the long controversy over climate change. Those who wait for absolute certainty before
acting are living in the wrong time. This is the main lesson of the precautionary prin-
ciple.
- In Chapter 4 we shall return to the new meaning that has to be given to the term
“decision,” which I shall link to the key notion of institution*. - Strange: the list of indictments taken up again by Beck maintains intact the tra-
dition’s capacities for speech without remarking that for a very long time now humans
have ceased to be the only ones endowed with the use of speech (Beck 1997, 122). - Here it would be useful to be able to show the role of the circulating references
that establish bridges between words and things (Hacking 1983). Numerous examples
can be found in the remarkable work by Peter Galison (1997) and in the detailed studies
by Karin Knorr-Cetina (1999) and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (1997). See also the accessible
and detailed example in Latour 1999b, and in the last section of this chapter the key no-
tion of articulation*. - The whole problem of Habermas’s work lies here, for what he says about hu-
mans would make an excellent definition of nonhumans! “As soon as we conceive in-
tentional social relations as communicatively mediated in the sense proposed, we are
no longer dealing with disembodied, omniscient beings who exist beyond the empiri-
cal realm and are capable of context-free actions, so to speak. Rather, we are concerned
with finite, embodied actors who are socialized in concrete forms of life, situated in
historical time and social space, and caught up in networks of communicative action
(Habermas 1996, 324). This is exactly what becomes of things that have been freed
from the anthropomorphism of the object! Habermas, while believing that human be-
ings had to be liberated, forgot those beings thatmadethem human: nonhumans, the
great losers in his moral philosophy. - There is now a vast literature on scientific instruments and the various forms of
visualization and argumentation they allow. The accumulation of these studies has
completely subverted the old monologue of representation speaking about the world
across the gulf of reference. This gulf has now largely been filled in, and no one today
will take as an example of a scientific utterance “the cat is on the mat,” an utterance
whose truth value would depend on whether or not the said cat is present on the said
mat. Some starting points can be found in Lynch and Woolgar 1990 and Jones and
Galison 1998. As with many of the themes in the previous chapter, specialists in my
field are confronted with the following alternative: either we can keep on offering the
same introductions, to modify the image that readers have of scientific practice, or we
can take this literature for granted and tackle the truly interesting problems that arise
in a multitude of fields as soon as we have modified the theory of science that was para-
lyzing us previously. - I have noticed that all discussions on the abandonment of the distinction be-
tween object and subject always fall flat, for most readers who have some familiarity
with German philosophy believe that the task hasalreadybeen accomplished by Hegel
and his descendants, thanks to the movement of dialectics. Now, dialectics, far from
solving the problem, makes it insoluble, since it makes contradiction itself the driving
force behind history and even the cosmos. This amounts to extending the artifacts of
modernist thought to the world itself. No anthropomorphism is more complete than
the one that makes the universe share in the category errors of a few philosophers of
NOTES TO PAGES 65–72
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