
Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science - mistersquid
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-post-truth-philosopher-science.html
======
pjc50
> This, in essence, is the premise of Latour’s latest book, “Down to Earth,”
> an illuminating and counterintuitive analysis of the present post-truth
> moment, which will be published in the United States next month.

Ah, that's why this article exists - he's got a book to promote.

Despite that, it's a good read and an important discussion to have, and one
that's at great risk of misinterpretation. What Latour and others are
discussing is not the idea that there isn't an external reality, but that
_what we know about reality is inevitably filtered by our perception_ , which
includes our social, economic and institutional contexts. Latour's questioning
of scientism pre-dates the modern problems of nonreproducibility, p-hacking
etc.

I would also recommend Latour's work _Aramis_. The French government attempted
an extremely Elon Musk personal transit system in the 80s, and Latour examines
why it failed. Perhaps to be read alongside Feynman writing about Challenger
in the same timeframe.

Edit: in re climate skepticism, have a look at the Introduction of
[https://ecomig2014.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/178919402-lat...](https://ecomig2014.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/178919402-latour-
bruno-an-inquiry-into-modes-of-existence-an-anthropology-of-the-moderns-
pdf.pdf) \- which is a serious inquiry into the question of why climate
scientists are or aren't believed.

~~~
gambler
_> What Latour and others are discussing is not the idea that there isn't an
external reality, but that what we know about reality is inevitably filtered
by our perception, which includes our social, economic and institutional
contexts._

It is extremely annoying when people present this is some kind of new
groundbreaking idea, when it fact this is the exact observation that lead to
creation of the scientific method.

The basis of the scientific method is the notion that human perception has
quirks, _therefore to learn about reality as it really is we need to design
system that correct for those quirks._ Alan Kay and Neil DeGrasse Tyson have
good talks on this subject.

Big problems with modern science are not philosophical ones. They stem from
institutional structures, incentives and the economy of modern science. Guess
what? An institution distorting it own conclusions because of group biases bad
economic incentives is not conceptually different from human brain distorting
conclusions because of individual biases and instincts. It is something that
should and can be handled through better process design.

Most scientists do not deny that these problems exist. There are plenty of
them who analyze these issues, criticize the current state of affairs and
propose actionable solution. Maybe we should listen to them before listening
to post-modernists, eh? I am aware of exactly zero positive changes in science
that ever resulted from post-modernist critique. Feel free to provide counter-
examples.

~~~
wsy
It is extremely annoying when anti-post-modernists argue against straw-men.
Admittedly, the cited summary makes this easy, because it is very misleading.

The common theme of postmodern epistemology is that there is not _the truth_.
Therefore, science is not an institution that finds _the truth_. This is not
about filtering and quirks and biases, it is much more fundamental.
mistersquid's sibling post to yours describes that very well, much better than
the article snippet you referred to.

I'm not sure if this insight has brought positive changes in science. But it
doesn't matter. Philosophy doesn't have the purpose to bring improvements to
science.

As a side note, when modern science was established, no scientist talked about
the influence of social, economic, or institutional contexts on their own
work, as far as I know. If this is nowadays perceived as obvious fact, I would
consider that as positive influence of philosophy on science.

------
throwaw-zxcvbn
> The first text he was assigned was Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy”;
> unlike “all the confusion of mathematics,” it immediately struck him as
> clear and perfectly rational.

Bad sign...

------
jeffmcmahan
> [Latour's] 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’s real.

I'm sorry, but no. Anglosphere philosophers (= the mainstream, like it or not)
do not, in general, take social constructionism at all seriously. I'd predict
that there is not one tenured philosopher of science at a top-50 department
who'd regard Latour as an influential contributor to epistemology or
philosophy of science.

For some reason, journalists who write about philosophy are universally
ignorant of the fact that academic philosophy took a hard analytic turn a
century ago, and that the continent has contributed very little since - France
least of all.

~~~
zzzzzzzzzz1
Clearly you know nothing. Poststructuralism since the 60s, and postmodernism
since 80s, have had profound impacts on philosophy and other related
disciplines. This all emerged out of France (Barthes, Derrida, Foucault,
Deleuze, Guatarri, Mouffe, Butler, Harraway, the list goes on and on and on).

~~~
woodandsteel
Poststructuralism was created as an attempt by a certain group of Marxists who
had given up on the usual ways to try to win people over to their political
philosophy, and decided instead to persuade them there is no reality (or at
least no way to know it, which for practical purposes amounts to largely the
same thing,)and therefore all the standard arguments for liberalism are false,
and we are free to create Marx's utopia. See for instance Hardt and Negri on
all this. As a political strategy it has simply failed, though it has helped
cause to a lot of the political problems we face today.

------
buboard
> these debates have begun to look more like a prelude to the post-truth era
> in which society as a whole is presently condemned to live. The past decade
> has seen a precipitous rise not just in anti-scientific thinking

Enough of this nonsense. Scepticism is a cornerstone of science itself.
Perhaps if the "scientific consensus" had not led to the disasters of 2008 in
USA and the EU crisis, people would be less skeptical. It would be nice if the
NYtimes writers stopped rubbing their intellectual superiority all over us and
instead think a little deeper about the rise of skepticism. Oh, and let's
remember that, despite their claims, their walled garden doesn't hold a
monopoly to the truth.

> Latour believes that if scientists were transparent about how science really
> functions — as a process in which people, politics, institutions, peer
> review and so forth all play their parts — they would be in a stronger
> position to convince people of their claims.

I 'm not sure if this would lead to stronger trust, considering the amount of
politics inherent in the processes of funding and publishing.

~~~
seanhunter
In what sense was the 2008 crisis anything to do with scientific consensus?
I'm not sure I follow that.

~~~
buboard
Economies have been led technocracies since at least the 80s. There are
numerous ways the academia failed to predict the financial crisis, and on the
contrary facilitated it:
[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/22a9/5fc8524947c1b7f985bd75...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/22a9/5fc8524947c1b7f985bd75aee2ce604d6fea.pdf)

The 'greed and bad governance' claim is bogus: one the one hand, it was was
academically-approved 'greed', and 'bad goverment' had little to with the
collapse of private institutions that the US government had to save.

~~~
resonanttoe
You're making claims that are entirely unsupported by anything you've provided
or said. The paper linked makes the claim towards the failure of academic
economics failing to predict the Financial crisis of 2008, not science.

(This also completely ignores that it seems to be a book passage rather than a
review and well cited article in a Journal).

You've imposed your own narrative on the article written about Latour here and
bought up wild claims about 2008 with no relevance to the discussion at hand.

I actually don't know what your point is other than to rally against the NYT
and it sniffs of personal bias the whole way down.

I doubt you've read the article.

And I'll just leave this selected quote here from the article you did link.

"* This opinion paper is the outcome of one week of intense discussions within
the working group on ‘Modeling of Financial Markets’ at the 98 th Dahlem
Workshop, 2008. "

