Science in Action

Infobox Book
name = Science in Action
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author = Bruno Latour
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language = English
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publisher = Harvard University Press
pub_date = 1987
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pages = 288
isbn = ISBN 0674792904
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"Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society" (ISBN 0-674-79291-2) is an influential book by Bruno Latour. The English edition was published in 1987 by Harvard University Press. It is written in a text-book style, and contains a full featured approach to the empirical study of science and technology. Moreover, it also entertains ontological conceptions and theoretical discussions making it a research monograph and not a methodological handbook "per se".

In the first chapter Latour develops the methodological dictum that science and technology must be studied "in action", or "in the making". Because scientific discoveries turn esoteric and difficult to understand, it has to be studied where discoveries are made in practice. For example Latour turns back time in the case of the discovery of the "double helix". Going back in time, deconstructing statements, machines and articles, it is possible to arrive at a point where scientific discovery could have chosen to take many other directions (contingency). Also the concept of "black box" is introduced. A black box is a metaphor borrowed from cybernetics denoting a piece of machinery that "runs by itself". That is, when a series of instructions are too complicated to be repeated all the time, a black box is drawn around it, allowing it to function only by giving it "input" and "output" data. For example a CPU inside a computer is a black box. Its inner complexity doesn't have to be known; one only needs to use it in his/her everyday activities.

Criticism

Latour's work, including Science in Action, has received heavy criticism from some scholars. Olga Amsterdamska's highly critical book review concluded with the following sentence: "Somehow, the ideal of a social science whose only goal is to tell inconsistent, false, and incoherent stories about nothing in particular does not strike me as very appealing or sufficiently ambitious." [ Amsterdamska, Olga. Surely You Are Joking, Monsieur Latour! Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 15 No. 4, Fall 1990 495-504.]

Response to Criticism

However, this quotation illustrates how Amsterdamska crucially failed to understand Latour in the following ways:
#Yes, the stories are inconsistent, because that is the nature of stories of that account for the working of science in practice. For examples, stories by the actual participants of how DNA was discovered are inconsistent in many ways. See History of DNA.
#The stories are not supposed to be lies and outright lying is condemned by Latour.
#The stories are not supposed to be incoherent as that would be to defeat Latour's aim to explicate how science actually works.
#And yes, Latour's goal to explicate how science actually works is breathtakingly ambitious. See Bruno Latour.

A second example is that Amsterdamska fundamentally misunderstood Latour's thesis that "the fate of facts is in later users' hands"." Latour's point is that facts are constructed and it takes work to establish a fact and then more work to maintain it. Amsterdamska imagined that it is possible to cut out all this work and simply "define a fact commonsensically as a statement that is believed to be true of the world"."

Another example is Amsterdamska's misunderstanding of Latour's suggestion to "consider symmetrically the efforts to enroll human and non-human resources" in that an essential point was missed, namely, "an enrollment attempt can fail". For example, if the weather had been better, then Einstein's first calculations of the bending of light around the sun would have been refuted and the sun would not have been enrolled. Fortunately for Einstein, he realized his error before the second attempt at observation, and the sun was successfully enrolled in the experiment contributing to his enormous fame. See Development of General Relativity.

See also

* "Laboratory life" (with Steve Woolgar)
* "Politics of nature"

References