Diario de una investigación

Lunes, 21 de noviembre de 2005

Constructivismo / Relativismo / Realismo

(Referencia: FAQ, Latour's website)

Social construction?

Is Bruno Latour a social constructivist? The answer is not quite. The word was used in the first edition of Laboratory Life in 1979 and then dropped in the second edition. Everything at the time was "socially constructed" (see Ian Hacking(1999). The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press), but even then the meaning of "social" was more like that of "practice" and had nothing to do with an explanation of science in terms of interest, power, social structure and so on. A perfect sub-title would have been :" the practical construction of scientific facts". Since then, BL's method has always been to show how science is a better analyser of society than vice versa.

But if is not a social constructivist, BL is certainly a full blooded constructivist (and even an unreconstructed constructivist at that!), meaning that things could have failed and that there is some risk entailed in making them what they are and in maintaining them in existence. To use Whitehead:" the world is made more of events than of objects".

Relativism

Is Bruno Latour relativist? No and then yes. There is always an ambiguity with relativism: it is most often used as an accusation to say that the guilty party fails to see differences where differences matter; it is thus an accusation about flattening the landscape of values as if everything was of the same worth, science, religion, witchcraft, cults etc. The contrary of relativist is then" well differentiated". But when it is used positively, it means the establishment of relations which are necessary for any judgement about differences, contrasts, oppositions, etc. Hence the preferred expression of relationism. In that second sense, the opposite of relativist is absolutist (see the new foreword in Bloor, D. ([1976] 1991). Knowledge and Social Imagery). Chicago, University of Chicago Press).

The question is not to decide whether one is relativist or not (who wants to be an absolutist?), but to see how can one produce the more lively, sturdy and vivid set of differentiations and contrasts. The general answer is to say that one big difference (like for instance science and non-science) is probably less able to express contrasts that many differentiations. In any case,whereas the discussion is opened when one aks what sort of differentiation is requested, it is definitively shut off when one profers the accusation of relativist," thinking" something important has been said.

Más referencias:

RESPECTO DEL CONSTRCUTIVISMO

- Laboratory Life
- «The Promises of constructivism» (2003)
- *Hacking, I. (1983), Representar e intervenir, Barcelona: Paidós, 1996.
- *Hacking, I. (1999): La construcción social de qué? (The Social construction of What?, Cambridge, Harvard Universty Press)

RESPECTO DE LOS ESTUDIOS SOCIALES DE LA CIENCIA

- Laboratory life
- Pandora's hope
- Postscriptum, Ciencia en Acción
- «A Dialog on Actor-Network-Theory With a (Somewhat) Socratic Professor»

RESPECTO DEL REALISMO
- *H.Putnam: Las mil caras del realismo, I.C.E./Paidós, Barcelona, 1994
- Prólogo de Quintanilla. "Sobre las imposibilidades de observación neutral", L. Olivé y A.Pérez Ransanz (comp.): Filosofía de la ciencia: teoría y observación, Siglo XXI, México, 1989

Por: NOE | Teoría del Actor-Red | Comentarios (0) | Referencias (0)