On Post-Modernist Philosophy of Science (2000)
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I think it's safe to say that, with this paragraph, Bruno Latour failed the Ideological Turing Test: this conflation of philosophical relativism with the physical theory of relativity is not something that would ever be uttered by someone who knew what the latter is.
It gets worse from there. Please, anyone who's tempted to write a dialogue with a fictional person holding an opposing viewpoint: talk to one first! Find out what their arguments really are! And, if possible, learn their views well enough that your summary would seem accurate to one of them.
Amen. It might also prevent the deliberately insulting language that Latour adopted. Clearly, he holds the scientific camp in contempt. An actual dialog might have demonstrated to him that there was more there than ignorance and mistaken ideas.
I think he makes a good point about a mutual misunderstanding:
> The history of science as presented in science texts, especially older ones, is rightly unsatisfactory to sociologists. In the interests of providing students with a heuristic framework (frequently a historical approach is the best way to explain a complex concept) and a sense of historical orientation, the accounts were streamlined to the point where they presented a highly linear view of science devoid of false starts, blind alleys, and personality clashes. The reason textbooks do it perhaps a tad better than they used to, by the way, is partly due to the insights of sociologists.
> Sociologists, on the other hand, need to realize that the way they present the history of science can seem just as distorted. However honorable their intent, their language seems at times to deny the existence of objective knowledge.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160529025038/http://www.cardif...
We might know objectively that matter is made of atoms, and sociologists know that too; but Dalton, Boyle and Lavoisier didn't know it. It's easy to tell a story about what they did and why they did it, and the story will end with everyone finding out that matter is made of atoms. But, in order for the beginning of that story to be an objective explanation of what people did, it has to make sense whether or not matter turns out to be made of atoms.
Causality runs forwards in time. Therefore, atoms were discovered as a result of the actions of people who didn't know about atoms, and atoms did not directly affect the actions that led to their discovery.
If atoms caused the discovery of atoms, it would have happened ten billion years ago, not two hundred.
See an old article posted here on discovery of an explanation for scurvy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1174912. Note that a correct explanation can help us to understand the partial success of past theories and also why they dont work fully. It is also important to understand the dynamics of the social groups and who is more likely to succeed.
Your link is a good post, but "does deny" is too strong, a better expression of the attitude is "bracketing/setting-aside the issue itself and studying the social processes involved in both sides of the argument, how it influences which arguments are accepted". Note that scientists and programmers often make these types of arguments as well. For instance, a scientist can say that funding committees are biased as they represent the old guard. "Worse is Better" is an argument which uses sociology kind of arguments to explain popularity of programming languages, though a sociologist probably wouldn't get into objective assessments like the popular languages are worse.
BTW, I dont agree with the main post that philosophy is bunk. Also, I think that there is construction in science, but one has to be clear at what level the construction happens. There are strong internal constraints which dont allow one to arbitarily use a different Periodic Table for instance.
I'm afraid I don't follow. If the basic laws of chemistry and molecular composition were different, we wouldn't have heard of Dalton, Boyle, and Lavoisier. Instead, we'd refer to people who happened to choose fruitful lines of inquiry in that universe.
Maybe I just don't properly understand the whole science wars thing. It seems so obvious as to be uncontroversial that science is a thing people do and can be studied as such, but this is probably an unhelpful strawman (steelman?) I've substituted for what's really being argued. Or maybe this all died out in the 00s.
I have some questions about your argument that the atoms didn't cause their discovery, but I don't think I have time to formulate them clearly right now, so I'll just stop with thanking you for the link. :-)
My account is obviously bullshit, because the luminiferous aether doesn't exist. So, if your story is not bullshit, there must be a specific causal link in my story that doesn't have an analog in yours. Find it.
Isn't this conflating objective reality (which we can only theorize about) with objective knowledge about reality (which can improve over time but never be perfect)?
The theory of the luminiferous aether "caused" the Michelson-Morley experiment, the outcome of which was inconsistent with the luminiferous aether actually existing. The theory of atoms "caused" many experiments, the outcome of which was consistent with atoms actually existing.
What causes theories to exist? Conjecture and criticism motivated by logical and empirical problems. The problems are "caused" by objective reality, of which atoms are one part (at a certain level of explanation, anyway).
An account of the development of scientific knowledge should explain the development of these problems, the conjectured solutions, and criticism made to them, and why the current explanations are the best available in light of this history. At no point do we need to claim that the current explanations are the best possible, but they are still objective knowledge.
This is starting to sound like history or sociology. The next step comes when you notice that the "the theory of" keys on your typewriter are getting excessively worn, and adopt a convention that any reference to "atoms" actually means "the atomic theory of matter".
There's a convention in scientific reasoning, that I'm not allowed to say, "Einstein believed that spacetime is curved", although in fact he did. This is a safety measure: if we forbid people from saying that, we don't lose much, but we avoid some common ways of fooling ourselves.
Sociologists are coming from the other side. They are allowed to say, "because Einstein believed that spacetime is curved", but they can't say "... because spacetime is curved." The readers know that spacetime is curved, and it's tempting for them to forget they are not the people whose actions they want to explain, and those people acted as if spacetime were flat. Perhaps they noticed things that were inconsistent with spacetime being flat. They never directly noticed that spacetime was curved: if it were possible to notice that directly, no one would ever have believed otherwise.
Like what is the person that discovered them made up of, if not atoms?
What were those scientists made of, exactly?
Scientists feel they need to portray absolute confidence because they know septics will latch onto anything to justify their views (see climate change). The problem is that disinterested parties, the sociologists, identify this conflict as a problem that scientists seem to ignore. Should the general public better understand science scientists could possibly shed the absolute confidence act, mooting the problem.
It's like talking to an ER doctor. The doc knows he is only 80% sure of a diagnosis, but the patient needs to see absolute confidence. They are the ones going under the knife. Should the patient better appreciate the science, the doc might be more honest. But given the average patient, the public, the act is necessity.
With Science and Technology no longer needed to fight against a powerful enemy, it was easy to devalue it. However times are changing.
A society can only ignore science and facts in favor of meaningless word salad as long as their security does not depends on it.
Don't think that the initial quote is the norm in philosophy.
Whereas the correct answer is what? Some disturbed individuals like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot etc are the cause? Or was it "philosophy" that perverted them -- because Hitler sure as hell didn't read much philosophy.
And what about the millions of victims of atrocities from the "civilized" colonial powers not mentioned in this list, because they're third world so nobody cares, and b) they kill the nice argument about "pure evil" leaders motivated by philosophy. Those crimes were motivated by the almighty buck.
>Calling twentieth-century philosophy superficial gives it too much dignity; vacuous is the closest term.
Yeah, man, you dismissed it in a sentence. How intellectual. And coincidentally, how anglo-saxon, the very culture that never understood continental philosophy to begin with, and deals mainly in scientism and crude empiricist platitudes.
Unfortunately, he read enough Nietzche to become dangerous. (Or perhaps he was dangerous anyway, and read enough Nietzche to provide a smoke screen...)
Still, where professor Dutch starts sounding like a crackpot is when he strawmans Latour and Derrida into a crusade against the purity of Scientific Objectivity. No deconstructionist I know of has ever picketed a chemical lab; "green activists" have done that -- and to throw christian young-earth creationism and Velikovsky on the lap of mr. Derrida, well, that just sounds like asking someone whether they have stopped beating their wife already.
I do wonder if the rise of this scientistic reactionaryism (not the self-satisfied belief in science, but the need to go out and write lengthy rants on subjects they know nothing about) has to do with the stagnation of fundamental physics since the 1970s. I mean -- professor Dutch sounds like he was promises a priesthood and then denied access to God.
(Edit: now -- this, from the very bottom of the article, is disturbing:
"If you don't understand why science has a valid claim to objective knowledge, and why undermining the belief in objective reality is dangerous not just to science but to society at large, don't disturb those of us who do.")
This becomes even more complicated as we leave the holy sciences of physics, chemistry and biology. We are told that the popperian method of posing falsifiable hypotheses is the only way "forward" and we attempt to apply it to the poorly defined questions of areas such as cognitive psychology -- and then become startled or blame p-values when we find ourselves in the middle of a replicability crisis where any given paper may as well be false.
Because physics has such a hug on its unyielding realities, we assume homogeneous "Science" is able to claim an "objective", extra-social -- and ironically unverifiable, as we can't arrive at right answers from wrong questions -- command of "knowledge". But that's not a true view of the real world, unyielding as it is to our space-age dreams.
Could be that; or could be that scienticians are investigating the wrong questions altogether in these massively nonreplicable fields.
Face it: science needs to learn to (1) be open to criticism (2) become well-acquainted with the critique of science (as it's expected to be well acquainted with statistical methods now) and (3) help the from-outside-science "science studies" fields grow rather than nipping them in their bud for their still-infant understanding of the meat (rather than the processes) of science.
Much like no one should be allowed to go into research with the poor grasp of probability theory that "p-value imagineers" display, no one should go into research while imagining they're being inducted into a priesthood of objective thinking.
Maybe Derrida is a confidence trickster, but it's not him who's "stifling" science. If anything, the Neil deGrasse Tysons of the world are stifling open societal discussion of where fundamental physics is actually going (which is -- nowhere for about 40 years now) and what "scientific studies" as portrayed by daytime TV really mean.
Scientific idealism isn't doing society any favors and isn't doing science any favors. Maybe it's doing favors to cynical tenure-track professors who need to massively oversell the meaning and potential impact of their work, but that's neither here nor there: graft and rent-seeking are as old as humanity.
Recently, as I'm sure everyone here knows, the LHC found the Higgs boson. Imagine an exchange between EP, an ecstatic physicist, and SP, a skeptical postmodernist.
EP: We did it, we found the Higgs boson!
SP: Why should I care?
EP: Well, knowing that the Higgs boson means that we finally know that the Standard Model is correct.
SP: That's cool, I guess. So you saw the Higgs boson with your eyes?
EP: No, that's impossible.
SP: How do you know it exists?
EP: Well, there's this cool thing in the LHC called ATLAS. We get beams of protons to collide in the middle of it, and the resulting products set off little signals inside the detector. By processing the results of these signals, we can figure out what byproducts must have been involved...
SP: How can you find that out?
EP: Embarks on particle physics that goes over SP's head
SP: This is the Standard Model you've talked about?
EP: Uh, yes...
SP: So, what you're telling me is that you've just verified the Standard Model by assuming that it was true in the first place?
EP: ...
SP: Walks away in smug satisfaction
What the postmodernist gets right in the argument is that our evaluation of the validity of scientific tools to make observation is based on a model of how science works, and that, without care, you risk creating a circular argument that boils down to proving models correct because you assumed them. What they get wrong is the assumption that this circular argument is unavoidable, and that thus the entire edifice of science is built on shaky ground in the first place (ultimately being simplified down to "there is no such thing as objective reality"). Ironically, what the Sokal exposed is that the postmodernists were just as guilty of the crime they accused scientists of committing: they didn't criticize that which would have proved them correct.
The message for scientists should be that you should always strive to make sure that the tools are working properly. If there were a serious bug in the code used in ATLAS, do you think that the scientists on the project would have been equally diligent in finding and fixing that bug if it made a Higgs boson appear where it didn't actually occur than if it hid the appearance of the Higgs boson?
Actually, the scientists trick themselves by injecting fake signals to avoid bias on their part. So they have that covered. They're well aware at how badly one can goof up when looking for a really rare signal. The statistical standards they set are incredibly high.
The more completely scientists are able to control the experimental conditions, the better science works. Things like psychology end up probing an extremely complex system (our brains) with a lot of constraints on what they can do for obvious, ethical reasons. Add in a side of politicization of certain results and you end up with a larger amount of replication problems than you would in particle physics where we can carefully isolate effects on significantly simpler systems.
But ask any particle physicist and they'll tell you the Standard Model is a hack. It's almost as if it belonged to the same family as epicycles.
Moreover -- ask any particle physicist and they'll tell you the empirical work related to LHC is mostly unrelated to the last 40 years of "post-modern" theorizing in physics.
In other words: I don't think philosophy should be as concerned with the truth of things (which, well, can't be determined by abstract speculation), but with relevance and significance. Science (as opposed to technology -- and saying technology is powered by science is like saying it's powered by testosterone) is failing pretty hard in remaining relevant. Thus the attacks on religion, linguistics, french philosophy and so on.
I would be fine if someone came up with a theory of, say, electromagnetism based on assuming the existence of the flying spaghetti monster or, to stick to the topic, based on assuming that our reality is mostly constructed by culture. The only thing I ask for is that those claims actually play a role in the theory, rather than being a mere addition, and that you can you can actually use the theory to build a transistor radio.
I cannot upvote this more. It seems all too easy to criticize scientific methods as being baseless or assuming some odd construction about the universe or the context or whatever it's embedded in, but it's so easy to overlook the fact that there are only so many (read: extremely few) ways one can construct a theory with the same predictive power as that of physics which has the same or less number of free variables. Thank you for putting into words something I've tried so hard to verbalize to some of my friends who please themselves with criticizing positivism/post-positivism as being woefully naive (relative to, say, constructivism), yet benefit infinitely from it.
No, we've just verified one part of the Standard Model to be true by assuming the other parts of the Standard Model, which we were already able to test, to be true. That isn't actually circular.
>> "dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives."
For more background on the period this essay came out of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars
But for some reason "social constructionist" seem to be often incredibly biased. Some things are "false" because they are constructs, but some things are "true" because they are constructs. And some things are just objectively horrible, while others are constructed as horrible.
Examples: rape culture is social construct, but mental distress from rape is suddenly not. Nationalism is "false" social construct, but Marxism is "true" social construct.
*edit: silly me, looks like I can't edit it. Perhaps someone with more karma/mod privileges could help out.