Some critical questions about Laboratory Life

Laboratory Life raises a number of fascinating questions about the viability of a sociology of scientific knowledge and the value of its contribution. For instance, does Latour’s claim that facts (and the objects they describe) exist only where the networks that produce and sustain them are extended, amount to anything more than a contemporary restatement (and, perhaps, an empirical demonstration) of Hume’s extreme scepticism? Hume pointed out that we can never ‘prove’ the validity of inducted laws or generalisations that are applied to events that have not yet happened (or that are assumed to have happened without direct observation)?

Similarly, Latour’s claim that scientists are involved in the production of order from chaos sometimes seems to amount to nothing more extraordinary than the observation that scientific practice depends upon technical competence and settled protocols: “Between scientists and chaos, there is nothing but a wall of archives, labels, protocol books, figures and papers. But this mass of documents provides the only means of creating more order” (245). While Laboratory Life is fascinating to read, and does make me think about science is a very concrete way, I am not convinced that a sociology of scientific knowledge contributes anything particularly novel or contentious to our understanding of science.

And, rather than clarifying the always ‘political’ and necessarily ‘social’ nature of scientific practice, does Lator actually render the problem of science’s relation to politics and society entirely opaque? For instance, he states quite clearly that he is not interested in issues of political interference or social ‘intrigue’ (cannot find quote). But how is Latour able to differentiate between the (sinister) political interference that he is not interested in, and the ‘agonistic’ wrangling amongst scientists that he sees as constitutive of ‘normal’ scientific practice (“the same “political” qualities are necessary both to make a point and to out-manoeuvre a competitor”, p237)? Without reference to the norms circumscribing science as a privileged site at least ideally insulated from political, economic or social influence, how do we critique, for example, the pernicious influence of drug-companies on research and development? (I know this is a hackneyed point).

Another problem, is that Latour wants to make general claims about science but his account of science is completely tied to modern, laboratory science. Contemporary scientific practice surely does involve a level of specialisation and complexity that ‘separates’ it from direct engagement with nature. But it seems paradoxical that Latour wants to restore history to science, to demonstrate the historicity of things, yet is completely focused on scientific practice at a particular historical moment (namely, the present). Science has its origin in practices that were much ‘closer’ to nature, like people plotting the movement of the stars. And similarly ‘close’ scientific practices exist today, for instance in acts of ‘public science’, where bird watchers throughout North America report their sightings and contribute to understandings of migratory patterns.