Last week, New York Magazine ran a lengthy profile of Bruno Latour. Writer Ava Kofman dove into what Latour, “France’s most famous and misunderstood philosopher,” is doing in a world that has embraced his post-modern and post-truth ideas in a way he’s not exactly thrilled with.
Latour recognizes how his seminal mid-century philosophical work, which explored and illuminated how science and facts are not discovered but created by humans with bias working within large social networks, has been weaponized by partisan or biased critics of science. Specifically, Kofman explains, “corporate-funded climate skeptics” use Latour’s “arguments about the constructed nature of knowledge to sow doubt around the scientific consensus on climate change.”
The denier’s mantra--that climate science is tainted by biased researchers pursuing grants from partisan or otherwise corrupt funding institutions--is a bastardized version of Latour’s ideas. Latour argues that the production of science is a social undertaking with findings that are inseparable from the context in which they were created. We all carry some sort of bias that even science can’t fully untangle or sanitize, but acknowledging that doesn’t invalidate the scientific process. In fact, it makes it stronger.
In part because of this corruption of his work, Latour in recent decades has focused on human’s impact on the environment. He is particularly interested in how our world-wide pollution has changed natural environments to the point that, as Latour says, “there is no outside anymore.”
As such, society in general and scientists in particular need to embrace the idea that “there is no such thing as a view from nowhere.”
Climate scientists specifically, according to Latour, need to abandon the idea that shoving more facts in peoples’ faces is all we need to move the needle towards climate action (something many are already well aware of.) Instead, Kofman summarizes, Latour believes they must “recognize that, as nature’s designated representatives,” climate scientists are inherently political. As such, they need to recognize they are not disinterested bystanders, but “combatants in a war whose outcome will have planetary ramifications.”
Going one step further, the public’s trust in science might actually be strengthened by embracing the Latour-ian view that science is not a sterile uncovering of immutable truths, but instead a messy human process with multiple layers of people, places, institutions and social rules.
Latour brought up an example of how a climate scientist who embraced such a view described how climate science is produced not by one lone researcher, but instead through a “complex system for verifying data, the articles and reports, the principle of peer evaluation, the vast network of weather stations, floating weather buoys, satellites and computers that ensure the flow of information.” If a thought can survive a run through the gauntlet of the scientific process, agreeing with multiple different sets and types of data and surviving the critical eyes of peer-review, then it arguably proves the finding’s mettle.
Deniers, on the other hand, lack this admittedly complicated set of interlocking institutions, and their lack of “institutional architecture” makes their statements that much less trustworthy.
This shift, “from scientists appealing to transcendent, capital-T Truth to touting the robust networks through which truth is, and has always been, established” allows consensus science to both embrace the human element of the scientific method and reinforce the validity of the findings that survive it.
In the Trump Era, then, when one man seeks to define truth and reality by decree, opening up the Ivory Tower so the public can see just how much effort by many people goes into producing one fact is perhaps a partial answer to the fake news, fake tweets, fake reality problem.
Because as Latour notes while watching a team of scientists measuring the impact of the ocean and tides on the planet’s gravity, there’s a whole lot of work that goes into science. But it’s not without its rewards.
“Can you imagine the pleasure,” Latour asks, “of producing one fact?”
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