trol of the primary qualities. Concerning the same period, we can contrast Koyré’s
treatment (Koyré 1957) with that of a political epistemologist, in Shapin 1996.
3. A New Separation of Powers
- The science wars, from this standpoint, are not lacking in a certain grandeur. I
would join the camp of the “Sokalists” right away if I heard someone calmly proclaim
that the sciences are one “system of beliefs” among others, a “social construction”
without any particular validity, an interplay of political interests in which the strongest
wins (positions that are usually attributed to me by people who have not read my
work!). “That means war!” as Isabelle Stengers reminds us (Stengers 1998), and there is
good reason to fight to prevent this extension of the obscurantism of the Cave to the
Enlightenment. Still, the battle I am waging has a different aim: to keep anyone from
depriving us of light by burying us in the inner reaches of the Cave, only to dazzle us
later on with a projector that can only burn our retinas.
- For a telling critique of the anthropomorphism implied in the notion of matters
of fact, see Tarde 1999, repr., 44.
- On the vascularization necessary for facts to exist, one could consult the whole
of science studies from Fleck 1935 to Rheinberger 1997. Let us not forget that Science
and the sciences do not have the same feeding habits: whereas Science is weakened by
any trace of construction, the sciences are nourished by the work of fabrication al-
lowed by laboratories. I am well aware that the theme of fabrication or the construc-
tion of facts necessitates a profound transformation of the notion of fabrication itself
(Hacking 1999). I have attempted this myself several times, particularly in Latour
1999b, Latour 1999c, and again in Latour forthcoming.
- The essential elements of this lengthy quarrel against empiricism, which Pierre
Duhem made classic (Duhem 1904), can be found in Bachelard 1951 as well as in Pop-
per and Kuhn.
- We shall understand only at the end of Chapter 4 why these two terms are syn-
onymous, even if the traditional dispute between the internal and external histories of
science presents them as separated; see Pestre 1995. This separation, whose history Ste-
ven Shapin has studied (Shapin 1992), is actually just an artifact of the old Constitu-
tion.
- Habermas (1996) attempts to find an intermediary between facts and values in
the notion of norms. Like many of his solutions, this one has the disadvantage of re-
taining the defects of the traditional concepts, even as it finds astute social means to al-
leviate them. To discover the “procedural rationality” that is appropriate to political
ecology (see Chapter 5), we must thus avoid the solution offered by the notion of the
norm and dig deeper, in order not to retain the difference, consecrated by Habermas,
between instrumental reasoning concerned with means and communicative action,
which would be concerned with ends (Latour 2002a).
- See for example the useful update on the discourses of genetics in Fox-Keller
- This is why the distinction introduced in Chapter 1 between Science and the
sciences owed nothing to this hope of purifying Science of any trace of ideology.
NOTES TO PAGES 88–100
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