“Sokalists”: the law of universal gravity is now quite solidlyestablished—even though it
no longer has in 1, 2, and 3 the same capacity to shut people up!
- We can recall the famous episode in which Lord Kelvin, a physicist, claimed that
the life span of the solar system was much more limited than the biologists, inspired by
Darwin, needed it to be for the unfolding of evolution. The biologists resisted politely
and continued to think in terms of hundreds of millions of years, despite the physi-
cists’ interdiction, even though physicists had much more prestige at the time. The
phenomenon of evolution “insisted” despite the absence of a physical theory capable of
reducing it or explaining it. And the biologists were quite right to hold onto their
enigma, since with the discovery of radioactivity the physicists would soon endow the
sun with a life span that was finally compatible with biological evolution. This is a
good example of resistance on the part of a problem to premature solutions. Extend
this resistance to everyone, and you have democracy defined as the autonomy of the
problems raised. It is when the “public at large” stubbornly seeks to protect its interro-
gations, if need be against the accusation of irrationalism by certain scientific lobbies,
that it is the most scientific (Stengers 1997b). - This prejudice is found throughout (political) economy. To define the rational
force of falsificationism, Lakatos gives a precise definition of an election! But the paral-
lel escapes him, since for him “politics” means red hordes trampling the due process of
Science alone (Lakatos 1978). For the contrary view, see Callon 1995. - Let us recall the admirable example of the Swiss referendum on genetically
modified organisms. No scientist worthy of the name would have forgotten to consult
the genes, the field experiments, the antibiotics, the corn- and rapeseed flowers. Yet
politicians had to intervene brutally afterward to allow the consultation to add the hu-
mans who were going to “profit” most directly from the benefits of biogenetics. They
had been forgotten! When scientists are added, justice is done to Habermas’s require-
ment (“Just those action norms are valid to which all possibly affected persons could
agree as participants in rational discourses” [Habermas 1996, 107]). But Habermas can
never make this an operational requirement, since he has driven the nonhumans out of
his City, as Plato drove the artists out of his. - To take up a useful expression from Tresch 2001.
- This collaboration can be observed up close in the establishment of the local wa-
ter commissions in France. For every catchment, these commissions have to make a
plan for shared water use (Latour 1998). Sometimes the understanding is reached ow-
ing to the discovery by hydrogeologists of new water reserves, sometimes by the modi-
fication of the constituents represented by one of the spokespersons: the farmer who
came in to defend his rights to irrigation leaves convinced of the need to defend the
river. The “we” that he represented has changed meaning. Such adjustments are never
achieved if one has a nature with fixed resources and a society with established inter-
ests—in other words, scientism in the natural sciences on the one side, scientism in the
social sciences on the other. - On this property of politics, to be modified below, see Schmitt 1976 (1963).
- Decision theory is inherited entirely from the myth of the Cave, for it has ne-
glected to point out that people also decide about facts and causes (contribution of the
sciences to task no. 4). Conversely, as soon as the word “decision” is applied also to the
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