might reach an understanding with them, contractually? But, after all, the old social
contract, too, was unspoken and unwritten: no one has ever read the original, or even a
copy. To be sure, we don’t know the world’s language, or rather we know only the vari-
ous animistic, religious, or mathematical versions of it. When physics was invented,
philosophers went around saying that nature was hidden under the code of algebra’s
numbers and letters: that wordcodecame from law. In fact, the Earth speaks to us in
terms of forces, bonds, and interactions, and that’s enough to make a contract” (Serres
1995, 39).
- For recent descriptions of this work of making things in the laboratory speak, or
rather write and trace, see Jones and Galison 1998 and Latour and Weibel 2002. - The distinction between primary and secondary qualities quite clearly required
that controversies among scientists not be visible. How can we go about stabilizing
them, today, if scientists cannot reach agreement among themselves about the com-
mon background, the furnishing of the world? One can oppose “the” genetic makeup
to culture, but only as long as there is only one definition of the gene, not if there exist
several of them—for controversies over genes, see Lewontin 2000 and Kupiec and
Sonigo 2000. - Pierre Lascoumes (1994) and Marie-Angèle Hermitte (1996) have assessed the
problems created for national governments by the experts’ disagreements. See also the
fine example in Sheila Jasanoff 1992. - By failing to study the innumerable discussion forums of researchers, the tradi-
tion stemming from the Cave separated demonstration from rhetoric, two regimes
of speech that Barbara Cassin callsapodeixisandepideixis,demonstration and persua-
sion (Cassin 1995). We owe the recent weakening of the distance between these two
forms of construction of the world to laboratory studies on the one hand and studies of
scientific rhetoric on the other. See several fine examples in Dear 1991, Licoppe 1996,
and Rosental 2000. Françoise Bastide’s work, unfortunately interrupted too soon, also
strikes me as very fruitful (Bastide 2001). - This is what Michel Callon and Arie Rip called hybrid forums, in Callon and Rip
- For a more developed argument, see also Callon, Lascoumes, et al. 2001.
- I shall show in Chapter 4 how we can profit from the tremendous work of Jürgen
Habermas (Habermas 1990, Habermas 1996) on the transcendental conditions of com-
munication. At this stage, however, Habermas’s work seems counterproductive, for we
would have to subject it, as we would Kantian morality, to too much twisting in order
to apply it to nonhumans, whom he seeks precisely to keep at a distance. By succeed-
ing in separating human communication from instrumental reasoning still more pro-
foundly (and this is the aim of his philosophy), one would succeed only in moving the
two assemblies even farther apart and in giving still more power to the first—that of
reason—which renders the second—that of humans—mute! Haberman’s enterprise is
a strange one, in that it aims to silence those whom he aspires to see speaking more
freely. - Marie-Angèle Hermitte’s book (Hermitte 1996) on the contaminated blood scan-
dal in France shows magnificently all that needs to be changed in the conception of
expertise and responsibility as soon as it is no longer possible to hypothesize that
knowledge brings controversies to an end. The same is true of “mad cow disease”—an
excellent example—and of course of the continuo provided to the experts’ theories by
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