways young physicists learned new calculational skills, David Kaiser frames his story around the crafting and stabilizing of the basic tools in the physicist's kit—thus offering the first book to follow the diagrams once they left Feynman's hands and entered the physics vernacular. |
| bruno latour science in action: How Well Do Facts Travel? Peter Howlett, Mary S. Morgan, 2010-11-15 This book discusses how facts travel, and when and why they sometimes travel well enough to acquire a life of their own. Whether or not facts travel in this manner depends not only on their character and ability to play useful roles elsewhere, but also on the labels, packaging, vehicles and company that take them across difficult terrains and over disciplinary boundaries. These diverse stories of travelling facts, ranging from architecture to nanotechnology and from romance fiction to climate science, change the way we see the nature of facts. Facts are far from the bland and rather boring but useful objects that scientists and humanists produce and fit together to make narratives, arguments and evidence. Rather, their extraordinary abilities to travel well shows when, how and why facts can be used to build further knowledge beyond and away from their sites of original production and intended use. |
| bruno latour science in action: Experimental Inquiries H.E. Le Grand, 2012-12-06 The institutionalization of History and Philosophy of Science as a distinct field of scholarly endeavour began comparatively early -- though not always under that name -- in the Australasian region. An initial lecturing appointment was made at the University of Melbourne imme diately after the Second World War, in 1946, and other appointments followed as the subject underwent an expansion during the 1950s and 1960s similar to that which took place in other parts of the world. Today there are major Departments at the University of Melbourne, the University of New South Wales and the University of Wollongong, and smaller groups active in many other parts of Australia and in New Zealand. 'Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Science' aims to provide a distinctive publication outlet for Australian and New Zealand scholars working in the general area of history, philosophy and social studies of science. Each volume comprises a group of essays on a connected theme, edited by an Australian or a New Zealander with special expertise in that particular area. Papers address general issues, however, rather than local ones; parochial topics are avoided. Further more, though in each volume a majority of the contributors is from Australia or New Zealand, contributions from elsewhere are by no means ruled out. Quite the reverse, in fact -- they are actively encour aged wherever appropriate to the balance of the volume in question. |
| bruno latour science in action: Higher Superstition Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt, 1997-11-06 With the emergence of cultural studies and the blurring of once-clear academic boundaries, scholars are turning to Subjects far outside their traditional disciplines and areas of expertise. In Higher Superstition scientists Paul Gross and Norman Levitt raise serious questions about the growing criticism of science by humanists and social scientists on the academic left. This paperback edition of Higher Superstition includes a new afterword by the authors. |
| bruno latour science in action: War of the Worlds Bruno Latour, John Tresch, 2002-01 Bruno Latour is best known for his work in the cultural study of science. In this pamphlet he turns his attention to another worthy pursuit: the project of peace. As one might expect, Latour gives us a radically different picture of this project than Kant or the philosophes, asserting that the West has been in a constant state of war both with other cultures and its own—although unwittingly so. Read through the lens of his trademark take on the modern, his arguments are original, thoughtful, and, as usual, provocative. |
Bruno Latour's Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages, and
France and America, and the influence of his Science in Action (1987) made him an important figure in the so-called Science Wars of the 1990s. A particular methodology, "Actor-Network Theory" (ANT), has been extracted from this early work, although Latour himself has until recently been reluctant to use these terms.
Bruno Latour - The Hanged Man
2 Science in Action (1) Looking for a way in Where can we start a study of science and technology? The choice of a way in crucially depends on good timing. In 1985, in Paris, John Whittaker obtains 'nice pictures' of DNA on a 'good machine'. In 1951 in Cambridge Watson and Crick
In Conversation with Bruno Latour: Historiography of “Science in Action”
Bruno Latour’s Science in Action, published in 1987, is a guidebook for a scholar – historian, anthropologist, or sociologist – who wishes to “follow scientists and engineers through society.” 1 Latour leads the reader to several construction sites of “facts and machines,” urging
bruno-latour-science-in-action - mycourses.aalto.fi
Instead of black boxing the technical aspects of science and then looking for social influences and biases, we realised in the Introduction how much simpler it was.to be there before the box closes and becomes black.
Bruno Latour Science In Action
Latour's Science in Action provides a powerful framework for understanding the social and political dimensions of scientific knowledge. By challenging the traditional view of science as objective and detached, it compels us to engage with the complex networks of …
Scientific Objects and Legal Objectivity - Bruno Latour
Scientific Objects and Legal Objectivity. Bruno Latour (kindly translated by Alain Pottage, revised by the author) Chapter for a book Making Persons and Things. Cambridge University Press edited by Alain Pottage. Portrait of the Conseil d’Etat as a laboratory.
Another turn after ANT: An interview with Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour’s work on actor–network theory (ANT) put him at the forefront of a wave of ethnographic research on scientists ‘in action’ in their laboratories and in the wider world.
Fabricating the Truth About Bruno Latour(s) - JSTOR
In his lifetime, Bruno Latour (1947-2022) made many provocative and controversial arguments, such as about the nature of the practices of the natural sciences, and against standard social scientific forms of critique.
One More Turn after the Social Turn: Easing Science ... - Bruno Latour
The only research programs that have been successful are those which put to use a fine-grained sociology: ethnomethodology, micro-sociology, symbolic interactionism, cognitive anthropology, cultural history, history of practices.
Agents in Inter-Action: Bruno Latour and Agency - JSTOR
This paper aims to describe Bruno Latour s contributions to the theory and methodology of agency in the Philosophy of Science and to apply them to the study of agency in archaeology.
Bruno Latour Science In Action (Download Only)
Bruno Latour's Science in Action is a seminal text that continues to provoke and inspire debate. By meticulously documenting the everyday practices of scientists, he revolutionized our understanding of science, challenging traditional notions of objectivity and revealing the complex social and material processes that shape scientific knowledge.
ESSAYS ON SCIENCE AND SOCIETY: Bruno Latour - University …
Bruno Latour. In the last century and a half, scientific development has been breathtaking, but the understanding of this progress has dramatically changed. It is characterized by the transition from the culture of “science” to the culture of “research.” Science is certainty; research is uncertainty.
Actor Network Theory, Bruno Latour, and the CSI - shs.hal.science
Science in Action, a book that I wrote in between these two phases, was published in 1987; at the very moment when I was writing up the investigation begun in 1986 into the various regimes of veridiction.
ACTOR NETWORK THEORY - SAGE Publications Inc
Actor network theory (ANT), also known as enrolment theory or the sociology of translation, emerged during the mid-1980s, primarily with the work of Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law.
Bruno Latour SCIE - innovation.disi.unitn.it
2 Science in Action (1) Looking for a way in Where can we start a study of science and technology? The choice of a way in crucially depends on good timing. In 1985, in Paris, John Whittaker obtains 'nice pictures' of DNA on a 'good machine'. In 1951 in Cambridge Watson and Crick
WHEN THINGS STRIKE BACK – A POSSIBLE - Bruno Latour
The contribution of the field of science and technology studies (STS) to main stream sociology has so far been slim because of a misunderstanding about what it means to provide a social explanation of a piece of science or of an artefact. The type of explanation possible for religion, art or popular culture no longer
CITATION FOR BRUNO LATOUR, - JSTOR
In 1987, Science in Action was published. It was written for the Open University Press, and by now has been translated into three other languages, including French.3 With this book, Bruno Latour achieved broad visibility and a wide impact in social studies …
Understanding science-in-the-making by letting scientific …
Latour encourages us to use science-in-the-making as an entry point to understanding science, because it allows us to see how scientific knowledge is constituted and through which processes the ‘absolute certainties’ of ready-made science appear.
The promises of constructivism - Bruno Latour
The two things science studies did not need were to replace the fascinating site it was uncovering by an unconstructed homogeneous overarching indisputable ‘society’ and of course an unconstructed, already there, indisputable ‘nature’. This is why science studies found itself fighting on two fronts : the first
BOOK REVIEWS - JSTOR
Bruno Latour delights some of us and infuriates others, but either way he has, for the past decade, been one of the most brilliant and original writers about science. Science in Action is about "technoscience", a neologism intended to put "science, technology and society" into one word. It expresses a philosophy that denies that there is ...
Bruno Latour's Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages, and
France and America, and the influence of his Science in Action (1987) made him an important figure in the so-called Science Wars of the 1990s. A particular methodology, "Actor-Network Theory" (ANT), has been extracted from this early work, although Latour himself has until recently been reluctant to use these terms.
Bruno Latour - The Hanged Man
2 Science in Action (1) Looking for a way in Where can we start a study of science and technology? The choice of a way in crucially depends on good timing. In 1985, in Paris, John Whittaker obtains 'nice pictures' of DNA on a 'good machine'. In 1951 in …
In Conversation with Bruno Latour: Historiography of “Science in Action”
Bruno Latour’s Science in Action, published in 1987, is a guidebook for a scholar – historian, anthropologist, or sociologist – who wishes to “follow scientists and engineers through society.” 1 Latour leads the reader to several construction sites of “facts and machines,” urging
bruno-latour-science-in-action - mycourses.aalto.fi
Instead of black boxing the technical aspects of science and then looking for social influences and biases, we realised in the Introduction how much simpler it was.to be there before the box closes and becomes black.
Bruno Latour Science In Action
Latour's Science in Action provides a powerful framework for understanding the social and political dimensions of scientific knowledge. By challenging the traditional view of science as objective and detached, it compels us to engage with the complex networks of actors that shape scientific findings.
Scientific Objects and Legal Objectivity - Bruno Latour
Scientific Objects and Legal Objectivity. Bruno Latour (kindly translated by Alain Pottage, revised by the author) Chapter for a book Making Persons and Things. Cambridge University Press edited by Alain Pottage. Portrait of the Conseil d’Etat as a laboratory.
Another turn after ANT: An interview with Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour’s work on actor–network theory (ANT) put him at the forefront of a wave of ethnographic research on scientists ‘in action’ in their laboratories and in the wider world.
Fabricating the Truth About Bruno Latour(s) - JSTOR
In his lifetime, Bruno Latour (1947-2022) made many provocative and controversial arguments, such as about the nature of the practices of the natural sciences, and against standard social scientific forms of critique.
One More Turn after the Social Turn: Easing Science ... - Bruno Latour
The only research programs that have been successful are those which put to use a fine-grained sociology: ethnomethodology, micro-sociology, symbolic interactionism, cognitive anthropology, cultural history, history of practices.
Agents in Inter-Action: Bruno Latour and Agency - JSTOR
This paper aims to describe Bruno Latour s contributions to the theory and methodology of agency in the Philosophy of Science and to apply them to the study of agency in archaeology.
Bruno Latour Science In Action (Download Only)
Bruno Latour's Science in Action is a seminal text that continues to provoke and inspire debate. By meticulously documenting the everyday practices of scientists, he revolutionized our understanding of science, challenging traditional notions of objectivity and revealing the complex social and material processes that shape scientific knowledge.
ESSAYS ON SCIENCE AND SOCIETY: Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour. In the last century and a half, scientific development has been breathtaking, but the understanding of this progress has dramatically changed. It is characterized by the transition from the culture of “science” to the culture of “research.” Science is certainty; research is uncertainty.
Actor Network Theory, Bruno Latour, and the CSI - shs.hal.science
Science in Action, a book that I wrote in between these two phases, was published in 1987; at the very moment when I was writing up the investigation begun in 1986 into the various regimes of veridiction.
ACTOR NETWORK THEORY - SAGE Publications Inc
Actor network theory (ANT), also known as enrolment theory or the sociology of translation, emerged during the mid-1980s, primarily with the work of Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law.
Bruno Latour SCIE - innovation.disi.unitn.it
2 Science in Action (1) Looking for a way in Where can we start a study of science and technology? The choice of a way in crucially depends on good timing. In 1985, in Paris, John Whittaker obtains 'nice pictures' of DNA on a 'good machine'. In 1951 in …
WHEN THINGS STRIKE BACK – A POSSIBLE - Bruno Latour
The contribution of the field of science and technology studies (STS) to main stream sociology has so far been slim because of a misunderstanding about what it means to provide a social explanation of a piece of science or of an artefact. The type of explanation possible for religion, art or popular culture no longer
CITATION FOR BRUNO LATOUR, - JSTOR
In 1987, Science in Action was published. It was written for the Open University Press, and by now has been translated into three other languages, including French.3 With this book, Bruno Latour achieved broad visibility and a wide impact in …
Understanding science-in-the-making by letting scientific …
Latour encourages us to use science-in-the-making as an entry point to understanding science, because it allows us to see how scientific knowledge is constituted and through which processes the ‘absolute certainties’ of ready-made science appear.
The promises of constructivism - Bruno Latour
The two things science studies did not need were to replace the fascinating site it was uncovering by an unconstructed homogeneous overarching indisputable ‘society’ and of course an unconstructed, already there, indisputable ‘nature’. This is why science studies found itself fighting on two fronts : the first
BOOK REVIEWS - JSTOR
Bruno Latour delights some of us and infuriates others, but either way he has, for the past decade, been one of the most brilliant and original writers about science. Science in Action is about "technoscience", a neologism intended to put "science, technology and society" into one word. It expresses a philosophy that denies that there is ...
