That unrealistic view of s/Science again (Bruno Latour)

[alice wellintown]

Are you Anti-science / Science / Big Science / Science-Technic or
what? And can't you dispense ( dis out in samller portions a reader
can chew on or discard)  with all that French-America- Rococo?

On French- American- Rococo

http://harpers.org/archive/2000/06/in-the-land-of-the-rococo-marxists/

BOOK REVIEW

Science Studies Study
Katherine Pandora

Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Bruno
Latour. Harvard University Press, 1999. 352 pp.

In this book of impassioned and creative explorations into scientific
life, Bruno Latour offers himself as a reasonable man who is ready and
willing to lead combatants of the "science wars" off the battle plain
and onto higher ground. This may surprise some in the scientific and
scholarly worlds who had heard in one forum or another that Latour was
the incendiary leader of a rag-tag band of sociologists, philosophers,
academic feminists and literary theorists who assert that reality is a
fiction and have therefore declared themselves to be enemies of
science. It is unfortunate that such cartoonish "anti-science"
characterizations of those who have been developing the field of
science studies has polarized debate in ways that have ill-served the
academy, the scientific enterprise and the larger polity, but that is
part of the "reality of science studies" today.

Latour uses Pandora's Hope as a platform to address this stasis, not
by presenting a point-by-point rebuttal of his critics but instead by
pressing "inquiries, anecdotes, myths, legends, textual studies and
more than a little bit of conceptual bricolage" into the service of
revealing what he believes to be the way forward. The text is
comprised of essays about the genesis of and context for the science
wars, case studies of scientific practice and elaboration of his
current theoretical stances. His writing can be stimulating, fresh and
at times genuinely moving, but it can also display a distractingly
mannered style in which a rococo zeal for compounding metaphors,
examples, definitions and abstractions can frustrate even readers who
approach his work with the best of intentions (notwithstanding the
inclusion of a nine-page glossary of terms and liberal use of diagrams
in an attempt to achieve the utmost clarity). In some respects, then,
this is a book that works best for those who come to its pages already
possessing some familiarity with philosophical discussions of the
grounds for knowledge or of sociological investigations into
scientific work practices, as such preparation provides some anchorage
in following Latour's train of thought.



http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/science-studies-study


On 8/4/13, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674724990
>