Pandora's Hope

Essays on the Reality of Science Studies

Bruno Latour

• Editorial: Harvard University Press
• Año: 1999
• ISBN:
  9780674255142
• Categoría: Ciencias biológicas
• Categoría: Ciencias en general

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.

CHAPTER ONE

“Do You Believe in Reality?”

News from the Trenches of the Science Wars

“I have a question for you,” he said, taking out of his pocket a crumpled piece of paper on which he had scribbled a few key words. He took a breath: “Do you believe in reality?”

“But of course!” I laughed. “What a question! Is reality something we have to believe in?”

He had asked me to meet him for a private discussion in a place I found as bizarre as the question: by the lake near the chalet, in this strange imitation of a Swiss resort located in the tropical mountains of Teresopolis in Brazil. Has reality truly become something people have to believe in, I wondered, the answer to a serious question asked in a hushed and embarrassed tone? Is reality something like God, the topic of a confession reached after a long and intimate discussion? Are there people on earth who don’t believe in reality?

When I noticed that he was relieved by my quick and laughing answer, I was even more baffled, since his relief proved clearly enough that he had anticipated a negative reply, something like “Of course not! Do you think I am that naive?” This was not a joke, then: he really was concerned, and his query had been in earnest.

“I have two more questions,” he added, sounding more relaxed. “Do we know more than we used to?”

“But of course! A thousand times more!”

“But is science cumulative?” he continued with some anxiety, as if he did not want to be won over too fast.

“I guess so,” I replied, “although I am less positive on this one, since the sciences also forget so much, so much of their past and so much of their bygone research programs—but, on the whole, let’s say yes. Why are you asking me these questions? Who do you think I am?”

I had to switch interpretations fast enough to comprehend both the monster he was seeing me as when he raised these questions and his touching openness of mind in daring to address such a monster privately. It must have taken courage for him to meet with one of these creatures that threatened, in his view, the whole establishment of science, one of these people from a mysterious field called “science studies,” of which he had never before met a flesh-and-blood representative but which—at least so he had been told—was another threat to science in a country, America, where scientific inquiry had never had a completely secure foothold.

He was a highly respected psychologist, and we had both been invited by the Wenner-Grenn Foundation to a gathering made up of two-thirds scientists and one-third “science students.” This division itself, announced by the organizers, baffled me. How could we be pitted against the scientists? That we are studying a subject matter does not mean that we are attacking it. Are biologists anti-life, astronomers anti-stars, immunologists anti-antibodies? Besides, I had taught for twenty years in scientific schools, I wrote regularly in scientific journals, I and my colleagues lived on contract research carried out on behalf of many groups of scientists in industry and in the academy. Was I not part of the French scientific establishment? I was a bit vexed to be excluded so casually. Of course I am just a philosopher, but what would my friends in science studies say? Most of them have been trained in the sciences, and several of them, at least, pride themselves on extending the scientific outlook to science itself. They could be labeled as members of another discipline or another subfield, but certainly not as “anti-scientists” meeting halfway with scientists, as if the two groups were opposing armies conferring under a flag of truce before returning to the battlefield!

I could not get over the strangeness of the question posed by this man I considered a colleague, yes, a colleague (and who has since become a good friend). If science studies has achieved anything, I thought, surely it has added reality to science, not withdrawn any from it. Instead of the stuffed scientists hanging on the walls of the armchair philosophers of science of the past, we have portrayed lively characters, immersed in their laboratories, full of passion, loaded with instruments, steeped in know-how, closely connected to a larger and more vibrant milieu. Instead of the pale and bloodless objectivity of science, we have all shown, it seemed to me, that the many nonhumans mixed into our collective life through laboratory practice have a history, flexibility, culture, blood—in short, all the characteristics that were denied to them by the humanists on the other side of the campus. Indeed, I naively thought, if scientists have a faithful ally, it is we, the “science students” who have managed over the years to interest scores of literary folk in science and technology, readers who were convinced, until science studies came along, that “science does not think” as Heidegger, one of their masters, had said.

The psychologist’s suspicion struck me as deeply unfair, since he did not seem to understand that in this guerrilla warfare being conducted in the no-man’s-land between the “two cultures,” we were the ones being attacked by militants, activists, sociologists, philosophers, and technophobes of all hues, precisely because of our interest in the inner workings of scientific facts. Who loves the sciences, I asked myself, more than this tiny scientific tribe that has learned to open up facts, machines, and theories with all their roots, blood vessels, networks, rhizomes, and tendrils? Who believes more in the objectivity of science than those who claim that it can be turned into an object of inquiry?

Then I realized that I was wrong. What I would call “adding realism to science” was actually seen, by the scientists at this gathering, as a threat to the calling of science, as a way of decreasing its stake in truth and their claims to certainty. How has this misunderstanding come about? How could I have lived long enough to be asked in all seriousness this incredible question: “Do you believe in reality?” The distance between what I thought we had achieved in science studies and what was implied by this question was so vast that I needed to retrace my steps a bit. And so this book was born.

The Strange Invention of an “Outside” World

There is no natural situation on earth in which someone could be asked this strangest of all questions: “Do you believe in reality?” To ask such a question one has to become so distant from reality that the fear of losing it entirely becomes plausible—and this fear itself has an intellectual history that should at least be sketched. Without this detour we would never be able to fathom the extent of the misunderstanding between my colleague and me, or to measure the extraordinary form of radical realism that science studies has been uncovering.

I remembered that my colleague’s question was not so new. My compatriot Descartes had raised it against himself when asking how an isolated mind could be absolutely as opposed to relatively sure of anything about the outside world. Of course, he framed his question in a way that made it impossible to give the only reasonable answer, which we in science studies have slowly rediscovered three centuries later: that we are relatively sure of many of the things with which we are daily engaged through the practice of our laboratories. By Descartes’s time this sturdy relativism*, based on the number of relations established with the world, was already in the past, a once-passable path now lost in a thicket of brambles. Descartes was asking for absolute certainty from a brain-in-a-vat, a certainty that was not needed when the brain (or the mind) was firmly attached to its body and the body thoroughly involved n its normal ecology. As in Curt Siodmak’s novel Donovan’s Brain, absolute certainty is the sort of neurotic fantasy that only a surgically removed mind would look for after it had lost everything else. Like a heart taken out of a young woman who has just died in an accident and soon to be transplanted into someone else’s thorax thousands of miles away, Descartes’s mind requires artificial life-support to keep it viable. Only a mind put in the strangest position, looking at a world from the inside out and linked to the outside by nothing but the tenuous connection of the gaze, will throb in the constant fear of losing reality; only such a bodiless observer will desperately look for some absolute life-supporting survival kit.

For Descartes the only route by which his mind-in-a-vat could reestablish some reasonably sure connection with the outside world was through God. My friend the psychologist was thus right to phrase his query using the same formula I had learned in Sunday school: “Do you believe in reality?”—“Credo in unum Deum,” or rather, “Credo in unam realitam,” as my friend Donna Haraway kept chanting in Teresopolis! After Descartes, however, many people thought that going through God to reach the world was a bit expensive and farfetched. They looked for a shortcut. They wondered whether the world could directly send us enough information to produce a stable image of itself in our minds.

But in asking this question the empiricists kept going along the same path. They did not retrace their steps. They never plugged the wriggling and squiggling brain back into its withering body. They were still dealing with a mind looking through the gaze at a lost outside world. They simply tried to train it to recognize patterns. God was out, to be sure, but the tabula rasa of the empiricists was as disconnected as the mind in Descartes’s times. The brain-in-a-vat simply exchanged one survival kit for another. Bombarded by a world reduced to meaningless stimuli, it was supposed to extract from these stimuli everything it needed to recompose the world’s shapes and stories. The result was like a badly connected TV set, and no amount of tuning made this precursor of neural nets produce more than a fuzzy set of blurry lines, with white points falling like snow. No shape was recognizable. Absolute certainty was lost, so precarious were the connections of the senses to a world that was pushed ever further outside. There was too much static to get any clear picture.

The solution came, but in the form of a catastrophe from which we are only now beginning to extricate ourselves. Instead of retracing their steps and taking the other path at the forgotten fork in the road, philosophers abandoned even the claim to absolute certainty, and settled instead on a makeshift solution that preserved at least some access to an outside reality. Since the empiricists’ associative neural net was unable to offer clear pictures of the lost world, this must prove, they said, that the mind (still in a vat) extracts from itself everything it needs to form shapes and stories. Everything, that is, except the reality itself. Instead of the fuzzy lines on the poorly tuned TV set, we got the fixed tuning grid, molding the confused static, dots, and lines of the empiricist channel into a steady picture held in place by the mindset’s predesigned categories. Kant’s a priori started this extravagant form of constructivism, which neither Descartes, with his detour through God, nor Hume, with his shortcut to associated stimuli, would ever have dreamed of.

Now, with the Konigsberg broadcast, everything was ruled by the mind itself and reality came in simply to say that it was there, indeed, and not imaginary! For the banquet of reality, the mind provided the food, and the inaccessible things-in-themselves to which the world had been reduced simply dropped by to say “We are here, what you eat is not dust,” but otherwise remained mute and stoic guests. If we abandon absolute certainty, Kant said, we can at least retrieve universality as long as we remain inside the restricted sphere of science, to which the world outside contributes decisively but minimally. The rest of the quest for the absolute is to be found in morality, another a priori certainty that the mind-in-the-vat extracts from its own wiring. Under the name of a “Copernican Revolution”* Kant invented this science-fiction nightmare: the outside world now turns around the mind-in-the-vat, which dictates most of that world’s laws, laws it has extracted from itself without help from anyone else. A crippled despot now ruled the world of reality. This philosophy was thought, strangely enough, to be the deepest of all, because it had at once managed to abandon the quest for absolute certainty and to retain it under the banner of “universal a prioris,” a clever sleight of hand that hid the lost path even deeper in the thickets.

Do we really have to swallow these unsavory pellets of textbook philosophy to understand the psychologist’s question? I am afraid so, because otherwise the innovations of science studies will remain invisible. The worst is yet to come. Kant had invented a form of constructivism in which the mind-in-the-vat built everything by itself but not entirely without constraints: what it learned from itself had to be universal and could be elicited only by some experiential contact with a reality out there, a reality reduced to its barest minimum, but there nonetheless. For Kant there was still something that revolved around the crippled despot, a green planet around this pathetic sun. It would not be long before people realized that this “transcendental Ego,” as Kant named it, was a fiction, a line in the sand, a negotiating position in a complicated settlement to avoid the complete loss of the world or the complete abandonment of the quest for absolute certainty. It was soon replaced by a more reasonable candidate, society*. Instead of a mythical Mind giving shape to reality, carving it, cutting it, ordering it, it was now the prejudices, categories, and paradigms of a group of people living together that determined the representations of every one of those people. This new definition, however, in spite of the use of the word “social,” had only a superficial resemblance to the realism to which we science students have become attached, and which I will outline over the course of this book.

First, this replacement of the despotic Ego with the sacred “society” did not retrace the philosophers’ steps but went even further in distancing the individual’s vision, now a “view of the world,” from the definitely lost outside world. Between the two, society interposed its filters; its paraphernalia of biases, theories, cultures, traditions, and standpoints became an opaque window. Nothing of the world could pass through so many intermediaries and reach the individual mind. People were now locked not only into the prison of their own categories but into that of their social groups as well. Second, this “society” itself was just a series of minds-in-a-vat, many minds and many vats to be sure, but each of them still composed of that strangest of beasts: a detached mind gazing at an outside world. Some improvement! If prisoners were no longer in isolated cells, they were now confined to the same dormitory, the same collective mentality. Third, the next shift, from one Ego to multiple cultures, jeopardized the only good thing about Kant, that is, the universality of the a priori categories, the only bit of ersatz absolute certainty he had been able to retain. Everyone was not locked in the same prison any more; now there were many prisons, incommensurable, unconnected. Not only was the mind disconnected from the world, but each collective mind, each culture was disconnected from the others. More and more progress in a philosophy dreamed up, it seems, by prison wardens.

But there was a fourth reason, even more dramatic, even sadder, that made this shift to “society” a catastrophe following fast on the heels of the Kantian revolution. The claims to knowledge of all these poor minds, prisoners in their long rows of vats, were now made part of an even more bizarre history, were now associated with an even more ancient threat, the fear of mob rule. If my friend’s voice quivered as he asked me “Do you believe in reality?” it was not only because he feared that all connection with the outside world might be lost, but above all because he worried that I might answer, “Reality depends on whatever the mob thinks is right at any given time.” It is the resonance of these two fears, the loss of any certain access to reality and the invasion by the mob, that makes his question at once so unfair and so serious.

But before we disentangle this second threat, let me finish with the first one. The sad story, unfortunately, does not end here. However incredible it seems, it is possible to go even further along the wrong path, always thinking that a more radical solution will solve the problems accumulated from the past decision. One solution, or more exactly another clever sleight of hand, is to become so very pleased with the loss of absolute certainty and universal a prioris that one rejoices in abandoning them. Every defect of the former position is now taken to be its best quality. Yes, we have lost the world. Yes, we are forever prisoners of language. No, we will never regain certainty. No, we will never get beyond our biases. Yes, we will forever be stuck within our own selfish standpoint. Bravo! Encore! The prisoners are now gagging even those who ask them to look out their cell windows; they will “deconstruct,” as they say—which means destroy in slow motion—anyone who reminds them that there was a time when they were free and when their language bore a connection with the world.

Who can avoid hearing the cry of despair that echoes deep down, carefully repressed, meticulously denied, in these paradoxical claims for a joyous, jubilant, free construction of narratives and stories by people forever in chains? But even if there were people who could say such things with a blissful and light heart (their existence is as uncertain to me as that of the Loch Ness monster, or, for that matter, as uncertain as that of the real world would be to these mythical creatures), how could we avoid noticing that we have not moved an inch since Descartes? That the mind is still in its vat, excised from the rest, disconnected, and contemplating (now with a blind gaze) the world (now lost in darkness) from the very same bubbling glassware? Such people may be able to smile smugly instead of trembling with fear, but they are still descending further and further along the spiraling curves of the same hell. At the end of this chapter we will meet these gloating prisoners again.

In our century, though, a second solution has been proposed, one that has occupied many bright minds. This solution consists of taking only a part of the mind out of the vat and then doing the obvious thing, that is, offering it a body again and p...