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I can agree with the "lyrical philosopher" quote, but for anyone with a background in science that think that Bruno Latour was a "serious man", I suggest readin

I can agree with the "lyrical philosopher" quote, but for anyone with a background in science that think that Bruno Latour was a "serious man", I suggest reading the book that made him famous: "Science in Action". It's so bad that it's funny. Out of his 7 rules for studying experimental science, the third one is outstanding: > Since the settlement of a controversy is the cause of Nature's representation, not its consequence, we can never use this consequence, Nature, to explain how and why a controversy has been settled. (Science in Action) Bruno Latour was among the selected few that were criticized in Sokal and Bricmont's "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science".

libraryofbabel 2y ago
Facile dismissal of a philosopher is easy. Understanding what they are trying to do, especially when it’s in a very different intellectual tradition from what you’re used to, is the hard thing. I could read Plato, Hegel, Wittgenstein, whoever, and pull the same trick you did by finding some provocative quote that’s impossible to put in context without a detailed explanation of what the guy was up to. For what it’s worth, I trained in theoretical physics and also read a fair bit of Latour later on. I don’t really like his work all that much, and wish he would be clearer sometimes, but the guy wasn’t an idiot, at least start from there. In philosophy the usual advice when approaching someone’s work for the first time is to suspend critique on the first reading and just try and take them seriously and understand what they were doing on their own terms. Then you can go back and apply the critical razor later. It’s a useful tool to apply to other areas of life too.
- nradov 2y ago
  Why should anyone care what a philosopher was trying to do if he didn't actually do it any sort of useful way? Stupid is as stupid does.
  - maleno 2y ago
    Why would anyone care what, say, Charles Babbage was trying to do, when he didn't actually do it in any sort of useful way? Surely this is largely how knowledge is produced—over time, with lots of false starts, and language and technique that is not yet adequate to the problem at hand.
    - hardlianotion 2y ago
      I’m quite sure that Babbage is the wrong person to use to illustrate the point I think you are trying to make.
  - photonthug 2y ago
    Because you risk missing something interesting or important because of your own arrogance, which is tragic, and most likely reinforcing that arrogance, which is even more tragic. As the parent mentions, engaging with primary sources from a different historical or cultural context with some patience and forbearance is particularly important for understanding philosophical works, but it’s not that different for say mathematics or physics. Notation and terminology changes. With your attitude you’d probably assume archimedes, newton and Fibonacci were all stupid.
    - nradov 2y ago
      [dead]
- calf 2y ago
  This is actually one of those sophisticated bullshit meta arguments used to defend any sort of intellectual garbage. "You have to see things from their context, intentions, history". No, we do not. And there is no authority that says we must save/suspend our skepticism for later. In fact your entire argument is self contradictory in that respect, by positioning the OP as engaging in"facile dismissal" in the first place! Right? This is a precise example of the awful, pernicious mental gymnastics that bad philosophy produces. Someone well-read with advanced formal education should have realized that right away.
  - zamfi 2y ago
    Huh. No one is forcing you to do this. You are 100% free to not give even the slightest mind to Bruno Latour—or any other philosopher’s—writing. The point is only that it’s easy to dismiss most philosophy because it’s easy to take a common reading, interpret words in ways the author may not have intended, and make them into a contradiction or other ridiculousness—but in contrast it’s hard to do the work to understand the context in which the author is writing, what the author is responding to, and what the author actually is trying to say through those words. It’s fine to take the easy road here, it’s just not going to teach you anything most of the time—and nor is it going to convince those who’ve done the hard part of anything.
    - smokel 2y ago
      At the time I'm writing this, there are three similar replies that use an argument along the lines of "you can simply ignore Latour if you don't like his work". I'm just replying to the first comment. Unfortunately this argument is not correct. Many, many, people have read Latour, and he has influenced a lot of thought. Ignoring Latour would imply that you'd have to ignore quite a few other people as well, and that is near impossible. Ironically, it is Latour who writes about the connectedness of things in his "actor-network theory". Even more ironically, Latour tried to improve mutual understanding in his "Inquiry Into Modes of Existence" project, but apparently it is not that easy. It might be interesting to hear out the criticisms against Latour's way of reasoning, instead of dismissing it.
codeulike 2y ago
Sokal on Latour: "The basic trouble with much of Latour’s writings—as with those of some other sociologists and philosophers of a “social constructivist” bent—is that these texts are often ambiguous and can be read in at least two distinct ways: a “moderate” reading, which leads to claims that are either worth discussing or else true but trivial; and a “radical” reading, which leads to claims that are surprising but false. Unfortunately, the radical interpretation is often taken not only as the “correct” interpretation of the original text but also as a well-established fact" From https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/comment_on_NYT_latour.html https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/comment_on_NYT_latour....
kayo_20211030 2y ago
> Since the settlement of a controversy is the cause of Nature's representation, not its consequence, we can never use this consequence, Nature, to explain how and why a controversy has been settled. I don't understand why you find this so objectionable. If I grasp Latour's point, the settlement of a controversy fixes an understanding of nature at a particular point (the causal effect). It seems sensible then to forbid that understanding of nature to be used as an explanation for why the controversy was settled. Doing that would affix an absoluteness to the understanding that's unjustified, given the empirical approach. At some point in the future some new anomaly in the understanding (Nature) will be discovered, leading to a controversy, empirical science will resolve it, and a new understanding will be synthesized; handing us a representation. It's probably better than the earlier representation, but it's still not all of Nature. I think Latour's view is a humble view.
_notreallyme_ 2y ago
I've had him as a sociology teacher in the early 2000s, specifically on this subject (controversies). It was apparently his first time in this school, and he was not prepared for the controversy that happened due to his (controversial) stance on the scientific method. He ended up calling us names, and privileged kids (that part was 97% true, but not entirely true...). It's only after his death that many articles praising him appeared. I guess people capitalize on its notoriety rather than on whatever bullshit he wrote...
- Animats 2y ago
  > (controversial) stance on the scientific method. That stance is well-covered here.[1] Some of the problems in science come from experiments too close to the noise threshold. This is most of social science and psychology. The hard-line position is Rutherford's "If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment." Related to this is Hoyle's "Science is prediction, not explanation." For phenomena that led to useful engineering, repeatability and predictability are very good. Otherwise the products won't work. People tend to forget this, because controversial research topics are often close to the noise threshold. It something turns out to be real, and you can get it to happen further from the threshold, it becomes routine engineering. It's then no longer controversial. Your result gets a few lines in the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. This sort of science makes the world go. Philip K. Dick's “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” remains useful. Taking this hard-line position is useful, because humans are evolved and wired to see patterns near the noise threshold. This is a useful survival strategy for detecting predators in the brush, even with a high false-alarm rate. Once past survival level, it's less useful. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-post-truth-philosopher-science.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-pos...

libraryofbabel 2y ago

Facile dismissal of a philosopher is easy. Understanding what they are trying to do, especially when it’s in a very different intellectual tradition from what you’re used to, is the hard thing. I could read Plato, Hegel, Wittgenstein, whoever, and pull the same trick you did by finding some provocative quote that’s impossible to put in context without a detailed explanation of what the guy was up to. For what it’s worth, I trained in theoretical physics and also read a fair bit of Latour later on. I don’t really like his work all that much, and wish he would be clearer sometimes, but the guy wasn’t an idiot, at least start from there. In philosophy the usual advice when approaching someone’s work for the first time is to suspend critique on the first reading and just try and take them seriously and understand what they were doing on their own terms. Then you can go back and apply the critical razor later. It’s a useful tool to apply to other areas of life too.

nradov 2y ago
Why should anyone care what a philosopher was trying to do if he didn't actually do it any sort of useful way? Stupid is as stupid does.
- maleno 2y ago
  Why would anyone care what, say, Charles Babbage was trying to do, when he didn't actually do it in any sort of useful way? Surely this is largely how knowledge is produced—over time, with lots of false starts, and language and technique that is not yet adequate to the problem at hand.
  - hardlianotion 2y ago
    I’m quite sure that Babbage is the wrong person to use to illustrate the point I think you are trying to make.
- photonthug 2y ago
  Because you risk missing something interesting or important because of your own arrogance, which is tragic, and most likely reinforcing that arrogance, which is even more tragic. As the parent mentions, engaging with primary sources from a different historical or cultural context with some patience and forbearance is particularly important for understanding philosophical works, but it’s not that different for say mathematics or physics. Notation and terminology changes. With your attitude you’d probably assume archimedes, newton and Fibonacci were all stupid.
  - nradov 2y ago
    [dead]
calf 2y ago
This is actually one of those sophisticated bullshit meta arguments used to defend any sort of intellectual garbage. "You have to see things from their context, intentions, history". No, we do not. And there is no authority that says we must save/suspend our skepticism for later. In fact your entire argument is self contradictory in that respect, by positioning the OP as engaging in"facile dismissal" in the first place! Right? This is a precise example of the awful, pernicious mental gymnastics that bad philosophy produces. Someone well-read with advanced formal education should have realized that right away.
- zamfi 2y ago
  Huh. No one is forcing you to do this. You are 100% free to not give even the slightest mind to Bruno Latour—or any other philosopher’s—writing. The point is only that it’s easy to dismiss most philosophy because it’s easy to take a common reading, interpret words in ways the author may not have intended, and make them into a contradiction or other ridiculousness—but in contrast it’s hard to do the work to understand the context in which the author is writing, what the author is responding to, and what the author actually is trying to say through those words. It’s fine to take the easy road here, it’s just not going to teach you anything most of the time—and nor is it going to convince those who’ve done the hard part of anything.
  - smokel 2y ago
    At the time I'm writing this, there are three similar replies that use an argument along the lines of "you can simply ignore Latour if you don't like his work". I'm just replying to the first comment. Unfortunately this argument is not correct. Many, many, people have read Latour, and he has influenced a lot of thought. Ignoring Latour would imply that you'd have to ignore quite a few other people as well, and that is near impossible. Ironically, it is Latour who writes about the connectedness of things in his "actor-network theory". Even more ironically, Latour tried to improve mutual understanding in his "Inquiry Into Modes of Existence" project, but apparently it is not that easy. It might be interesting to hear out the criticisms against Latour's way of reasoning, instead of dismissing it.

codeulike 2y ago

Sokal on Latour: "The basic trouble with much of Latour’s writings—as with those of some other sociologists and philosophers of a “social constructivist” bent—is that these texts are often ambiguous and can be read in at least two distinct ways: a “moderate” reading, which leads to claims that are either worth discussing or else true but trivial; and a “radical” reading, which leads to claims that are surprising but false. Unfortunately, the radical interpretation is often taken not only as the “correct” interpretation of the original text but also as a well-established fact" From https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/comment_on_NYT_latour.html https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/comment_on_NYT_latour....

kayo_20211030 2y ago

> Since the settlement of a controversy is the cause of Nature's representation, not its consequence, we can never use this consequence, Nature, to explain how and why a controversy has been settled. I don't understand why you find this so objectionable. If I grasp Latour's point, the settlement of a controversy fixes an understanding of nature at a particular point (the causal effect). It seems sensible then to forbid that understanding of nature to be used as an explanation for why the controversy was settled. Doing that would affix an absoluteness to the understanding that's unjustified, given the empirical approach. At some point in the future some new anomaly in the understanding (Nature) will be discovered, leading to a controversy, empirical science will resolve it, and a new understanding will be synthesized; handing us a representation. It's probably better than the earlier representation, but it's still not all of Nature. I think Latour's view is a humble view.

_notreallyme_ 2y ago

I've had him as a sociology teacher in the early 2000s, specifically on this subject (controversies). It was apparently his first time in this school, and he was not prepared for the controversy that happened due to his (controversial) stance on the scientific method. He ended up calling us names, and privileged kids (that part was 97% true, but not entirely true...). It's only after his death that many articles praising him appeared. I guess people capitalize on its notoriety rather than on whatever bullshit he wrote...

Animats 2y ago
> (controversial) stance on the scientific method. That stance is well-covered here.[1] Some of the problems in science come from experiments too close to the noise threshold. This is most of social science and psychology. The hard-line position is Rutherford's "If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment." Related to this is Hoyle's "Science is prediction, not explanation." For phenomena that led to useful engineering, repeatability and predictability are very good. Otherwise the products won't work. People tend to forget this, because controversial research topics are often close to the noise threshold. It something turns out to be real, and you can get it to happen further from the threshold, it becomes routine engineering. It's then no longer controversial. Your result gets a few lines in the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. This sort of science makes the world go. Philip K. Dick's “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” remains useful. Taking this hard-line position is useful, because humans are evolved and wired to see patterns near the noise threshold. This is a useful survival strategy for detecting predators in the brush, even with a high false-alarm rate. Once past survival level, it's less useful. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-post-truth-philosopher-science.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-pos...