Response 04/06

Bruno Latour spends a great deal of time in the article A Textbook Case Revisited – Knowledge as a Mode of Existence by Bruno Latour, in Sciences Po Paris, a chapter for the STS Handbook focusing on the disparity between the approaches of Ludwig Fleck and William James toward understating the basis of relativism of knowledge. Latour provides a great deal of insight into each gentleman’s relative approach. Fleck believes that truth was an unreachable ideal in scientific research because discovery was both a multi directional and an iterative process, where new information must be acquired and analyzed, which can result in old information being replaced. James on the other hand felt that discerning the truth about any idea or thing relies not only on an analysis, but also on observation. Whatever the differences in philosophy, something that Latour writes about in a rather tedious fashion in this article, he doesn’t answer what I thought was the most interesting question he posed: ‘Why do we find troubling, superfluous, irrelevant, the displaying of the successive versions of the science of evolution?’

Looking at current societal trends to answer this question, it seems to me that we, as a people, find history interesting, but the ability to focus on each successive iteration of evolution for the general population is both boring and tedious. As a society, we have evolved to a pursuit of the bottom line, ‘just the facts’, the ‘need to know’. Focusing on the path that got us there is appropriate when needed, but it is typically viewed as someone else’s problem. The boss, the scientist, the person who cares, is the one who should be involved in the details. We just want the outcome. Looking at how the horse got to be the modern horse is interesting, but the American attention span is not capable of viewing 200 iterations of the horse, and noting the subtle differences in evolution.

The history of science, while nice to think about, is not really our focus. Society as a whole is concerned with the here and now, and unable, as James noted, to ascertain that there is a ‘continuous scheme’ to things. As a society we are so self centered, we find it difficult to contemplate our role in interactions with all other living things – why would we contemplate that there were 200 or 2000 evolutions of the modern horse?

The fact that “we see only what we know beforehand or that we ‘filter’ perceptions through the ‘biases’ of our ‘presupposition’” has not changed. Fleck’s belief lead for the first time, to integration of the social, collective, practical elements that contribute substantively to categories and accept the facts as they are has slowly become recognized as the preferred method. Understanding the relationship that defines the integration of scientific concepts within society is one key to answering the question that Latour poses. The newly developed discipline of STS (Science and Technology Studies) will lead the way into resolving this debate and hopefully provide new approaches to answer Latour’s question.