Reading Questions for Latour: Circulating Reference

The question that this essay tries to answer is that of reference in science. Presumably it is correct to say that science and scientific claims are about the world, reality, nature in some way, but in what way, precisely? What does it mean to say that scientific claims are about the world? The traditional approach in the philosophy of science is to construct philosophical theories about the relation between two types of things: science/world, language nature. They presume that there is a mysterious gap between them (after all a word is not a thing) that must be crossed and philosophy of science constructs theories about this crossing:

• A scientific claim corresponds to reality because it mirrors reality.
• A scientific claim is about the world because it has been verified.
• A scientific claim is about the world because it can be falsified and has not been

And so on.

What Latour sets out to do is to take an empirical approach to the problem of empiricism. He looks at the actual practices of scientists of converting entities (leaves, soil samples, forests) into signs (words, scientific papers, charts). This practice he calls inscription.

Check out the glossary, by the way. Although it is dictionary-like in being rather circular – this is because the terms are technical and there’s no way to get the theory except by jumping in and seeing how all the terms relate – he is very good about pointing out and then relating key technical terms that he introduces.

As you read the essay, consider the following questions:

1. What does Latour mean when he says “One science always hides another”? (32) Can you think of one or two examples of this hiding?
2. Note the analogy between taking a reference sample back to the lab and placing a reference in a paper to another paper. Is this a mere analogy?
3. What does Latour mean when he says of the cabinet, “This piece of furniture is a theory” (34)? How is the cabinet similar to the tag? What other science ties the two together (check out the list of sciences on page 29)?
4. Explain Latour’s claim (on page 38), “In losing the forest, we win knowledge of it.”
5. In the next paragraph, Latour writes,

“In the naturalist’s collection things happen to the plants that have never occurred since the dawn of the world. The plants find themselves detached, separated, preserved, classified, and tagged. They are then reassembled, reunited, redistributed according to entirely new principles that depend on the researcher, on the discipline of botany, which has been standardized for century, and on the institution that shelters them, but they no longer grow as they did in the great forest.” (39, emphasis added)

Can you relate this quote – especially the italicized section – to what Kuhn has to say about paradigms?

6. Do these “arbitrary” and “relative” factors add to or decrease the reality of knowledge?
7. Explain Latour’s following comment, “The botanist learns new things, and she is transformed accordingly, but the plants are transformed also. From this point of view there is no difference between observation and experience: both are constructions” (39). What does he mean by “constructions”? (“Constructivism” is often thought of as anti-realism in philosophy of science. However, one might point out that although a house is constructed, it is no less real than something that isn’t (a tree, for example), although it might have been constructed differently.)
8. How does reassembling, reuniting, and redistributing the plants transform them? In what ways are they the same? In what ways are they different?
9. How is all this movement not simply “seeing what the forest is like”?
10. Explain Latour’s comment on page 42, “One should never speak of ‘data’ – what is given – but rather of sublata, that is, of ‘achievements’. (You will probably want to make reference to what’s going on in the surrounding paragraphs.)
11. Explain Latour’s comment, “For the world to become knowable, it must become a laboratory. If virgin forest is to be transformed into a laboratory, the forest must be prepared to be rendered as a diagram.” (43)
12. There’s an awful lot of numbering and conversion to numbers and mathematics involved in the story that Latour describes. Clearly, numbers and mathematics are important for making the scientific process scientific. Note, however, that other, presumably non-scientific activities involve numbering as well (table 29 in the restaurant, astrology, etc.). What is it about the numbering in Latour’s account that makes the activity scientific? In short, how are the numbers being used?
13. On page 48, Latour writes:

…even though they attach importance to the structure, coherence, and validity of language, in all their demonstrations the world simply awaits designation by words whose truth or falsehood is guaranteed solely by its presence…Yet to achieve certainty the world needs to stir and transform itself much more than words. (48-49)

Here, Latour is pointing out that on a common-sense understanding of truth and reference, because a claim is true or false depending upon whether it accurately depicts the world, and because it is the world that is static (the cat is either there or not), and it is language is mutable, it is the structure, coherence, validity, in short, the form of language that must change if accurate reference is to be guaranteed. For example, if we want our expression about the cat’s relation to the mat to be true, it is our expression (“The cat is on the mat” or “The cat is not on the mat”) that we alter, not the state of the world that we’re trying to represent. That is, we change our sentence (by adding a “not”, perhaps), not by moving the cat, in order to guarantee reference. However, all of the modifications of soil samples show how the world itself must be transformed in science in order to guarantee accurate reference. Of course the scientists themselves don’t go in with a backhoe in order to alter the soil composition and thus guarantee their hypothesis (“the forest is advancing” or “the savannah is advancing”). This would be the equivalent to moving the cat. However, in creating knowledge, the scientists can’t simply passively observe the situation in the forest. The forest must be changed, to be put into usable form. Thus, in some sense, the world must be altered (radically, in fact) in order to produce the appropriate word-world relation.

See if you can put this point into your own words, using Latour’s example or your own.

14. “All these empty forms are set up behind the phenomena, before the phenomena manifest themselves, in order for them to be manifested” (49). Compare this to the figure/ground relationship and the way that figure only emerges in the context of a ground. Note that the point here is that the figure can become what it is only in light of the ground. Context alters/transforms/creates content. Compare this to what Kuhn says about paradigms and perception.
15. Latour notes that it is the empty compartments (in the pedocomparator or in the periodic table) “define what is left for us to find, and we are able to plan the next day’s labor in advance since we know what we must gather” (51). This is a good example of how a paradigm governs scientific activity. Explain how this is neither simply imposing pre-existing categories on raw matter nor letting nature determine its own discovery. In other words, explain how the combination of facts and theories, “data” and categories set the rules for normal scientific practice.
16. Compare, in your own words, the difference between a scientific text and other (specific) forms of narrative, of your choosing using Latour’s observation on page 56 that the scientific text, unlike other forms of literature, speaks of a referent present in the text.
17. The conclusion that Latour reaches in this chapter is expressed in the following quote:

Reference…is our way of keeping something constant through a series of transformations. Knowledge does not reflect a real external world that it resembles via mimesis, but rather a real interior world, the coherence and continuity of which it helps to ensure. (58)

Put this into your own words.

18. Mimesis means resemblance (mimicking, mirroring). How is resemblance sacrificed at each stage? What is preserved?
19. Which of the possible meanings of “aligning” in the following quote make sense of Latour’s point?

In none of the stages is it ever a question of copying the preceding stage. Rather, it is a matter of aligning each stage with the ones that precede and follow it, so that, beginning with the last stage, one will be able to return to the first. (64)

20. What is wrong with the correspondence theory of truth, based on resemblance. If I say, “the sun is shining”, apparently this has some sort of connection with a state of affairs. Why can’t this connection be one of resemblance?
21. Explain in your own words the relationship between construction, discovery, invention, and convention in the production of diagrams such as the one on page 2.15.
22. Explain in your own words Latour’s restatement of the epistemological situation that replaces the old dualism between subject and object.
23. In the Kantian epistemology, the phenomena are the point of contact between things in themselves and our encounter with them. In Latour’s model, phenomena are the product of successive transformations. That is, rather than being what we have to explain, phenomena are the products of successive transformations whose process is explanation. How is the Kantian view produced by a conventional understanding of science (looking at its starting point (“reality) and final product (“knowledge) only?
24. What are the similarities between the empirical work done by Latour and the empirical work done by the scientists? What are the differences?
25. To a certain extent, the necessity of circulating reference in science means that the truth of science is guaranteed only by its continuation. Science is a process, not an achievement. (Consider how the truth of the claims of the scientists is related to the question of whether they get to go back or not.) To what extent is the situation similar with respect to Latour’s activities and claims?
26. Go back and re-read the first chapter, seeing if it makes more sense in light of the second one.