{"id":4062,"date":"2018-10-27T18:34:53","date_gmt":"2018-10-27T22:34:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/?p=4062"},"modified":"2018-10-27T18:39:44","modified_gmt":"2018-10-27T22:39:44","slug":"ava-kofman-bruno-latour-the-post-truth-philosopher-mounts-a-defense-of-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/ava-kofman-bruno-latour-the-post-truth-philosopher-mounts-a-defense-of-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Ava Kofman | Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Ava Kofman,\u00a0<\/span><\/strong>Oct. 25, 2018,\u00a0New York Times Magazine<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I<\/span>n the summer of 1996, during an international anthropology conference in southeastern Brazil, Bruno Latour, France\u2019s most famous and misunderstood philosopher, was approached by an anxious-looking developmental psychologist. The psychologist had a delicate question, and for this reason he requested that Latour meet him in a secluded spot \u2014 beside a lake at the Swiss-style resort where they were staying. Removing from his pocket a piece of paper on which he\u2019d scribbled some notes, the psychologist hesitated before asking, \u201cDo you believe in reality?\u201d<\/p>\n

For a moment, Latour thought he was being set up for a joke. His early work, it was true, had done more than that of any other living thinker to unsettle the traditional understanding of how we acquire knowledge of what\u2019s real. It had long been taken for granted, for example, that scientific facts and entities, like cells and quarks and prions, existed \u201cout there\u201d in the world before they were discovered by scientists. Latour turned this notion on its head. In a series of controversial books in the 1970s and 1980s, he argued that scientific facts should instead be seen as a product<\/em> of scientific inquiry. Facts, Latour said, were \u201cnetworked\u201d; they stood or fell not on the strength of their inherent veracity but on the strength of the institutions and practices that produced them and made them intelligible. If this network broke down, the facts would go with them.<\/p>\n

Still, Latour had never seen himself as doing anything so radical, or absurd, as calling into question the existence of reality. As a founder of the new academic discipline of science and technology studies, or S.T.S., Latour regarded himself and his colleagues as allies of science. Of course he believed in reality, he told the psychologist, convinced that the conversation was in jest. From the look of relief on the man\u2019s face, however, Latour realized that the question had been posed in earnest. \u201cI had to switch interpretations fast enough to comprehend both the monster he was seeing me as,\u201d he later wrote of the encounter, \u201cand his touching openness of mind in daring to address such a monster privately. It must have taken courage for him to meet with one of these creatures that threatened, in his view, the whole establishment of science.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

To continue reading Ava Kofman’s essay on Bruno Latour and review of his new book Down to Earth\u00a0<\/em>(that we will be reading and discussing), click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ava Kofman,\u00a0Oct. 25, 2018,\u00a0New York Times Magazine In the summer of 1996, during an international anthropology conference in southeastern Brazil, Bruno Latour, France\u2019s most famous and misunderstood philosopher, was approached by an anxious-looking developmental psychologist. The psychologist had a… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38966],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources-6-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4062\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/praxis1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}