"Belief is a caricature of religion exactly as knowledge is a caricature of science."
— Bruno Latour, “Thou Shall Not Freeze-Frame” or How Not to Misunderstand the Science and Religion Debate
"There is nothing extravagant, spiritual, or mysterious in beginning to describe religious talk in this way. We are used to other, perfectly mundane forms of speech that are evaluated not by their correspondence with any state of affairs either, but by the quality of the interaction they generate from the way they are uttered. This experience—and experience is what we wish to share—is common in the domain of “love-talk” and, more largely, personal relations. “Do you love me?” is not assessed by the originality of the sentence—none are more banal, trivial, boring, rehashed—but rather by the transformation it manifests in the listener, as well as in the speaker. Information talk is one thing, transformation talk is another. When the latter is uttered, something happens. A slight displacement in the normal pace of things. A tiny shift in the passage of time. You have to decide, to get involved: maybe to commit yourselves irreversibly. We are not only undergoing an experience among others, but a change in the pulse and tempo of experience: kairos is the word the Greeks would have used to designate this new sense of urgency."
— Bruno Latour, “Thou Shall Not Freeze-Frame” or How Not to Misunderstand the Science and Religion Debate
(Source: bruno-latour.fr)
"It is because of this “dialectic” between fact and artifact that, although no philosopher would seriously defend a correspondence theory of truth, it is nevertheless absolutely impossible to be convinced by a purely constructivist account for more than three minutes. Well, let’s say an hour, to be fair. Most philosophy of science since Hume and Kant consists in taking on, evading, hedging, coming back to, recanting, solving, refuting, packing, unpacking this impossible antinomy: that on the one hand facts are experimentally made up and never escape from their manmade settings, and on the other hand it is essential that facts are not made up and that something emerges that is not manmade. Bears in cages pace back and forth within their narrow prisons with less obstinacy and less distress than philosophers and sociologists of science going incessantly from fact to artifact and back."
— Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope p125
"Is it possible, with the help of my schema, to understand, visualize, and detect why the original model of philosophers of language is so widespread, when this slightest inquiry reveals its impossibility? … Let us block the extremities of the chain as if one were the referent, the forest of Boa Vista, and the other were the phrase, “the forest of Boa Vista.” Let us erase all the mediations that I have delighted in describing. In place of the forgotten mediations, let us create a radical gap, one capable of covering the huge abyss that separates the statement I utter in Paris and its referent six thousand kilometers away. Et voilà, we have returned to the former model, searching for something to fill the void we have created, looking for some adequatio, some resemblence between two ontological varieties that we have made as dissimilar as possible. It is hardly surprising that philosophers have been unable to reach an understanding on the question of realism and relativism: they have taken the two provisional extremities for the entire chain, as if they had tried to understand how a lamp and a switch could “correspond” to each other after cutting the wire and making the lamp “gaze out” at the “external” switch."
— Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope pp72-3
"We always forget that the word “reference” comes from the Latin refere, “to bring back.” Is the referent what I point to with my finger outside discourse, or is it what I bring back inside discourse?"
— Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope p32
“Although cases of outright misconduct are rare, many papers and protocols contain serious scientific flaws, says McShane. Intuition breaks down when so many variables are considered, she says, making researchers blind to methodological flaws.”
— interesting if glancing reference to the role of intuition in good scientific work
"I vividly remember one Saturday morning in April 1988 – an entirely ordinary one for Manchester at that time of year, with grey skies and a little rain – when, on my way to catch a bus, it suddenly dawned on me that the organism and the person could be one and the same. Instead of trying to reconstruct the complete human being from two separate but complementary components, respectively biophysical and sociocultural, held together with a film of psychological cement, it struck me that we should be trying to find a way of talking about human life that eliminates the need to slice it up into these different layers. Everything I have written since has been driven by this agenda."
— Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment
"It is hard to avoid the conclusion, then, that the passage of Madison and Grant’s work [on eugenics] from good science to pseudoscience was the result not of discovery but of social process. No previously unknown facts of nature were unearthed, but previously known data and arguments began to seem more persuasive in light of social and political developments."
— Jonathan Marks, Why I am Not a Scientist pp138-9 (my italics)
Those who document misconduct in scientific research talk of a spectrum of bad practices. At the sharp end are plagiarism, fabrication and falsification of research. At the other end are questionable practices such as adding an author’s name to a paper when they have not contributed to the work, sloppiness in methods or not disclosing conflicts of interest.
“Outright fraud is somewhat impossible to estimate, because if you’re really good at it you wouldn’t be detectable,” said Simonsohn, a social psychologist. “It’s like asking how much of our money is fake money – we only catch the really bad fakers, the good fakers we never catch.”
"We, the readers, do not live inside space, that has billions of galaxies in it; on the contrary, this space in generated inside the observatory by having, for example, a computer count little dots on a photographic plate… You are ashamed of not grasping what it is to speak in millions of light years? Don’t be ashamed because the firm grasp the astronomer has over it comes from a very small ruler he firmly applies to a map of the sky like you do to your road map when you go out for a camping trip. Astronomy is the local knowledge produced inside these centres that gather photographs, spectra, radio signals, infrared pictures, everything that makes a trace that other people can easily dominate."
— Bruno Latour, Science in Action, pp228-9
“Like some other scientists, Sokal and Bricmont appear to regret that science has any need of natural language to make itself known, that scientific facts can’t be implanted directly in our brains without resort to verbal mediation. When you complain, as they do, about Post-Modernism’s ‘emphasis on discourse and language as opposed to the facts to which those discourses refer’, a pause for reflection is in order, on whether it is legitimate to oppose the facts to the discourse when facts that are not contained in a discourse cannot be known.”
"How could we be capable of disenchanting the world, when every day our laboratories and our factories populate the world with hundreds of hybrids stranger than those of the day before? … How could we be victims of reductionism, when each scientist multiplies new entities by the thousands in order to be reductionist for a few of them?"
— Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern
"There is no natural situation on earth in which someone could ask 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."
— Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope
"Metaphysical materialism has replaced positivism and pragmatism as the dominant contemporary form of scientism. Since scientism is, in my opinion, one of the most dangerous contemporary intellectual tendencies, a critique of its most influential contemporary form is a duty for a philosopher who views his enterprise as more than a purely technical discipline."
— Hilary Putnam, Realism and Reason, p211
"In support of realism there seem to be only those “reasons of the heart” which, as Pascal says, reason does not know. Indeed, I have long felt that belief in realism involves a profound leap of faith, not at all dissimilar from the faith that animates deep religious convictions."
— Arthur Fine, The Shaky Game, p116
