Constructivism for Philosophers (Be it a Remark on Realism

Constructivism forPhilosophers (Be it aRemark on Realism)

Ofer GalProgram for History andPhilosophy of ScienceBen Gurion University of theNegev Israel

Bereft of the illusion of an epistemic vantage point external to science whatshould be our commitment towards the categories concepts and terms of thatvery science Should we despaired of the possibility to found these concepts onrock bottom adopt empiricist skepticism Or perhaps the inexistence of exter-nal foundations implies rather immunity for scientic ontology fromepistemological criticism Philosophyrsquos ldquorealism debaterdquo died out withoutproviding a satisfactory answer to the dilemma which was taken over by theneighboring disciplines The ldquosymmetry principlerdquo of the ldquoStrong Programmerdquofor the sociology of science-the requirement that truth and error receive thesame kind of causal explanations-offered one bold metaphysical answer un-der the guise of a methodological decree Recently however it has been arguedthat this solution is not bold enough that the social constructivists replacedthe naiumlve presumption of an independent nature which adjudicates our beliefswith a mirror-image presumption of a sui generis society which furnishesthese beliefs autonomously The proper metaphysics for a foundationless episte-mology argues Bruno Latour is one which grants nature and society objectand subject equal roles in the success and failure of science and technologyone in which history of society merges with a history of things-in-themselvesThe paper analyzes the philosophical and methodological motivations andramications of this extraordinary suggestion

No FoundationsAfter taking central stage in the 1980s the realism debate seems to havesubsided in recent years without leaving much of a mark Given the grav-ity of the issues at stake a future historian of philosophy may nd herselfintrigued by this quick dissolution The debate after all was an attemptto accommodate an extremely important realization that we do not have

523

Perspectives on Science 2002 vol 10 no 4copy2003 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

an independent perspective from which to view and adjudicate our knowl-edge no neutral language to talk about both nature and its representa-tions All the various arguments and positions in the debate our imaginedhistorian would explain were attempts at answers to one fundamentalquestion bereft of the illusion of an epistemic vantage point external toscience what should be our commitment towards the categories conceptsand terms of that same science Should we despaired of the possibility tofound these concepts on rock bottom adopt empiricist skepticism Orperhaps the inexistence of external foundations implies rather immunityfor scientic ontology from such epistemological criticism The realismdebate was quick to lose its vivacity she might conclude because as manyof its participants noticed (Rescher 1987 p xi) it had turned ldquotechnicalrdquobefore coming to grips with this basic dilemma Philosophy it seems hasadopted realism as its ofcial stance on science while hardly noticing thatit has chosen ipso facto the latter of the two alternatives and withoutreecting upon the metaphysical and epistemological ramications of thischoice

In particular realismrsquos quick ascendance to the throne of mainstreamphilosophy of sciencemdashdriving the incumbent logical positivism out ofits last strongholdsmdashhas obscured the fact that the title ldquorealistrdquo stood fortwo completely different philosophical personae The one represented byeg Wright (1986) Harreacute (1986) Rescher (1987) Musgrave (in Nola1988) and Putnam (1987) perceived the above dilemma as a reenactmentof the old philosophical struggle with the skeptic who has simply takenon a small array of new guisesmdashanti-realist about this aspect of science orthe other The other persona assumed by the likes of Rorty (1979)Hacking (1983) McDowell (1994) and Putnam of ldquoThe Meaning ofMeaningrdquo was engaged to varying degrees of reection and success in aground-breaking project of dismantling the very opposition in which theformer type of ldquorealistrdquo was taking a side Taking their key from previousassaults on the sets of dichotomies and hierarchies dening the Philosoph-ical Kingdom of the battered positivist sovereignmdashSellars on the ldquomythof the givenrdquo Quine on the dichotomy between ldquoanalyticrdquo and ldquosyn-theticrdquo Davidson on that between ldquoschemerdquo and ldquocontentrdquomdashthey set adevastating challenge to what Rorty called ldquothe visual metaphors ofknowledgerdquo and Hacking following Dewey summarized as ldquothe specta-tor theory of knowledgerdquo

The realism debate subsided but the absence of an Archimedean sup-port for science has lost none of its epistemological signicance and thatfundamental dilemma left unresolved by philosophy has come to hauntthe neighboring disciplines of history and sociology of science Indeed thestudents of these disciplines did not originally experience the philosophi-

524 Constructivism for Philosophers

cal ight from foundationalism as a cause for concern but rather as a liber-ating breakthrough The manifestos of the Edinburgh School in themid-1970s were celebrations of this liberation1 Provoking as much angryopposition as enthusiastic application the ldquosocial constructivismrdquo evokedby the self-titled ldquoStrong Programme for the Sociology of Sciencerdquo becamethe liveliest and most fertile eld for the study of science in the last quar-ter-century It did so by holding on to both horns of the dilemma insist-ing on its own scientic meritmdashthus upholding sciencersquos claim to uniqueepistemic statusmdashwhile denying science (including the sociology of sci-ence itself ) any privileged realmmdashany autonomous epistemic dominionwhere reasons rule over causes In the name of the scientic values of empir-icism objectivity and generality the Strong Programme demanded for it-self the right (and assumed the responsibility) to provide causal accountsfor the essential core of scientic knowledge as well as its paraphernalia(belying in the process the very distinction between core and periphery)for its content as well as its institutions and most importantly for its trueclaims as well as its erroneous hypotheses and speculations These accountswere to be sociologicalmdashscientic knowledge is a social phenomenon ar-gued Bloor Barnes and their disciples against the solipsistic instincts ofmost of modern epistemology But it was the ldquosymmetry principlerdquomdashtherequirement that truth and error receive the same kind of causal explana-tionsmdashthat has turned the Sociology of Scientic Knowledge into astrong philosophical positionmdasha genuine ldquoEmpirical Program of Relativ-ism (EPOR)rdquo2

2 SymmetryTo be a constructivistmdashsocial or otherwisemdashis to perceive the symmetryprinciple as reecting a profound epistemological and metaphysical in-sight that human knowledge is fundamentally a human product con-structed by human agency out of malleable though recalcitrant naturalingredients According to the constructivist credo it is not unmediatedNature that distinguishes between true and false claims Humans makethe distinction by applying historically changing and culturally depend-ent criteria From this point of view there is clearly no place for two differ-ent types of historical sociological or philosophical accounts of scienceonemdashinternal and rationalmdashfor its successes and the othermdashexternal andcausalmdashfor failures

This is a very powerful philosophical position but it is not where thesymmetry principle displays its true force The demand for symmetrical

Perspectives on Science 525

1 Perhaps the most exemplary ones are Bloorrsquos (1976) and Barnesrsquo (1977)2 Collins (1981)

causal accounts of true and false science still presents an intriguing chal-lenge to the philosophy of science precisely because it can be coached andsupported in strictly methodological terms committing as it were to nometaphysical creed but that implied directly by the ldquoscientic methodrdquo it-self3 One does not need to accept any assumptions regarding the nature ofscientic truth in order to accept the symmetry principle it is a straight-forward application of the scientic edicts of causality generality parsi-mony and especially objectivity

This is so because even a staunch believer in the existence of a provinceof scientic knowledge that gains its legitimacy directly from nature anautarchic ldquorealm of reasonsrdquo4 unfettered by causes will nd it hard to in-sist that we know the boundaries of this domain Even Lakato himselfwould have had to concede it seems that we do not know the real pedi-gree of our beliefs we do not know which of them were conceived andbred by reasons within the realm and which by causes outside it The un-perturbed Lakatoian would be right to point out that to accept a knowl-edge claim as scientic let alone as true is to grant the credibility of itslineage and would also probably argue against the constructivist thatthis credibility means that the claim was reasoned rather than caused Buthe will surely admit a station within the realm of reasons is always as ten-tative and provisional as any other attribute we assign to a scientic claimThe realization that we do not have an independent point on which tofound the truth of our knowledge applies just as well to its rationality Allone can say in that respect about the most reliable and trustworthy piecesof current science is precisely that that they represent the best knowledgewe have probably the best we ever had and perhaps the best we couldhope for or similarly that they are supported by the best purest reasonswe could come up with

This one should stress is quite a lot It should be enough to defeat theskeptic if there is no rm independent standing point from which toascertain that our scientic convictions are reasoned and true there canalso be no independent position from which they can be shown as funda-mentally wrong or irrational5 But the reliability and trustworthiness ofthese convictions is not nearly enough to censure the question of how


3 See eg Golinsky 1998 pp 6 84 This is the phrase developed by Sellars in his 1956 granted in a much more sophisti-

cated way than can be discussed here5 This argument does not effect anyonersquos entitlement to offer external criticism of the

morality political standing nancial cost cultural implications or any other aspect of sci-ence Sciencersquos relative immunity according to this line of thought is limited to itsepistemic prowess That again is not due to sciencersquos own unshakeable foundationsbut tothe impossibility of any such foundations

we did establish them nor any well-supported answer to this questionmdashnotwithstanding that both question and answer may trespass the bound-aries marked and declared by scientists the legitimate inhabitants ofthe alleged domain of pure reasons In other words if our assumptionsabout the nature of scientic truth preclude the possibility that a scienticclaim may be both caused and true (assumptions rejected by the socialconstructivist) we might not like to discover that some or all of ourbeliefs are an effect of ldquoexternalrdquo causes Even if we were shown a convinc-ing causal account of their emergence and acceptance we may decide toreserve judgment about whether or not to keep holding to those beliefsBut we cannot preclude the possibility of such an account concerning anyparticular belief

Thus not knowing in advance which of our scientic convictions right-fully belongs in the touted realm of reasons it is scientic objectivity it-self that demands of the investigator of science to treat all of them alikeThe historian sociologist or philosopher of science should put aside herown (probably favorite) opinion concerning the truth of the claims madeby scientists And unless she believes against strong evidence to the con-trary that ldquotruth prevailsrdquomdashthat the very truth of a claim scientic orother guarantees that it will ultimately be recognized as suchmdashthis de-mand will not strike her as a difcult one to meet If she is interested inEinsteinrsquos path to relativity theory and the means by which he swayed hispeers into accepting it how could she benet from her own knowledgethat the theory was correct Assuming as we do that she has no recourseto an external vantage point from which to examine both Einsteinrsquos hy-potheses and their independent ldquotruth of the matterrdquo we must concludethat she based her conviction upon Einsteinrsquos own success in convincinghimself and his peers But this success is exactly what she attempts to ac-count for it cannot be used as part of the explanation Hence when onegives up the uplifting but ill-founded belief in revelationmdashin the mysti-cal property of truth to declare itself to the unobstructed gaze of the hu-man mindmdashsymmetry becomes a simple consequence of scientic parsi-mony If the truth of an hypothesis is not to be employed in the account ofits emergence and acceptance than there is no reason to eld two essen-tially different kinds of explanations one for true science and the other forfalse

This is only one way to spell out the requirement of symmetry in expla-nation It is somewhat less exciting than the epistemological version Isummarized above but it has one important advantage It helps to illus-trate that in complete opposition to its prevalent ldquoanti-sciencerdquo imagesocial constructivism tends to behave very much like its great punchingbagmdashgood old logical positivismmdashpurporting to be a metaphysics-free


methodological critique And in a vain much similar to the disillusion-ment suffered by that previous attempt at scientic philosophy thecondent methodological decrees of the Strong Programme their struc-ture thoroughly explored by their most competent upholders gave way topainful metaphysical dilemmas In fairness to the Strong Programme itshould be noted that the dilemmas were raised against the backgroundof signicant empirical success which denitely redeems the methodolog-ical self-understanding Moreover these dilemmas were given their mostpungent formulation by one of the scholars most responsible for its suc-cessmdashBruno Latour

3 Super SymmetryLatour never shied away from metaphysical commitments especially thoseimplied by the constructivist approach to knowledge All epistemologicaldichotomies a-symmetries and hierarchies he happily contends are con-structions This is true he species of the superiority of Western scienceover any other mode of knowledge and of course true of the distinctionbetween ldquointernalrdquo reasons and ldquoexternalrdquo causes of belief as the StrongProgramme prociently argued This fact itself does not make a-symme-tries like these any less ldquorealrdquo sciencersquos superiority one recalls was force-fully upheld by the advocates of the Strong Programme while the exter-nal-internal distinction Latour had already shown in his Laboratory Life isan important argumentation tool in the hands of scientists The con-structed nature of a-symmetries does mean however that one is notobliged to adopt any of themmdashthey should rather be treated as a subjectmatter for analysis ldquotopicalizedrdquo in the internal lingo of the debate Inrequiring exactly this under the principle of symmetry the StrongProgramme has been a genuine intellectual revolution Insisting that bothtruth and error are outcomes of social negotiation the social con-structivists demonstrated how the establishment of even this most basicdichotomy occurred differently and locally each time anew They thus allbut obliterated the most sanctied a-symmetry of traditional epistemol-ogy namely the custom of assigning truth to nature and error to society

But the Edinburgh revolution cannot be the last insists Latour Thesocial constructivists he proclaims stopped short of committing them-selves to the historization of all a-symmetries Assaulting the a-symmetri-cal preference to nature they ended up replacing it with a similar prefer-ence to society Insisting that the former is a construct they foundthemselves accepting the latter as a sui generis autarchic entity6 Wran-


6 A similar accusation is levelled at the philosopher most commonly associatedmdashnotnecessarily to his likingmdashwith social constructivism Richard Rorty Richard Bernstein

gling with the custom of assigning exclusively to Nature the positive roleof begetting truth and to society the negative role of introducing errorthe social constructivists fell into the habit of allocating to society everyactive move in the production of knowledge and leaving Nature withonly at best the passive role of recalcitrance Finally choosing society overNature but remaining within the boundaries of the dichotomy betweenthe two they again found themselves unwittingly mimicking their posi-tivist arch-rivals having to allow human agents the freedom to constructtheir knowledge according to social forces they were inclined to watch asldquo[Nature] lsquoitselfrsquo drops out of the storyrdquo (ibid) They did this by reconsti-tuting the archaic notion of a neutral observation a realm of consensuswhere all observers agree upon the presence of a ldquoredish powdery sub-stancerdquo (Bloor 1999 p 93) in front of them

Yet there is no more basis for this new a-symmetry which favors soci-ety to Nature than for the old one where Nature was preferred The verydichotomy between Nature and society is a construct The sharp distinc-tion between subjects and objects claims Latour between human-societaland objective-natural is but another articial a-symmetry constructedphilosophically and politically in the seventeenth centurymdashas beautifullyshown in one of the classics of the school Leviathan and the Air Pump(Shapin and Schaffer 1985) Therefore this dichotomy and especially itsboundaries should not be taken for granted there is no point in replacingnaiumlve realismmdashthe belief that Nature is ldquoout thererdquo independently ofwhat humans make of itmdashwith naiumlve sociologismmdashthe belief that societyis simply ldquoin usrdquo independently of what Nature enforces on it

With that Latour calls upon the next revolution establishing a ldquosuper-symmetryrdquo7 (my term) between subjects and objects in place of the localsymmetry between truth and error How can we do this Well by lettingobjects as it were ldquospeak for themselvesrdquo by allowing them to participateas equal partners in the stories of the successes and failures of science andtechnologymdashand for that matter society as well The Copernican Revolu-tion did not belong solely to Copernicus Tycho Kepler and Galileo Theplanets comets and super-novae had no less of a role in it and the rapidsocial changes that followed the casting of Earth into the margins ofheaven and setting it in triple motion should be ascribed to all those rele-vant agentsmdashhistory of society cannot be separated from the history ofthings-in-themselves


claims that if in Rortyrsquos mind ldquosocial practices are the sort of thing that are given and thatall we need to do is to look and see what they arerdquo then he ldquohimself is guilty of a version ofthe lsquoMyth of the Givenrsquordquo (Bernstein 1985 p 83)

7 Collins and Yearly mark the idea ldquohyper symmetryrdquo See their 1992 and Collins1994

4 Latourrsquos DilemmaThis is an exciting specter and Latour attempts to carry it through in hisremarkably wide-ranging work He seems to get closest to his historio-graphic ideal in Aramis (Latour 1996) Yet the great allure of this positioncannot disguise its immense difculty for which he has received sharpcriticism by his erstwhile comrades most notably Collins and Yearly(1992) and Bloor (1999)

Both the allure and the difculties are well demonstrated in Latourrsquosprogrammatic contribution to Daston (2000 pp 247hellip269) Referring toan episode on which his expertise needs no further testimony he turns ourattention to the debate between Pouchet the last ldquolegitimaterdquo championof spontaneous generation and Pasteur one of the original two masters(Koch being the other) of germ theory It will not do explains Latour totreat Pouchet as hopelessly pursuing an entity that has never existed any-where while Pasteur is playing hide and seek with real entities whichhave always been everywhere Such a ldquodemarcatingrdquo attitude only masksthe actual discrepancy between the two The warm and fuzzy blanket ofthese seemingly-obvious categoriesmdashrdquorealrdquo vs ldquounrealrdquomdashwould com-pletely blur the intricate differences in the theoretical experimental in-stitutional political and technical associations by which both men weretrying to envelope their competing phenomena in order to bring theminto stable and secure existence Moreover it will mask the hard laborwhich Pasteur had to put in in order to extend the existence of germsfrom his laboratory towards the always and everywhere But it would beonly marginally better to look at the two as employing an array of humanresourcesmdashtheories prejudices political loyalties and bodily skillsmdashtocreate consensus concerning ldquodramatically underdetermined matters offactrdquo (p 264) This would mean that ldquomatters of fact [are] playing no roleat all in the controversy human agents have about themrdquo (ibid)mdashthe exactmirror image of the discarded demarcation Both approaches are radicallya-symmetrical pitting humans in their ever-changing society to objects intheir never changing Nature

Yet what exactly does it mean to let ldquomatters of fact [play] a rolerdquo inthe closure of the dispute between Pasteur and Pouchet How are we sup-posed to let ldquothings-in-themselvesrdquo tell their own version of Pasteurrsquos win-ning the day Even the most rudimentary attempt to explore thesignicance of Latourrsquos beautiful phrase is bound to come up against thatprimary philosophical insight with which we started we know no otherway of listening to ldquomatters of factrdquo but through science In order toachieve super-symmetry it appears in order to let objects fulll historicalroles similar to subjects we must refer to science in the attempt to recount


historymdashsciencersquos own history included It may seem somewhat petty towaive the ag of petitio principii here admittedly the ldquorecountrdquo we areseeking is not an abstract argument but a causal-historical narrative Butthe difculty this petitio principii signals is not merely logical If contraryto the old constructivists we are to give Pasteurrsquos germs their fair share inhis success to ll our world with industrial yogurt and antibiotics how arewe to avoid prejudging his dispute with Pouchet in his favor After allthat was exactly Pasteurrsquos claimmdashnamely that the success of hisprize-winning experiments was due to germs that germs were responsiblefor fermentation and putrefaction

The difculty of Latourrsquos position the price paid for the next revolu-tion is steep and is to be delivered in hard metaphysical currency In or-der to secure the symmetry between things and people between germsand Pasteur it appears Latour has to sacrice the cherished andhard-earned symmetry of SSKmdashthe one between truth and falsehood be-tween germs and spontaneous generation If we were to grant Pasteurrsquosgerms with historical agency then the requirement of symmetry wouldforce us to ascribe the same agency to Pouchetrsquos spontaneously generatedeggs It is hard to believe that even the most devout of constructivistswould approve of granting agency to non-existing entities Yet giving upon symmetry is renouncing the most signicant philosophical achieve-ment of the Strong Programme the empirically supported claim that es-tablished science is a contingent creation one of a variety of possible prod-ucts of social negotiations To wit if the reasons for Pasteurrsquos success aredifferent from the causes for Pouchetrsquos failure if Pasteur won the disputebecause he had germs on his side then the die was cast in his favor fromthe outset the conclusion of their dispute was predetermined by naturerather than contingent upon human labor

Contingency is the strong metaphysical commitment behind the sym-metry principle a commitment disguised earlier by presenting symmetryas a metaphysics-free methodological ploy Without contingency there isno constructivism social or other if humans construct knowledge usingnatural materials it must be no more necessary than any other humanconstruct any other artifact8 Yet from the point of view of sciencemdashthe perspective that Latourrsquos new demands appear to force upon usmdashthissame knowledge looks anything but contingent This is exactly howit should be it is the business of scientists to make their claims and resultsappear as necessary and inevitable as they possibly can It is the business


8 Hacking (1999) makes ldquocontingencyrdquo one of his three marks of constructivism to-gether with nominalism and external explanations of stability Cf Ch 3 pp 63hellip99

of historians philosophers and sociologists to trace their contingencyThis difference in epistemic commitments and interests canmdashbut doesnot have tomdashdevelop into epistemological difference and it didmdashasit should not havemdashdevelop into the political quagmire known as ldquothescience warsrdquo but it is a genuine difference even without such develop-ments It is hard to see how one can hold to both perspectives at once howone can maintain ldquointernal realismrdquo simultaneously with ldquoempirical rela-tivismrdquo

5 The Case of Newtonrsquos OpticsIt would perhaps be better to understand and judge the dilemma broughtabout by Latourrsquos critique against the backdrop of real historiographicdebate rather than his made-for-the-occasion examples Competing hist-oriographic narratives of one and the same episode are almost as hard tond as a replication of an experiment but the signicance of the debate issuch that Alan Shapiro a distinguished historian of Newtonian science inan explicit attempt to lay bare the constructivist folly wrote in 1996a massive recount of the introduction and acceptance of Newtonrsquos op-ticsmdashfor which Simon Schaffer had suggested a detailed constructivist ac-count of just a few years earlier (Shaffer 1989) The two papers brilliantpieces of scholarship in their competing approaches are exciting enoughto compare as they stand Reviewed from the perspective of Latourrsquosdilemma the dispute between them becomes almost unsettling

Most of the basic chapters of the episode are not under contentionSometime during the academic year 1666 while working on improvingoptical instruments Isaac Newton then an undergraduate student atCambridge concluded that the elongated spectrum cast by a light ray re-fracted through a prism on a screen 20hellip22 feet removed was not an arti-fact of an asymmetrically placed prism but rather a genuine effect of thenature of light A long series of experiments followed and a remarkableldquoNew Theory of Light and Colourrdquo ensued According to this theory thewhite sunlight surrounding us is not simple but rather a mixture of prim-itive rays each characterized by a unique color and a unique index ofrefrangibility Refraction did not modify light in creating the colors of therainbow but rather broke it down to its primitive constituents

After presentation at a lecture course in Cambridge the theory wassubmitted to the Royal Society of London in 1672 in a letter that citedonly three experiments The most celebrated of themmdashthe so calledexperimentum crucismdashinvolved a second refraction to demonstrate that therst refraction did not indeed modify the characteristics of white lightbut rather exposed the real and immutable properties of primary rays


properties which persevered through the second refraction9 The theorywas rst enthusiastically endorsed but the resistance which started tomount from both Britain and the continent pushed Newton into angrywithdrawal from public scientic life until the 1680s The resistancehowever waned by 1704 when Newton published his Optics it was re-ceived almost unanimously and the little debate that did arise was rmlysettled in Newtonrsquos favor ldquoAfter 1726 or 1728 to oppose [Newtonrsquostheory] was to initiate being removed from the mainstream of thescientic communityrdquo claims Shapiro (1996 p 125) Schaffer disagreeson the dates ldquoThe 1740s saw important specic criticisms of some ofNewtonrsquos apparent claimsrdquo (1989 p 99) he points out but he does agreethat ldquoIn popular texts such as Voltairersquos Elements of Sir Isaac Newtonrsquos Phi-losophy (1738) and Algarottirsquos Newtonianism for Ladies (1737) it wasclaimed that those who had not succeeded in replicating Newtonrsquos trialslsquohad not been happy enough in the Choice of prismsrsquordquo (pp 91hellip2)

This is more or less where the agreement between the two historiansends Their differences on the question of why and how Newtonrsquos theorywas accepted an afterthought issue for historians of previous generationsruns so deep that it colors every other aspect of their respective accountsWhy did Newton for example offer only three experiments in the papersubmitted to the Royal Society Was this deviation from the experi-mentalism ponticated by the Society a simple stylistic mistake whichcaused him to lose points with its gentlemen members as offered byShapiro or a sophisticated rhetorical ploy intended to highlight hisexperimentum crucis and provide it with emblematic status as Schafferclaims And what did Newton intend the experimentum crucis to demon-strate Was it the immutability of colors as most of his contemporariesseem to have assumed or the different and constant refrangibility of eachcolored ray as Shapiro explains Or did Newton himself as Schaffer sug-gests change his interpretation in order to defeat recalcitrant opponentsWhat in general was the degree of such recalcitrance Was Newtonrsquos ex-perimental ldquoauthority necessarily unstable and contestedrdquo even well af-ter his death and near-deication (Schaffer 1989 p 100) or is it thatldquoSchaffer as a constructivist focuses almost exclusively on controversyrdquosince it allows him to ldquomake it appear that Newtonrsquos theory was continu-ally contestedrdquo while in fact ldquofocusing on Newtonrsquos criticsrdquo is a viciousconstructivist bias which ldquotells us little about his supportersrdquo and ldquoeasily


9 Whether the properties demonstrated were the unique colors or the unique indicesof refrangibility was importantly disputed and still is among the involved historians Iwill return to this dispute momentarily

distorts the historical picturerdquo by ldquoreducing the issue of acceptance to oneof power and authorityrdquo (Shapiro 1996 pp 60hellip2) And what did in factdetermine the conclusion of Newtonrsquos debates especially the ones withthat group of English Jesuits from Liegravege Did the scientic communityarrive reasonably at the conclusion that being the last ones to still reportfailure to replicate Newtonrsquos not-too-complicated experiments the Jesuitswere simply incompetent (Shapiro) Or did Newton succeeded inmarginalizing the group which stubbornly deed the success of his exper-iments and their interpretation by controlling the rules of the debateconstantly changing the signicance of the experimental set-up dictatingthe interpretation of the results and de-legitimizing their claims(Schaffer)

Until recently any student of science with basic sympathy to con-structivism could have easily pointed out the misunderstandings fromwhich stems Shapirorsquos criticism of Schaffer To begin with Shapirorsquos no-tions of ldquopower and authorityrdquo are limited to brute power and repressiveauthority gathered by ldquoconspiratorsrdquo and distributed to ldquoacolytesrdquo (p 60)Needless to say no constructivist for whom the name ldquoFoucaultrdquo rings re-motely familiar would grant that these are the only relations holding be-tween power and knowledge More signicant still is that Shapiro con-stantly favors the winners where Newton ldquoexplainsrdquo the Jesuits ldquoinsistrdquo(p 77) where Newtonrsquos critics ldquofail to replicaterdquo his supporters ldquoelidedifcultiesrdquo (p 94) And Shapirorsquos most signicant failure from the tradi-tional constructivist perspective is in seeing reasons where he should haveseen effects in nding explanations for Newtonrsquos success where he shouldhave located the mysteries of that success Thus he explains with theNewtonians why Venetian glass was inadequate for replicating Newtonrsquosexperiments instead of accounting for the Newtoniansrsquo success in ascrib-ing every failure in replication to the (low) quality of the equipment or the(lack of ) skills of the experimenters This the constructivist would bequick to point out is exactly the dilemma facing the experimenterwhether to attribute the failure of his experiment to the inadequacy of hisequipment or to that of the inspected theory10 The eighteenth centuryscientic community could have taken the fact that Newtonrsquos experimentscould not be replicated ldquowith Venetian glass long considered Europersquosbestrdquo (p 128) as a refutation of Newtonian optics or it could have ac-cepted Dereham and Desaguliersrsquo arguments that the failure was due tobad prisms it decided to do the latter Instead of explaining why


10 This is the dillema Collins carefully inspects in his 1985 under the title ldquoTheExperimenterrsquos Regressrdquo

(ldquotopicalizingrdquo the episode in the common Edinburgh dialect) Shapiroadopts the Newtoniansrsquo arguments

However Latourrsquos comments shatter the constructivistsrsquo condence Toascribe the ldquogradual acceptance of Newtonrsquos theoryrdquo solely to the negotiat-ing skills of Newton and his allies he explains is almost as bad as ascrib-ing it directly to Nature If in the name of symmetry Newtonrsquos ldquoinsis-tencerdquo on his interpretation of his results should receive the sametreatment as the Liegravege grouprsquos ldquoexplanationrdquo of theirs then in the name ofsymmetry differently refrangible colored rays should get as much credit forestablishing Newtonrsquos authority as he and his authority get in establishingtheir existence and signicance Could this be done without adjudicatingthe dispute by its results This is the dilemma I named after Latour

6 Back to RealismSo is Latourrsquos dilemma not after all just another stance in the realism de-bate It is denitely a worry very similar to the ones that sparked that de-bate namely How do we settle our loss of epistemological innocence withour acknowledgement of the indispensability of scientic ontology Whatis the proper metaphysical commitment to a science that is both uniqueand contingent One way to understand realism along the lines I sketchedat the beginning is to view it as an attempt to answer this challengeby falling on the ontological side ldquowhen we say and mean that such-and-such is the case wemdashand our meaningmdashdo not stop anywhere shortof the fact but we mean thismdashismdashsordquo (Wittgenstein Philosophical Investi-gations sect95 cf McDowell 1994 pp 26hellip29) Epistemologically thischoice implied a thorough rejection of all attemptsmdashpositivist instru-mentalist and all their nuanced variationsmdashto hold in media res to believescience on a tentative basis while denying its categories the status theyaspire to11 Such unabashed adoption of scientic ontology it seems is ex-actly what Latour requires to resolve his dilemma If the use of non-scientic arguments supports the use of scientic ontologymdashif one canjustify employing scientic concepts without referring to the reasonsadduced by the scientists under investigationmdashthen Latour should be al-lowed to bring these concepts into his accounts of science Might realismthe destructor of the previous ldquomethodological philosophyrdquo logical posi-tivism come to the rescue of the current one social constructivism


11 It is important to recall that although the title ldquorealismrdquo for this position is rela-tively new the position and arguments for it are not One early version of them is Galileorsquosrejection of Cardinal Belarminersquos suggestion that he (Galileo) should adopt what we wouldcall an instrumentalist approach towards Copernicanism See ldquoGalileorsquos Considerations onthe Copernican Opinionrdquo in Finocchiaro 1989 pp 70hellip86

Certainly not every self-styled realist would conceive of constructivismafter Latour as requiringmdashor even deservingmdasha rescue I introduced real-istic thought as consisting of two strands the anti-skeptic and theanti-representational For thinkers of the former ilk Latourrsquos move did notappear to suggest any dilemma Rather they viewed it as a welcome so-bering-up a commendable retreat from fanciful constructive epistemol-ogy and a return to the good old ldquoidea that experiment and debate allowscience to home in on the true mechanisms behind the appearancesrdquo(Papineau 1995 p 491)12 The worry of old constructivist avant-gardebest voiced by Bloor (1999) that Latourrsquos further revolution is nothingbut a counter-revolution echoes the realist hope that Latour ldquois inchinghis way towards common senserdquo (Papineau 1995) instigating Latourrsquosrant that ldquothe acquiescence of the two archenemies social constructivistsand realists to the very same metaphysics for opposed reasons has alwaysbeen for me a source of some merrimentrdquo (Latour 2000 p 264) To thosewho believe that ldquobeliefs should be caused by the facts they are aboutrdquo(Papineau 1987 p xiv) Latour may seem to present no dilemma as theprinciple of symmetry presented no achievement and its abandonment istherefore no loss

But the realist sigh of relief is premature The anti-relativist realist can-not to be sure tolerate the relativism that seems to stem from the strongmetaphysical reading of the symmetry principle offered by Latour Shedoes however have a vested interest in the original methodological ver-sion of the principle for reasons akin to the ones with which I introducedthis version Anti-relativism becomes scientic realism once the trust inscientic criteria procedures techniques etcmdashthe (anti-relativist) beliefin their efcacy to pick true scientic statements from false onesmdashis sup-ported by the (realist) conviction in the objectivity of scientic state-mentsmdashin their gaining their subject matter and their truth from the ob-jects of which they are about13 When the realist urges us to trust theobjectivity of science she vouches her trust in the hope that these criteriaprocedures etc are able to sort through scientic statements to the objectsthat give them their truth and meaning If the criteria and procedurescontain biases if they prejudge scientic hypotheses then they are ipsofacto not objectivemdashthey do not allow the objects to adjudicate the truthof statements The symmetry principle is nothing but a demand for objec-tivity in this very sense applied to the study of science itselfmdasha demand


12 This citation is from Papineaursquos review of Pickering (1995) which is anattemptmdashfar less successful to my mindmdashin the same direction as Latourrsquos

13 Anti-relativism can of course be supported in many other ways as well eg by thebelief in a benevolent God or in evolutionarily-tested categories

not to prejudge our hypotheses about the coming to being of scienticstatements by our knowledge of their truth This demand is aided by an-other fundamental element of the realist creed namely that ldquodefeat alwaysis a possibility where criteria are concerned [a]nd it will be in the lap ofthe gods whether it occurs in any particular caserdquo (Wright 1987 p 279)This fallibilism follows immediately from that most realistic of principlesnamely that truth transcends all evidence and it means that we alwayshave to allow that we have been wrong to accept that any particularscientic claim has ldquoa lsquogenuinely factualrsquo subject-matterrdquo (Wright 1987p 7) Thus even if we are certain of the truth of a specic scientic asser-tion and the falsehood of its rival it is realism that commands us to treatthem symmetrically It is realism that requires that we let the hypothesesabout the discovery and justication of true as well as false claims toscientic knowledge be decided by the objects of inquiry whether histori-cal or sociological without these hypotheses being prejudged by the truthor falsehood of the claims

Realism requires symmetry and for the realist the difculties arisingfrom this requirement should be a cause for concern rather than glee If asBloor ercely contends his position is a realist naturalist and materialistone (eg 1999 pp 87hellip91) then there is no apparent reason why the ar-guments which Latour directs against this position could not be general-ized to pertain to more conventional versions of realism The difcultiesraised by Latour concerning the Edinburgh way of interpreting and apply-ing the symmetry principlemdashnamely the unwitting consequent shift to-wards idealismmdashare difculties shared by the realist This is indeed themajor fault that Hillary Putnam nds in her position ldquoso far as thecommonsense world is concernedrdquo he concludes ldquothe effect of what iscalled ldquorealismrdquo in philosophy is to deny objective reality to make it allsimply thoughtrdquo (1987 p 12)14 The social idealism with which Latourcharges the Edinburgh school is different from the idealism to whichPutnam refers but it is not different enough to avert the suspicion that ifLatourrsquos criticism of the Strong Programme is a move within the realismdebate its signicance resides in pointing at an internal inconsistencywithin the anti-skeptic realist position

Even more troubling from the perspective of anti-skeptic realism isthe dilemma emerging from Latourrsquos attempt to replace the idealism herecovers with realist intuitionsmdashnamely that the success of this attempt


14 In fact Putnamrsquos conclusion is weaker than allowed by his argument which dem-onstrates that quite a few scientic properties beyond ldquothe commonsense worldrdquo become aproduct of ldquothoughtrdquo when viewed from the perspective of the brand of scientic realismhe tags after Husserl ldquoobjectivismrdquo

apparently comes at the cost of the original symmetry This is becauseLatourrsquos dilemma is highly reminiscent of a familiar nagging tension inthis version of realism anti-skepticism is based on afrming and acclaim-ing the success of contemporary science But this success is predicated onthe failure of its predecessors and the failure suggests that the success istemporary and tentative and thus no weapon against the skeptic InLatourrsquos case it is the apparent discrepancy between the two realist inter-pretations of symmetrymdashBloorrsquos and Latourrsquosmdashwhich presents realism asdeconstructing itself In anti-skepticism it is the discrepancy between therealist interpretation of contemporary success and the unatteringldquometa-inductiverdquo conclusion drawn from past failure Again the intellec-tual motivations are very different but the resultant worry is the same re-alists of the anti-skeptic camp should have an interest in a solution toLatourrsquos dilemma and their failure to as much as address it can rightly beperceived by Latour and his disciples as another evidence for the poverty oftheir approach

7 A Possible Realist ResolutionBut there is another brand of realism Its subscribers are not always giventhis title since they do not usually make rm proclamations in favor ofmind-independent reality truth-likeness of theories or unknowably-truestatements This is not because they believe in the opposite doctrines butbecause they nd it hard to express themselves in terms of a gap betweenmind and object This deance makes those thinkersmdashsome of whom Imentioned abovemdashless likely to take a position within the ldquorealism de-baterdquo as shaped in the 1980s but I think it does warrant labeling themldquorealistsrdquo This is not the place to review the various attitudes that theymight develop towards Latourrsquos dilemma but by way of example I willtry to distill such a possible position from one of their own to whom theterm ldquoconstructivistrdquo can be applied with least violencemdashIan Hacking

In his recent Social Construction of What (1999) Hacking offers aless-than-favorable if fair critique of social constructivism in general andits epistemological brand in particular (cf his chapter 3 pp 63hellip99) andexpresses surprise that his earlier Rewriting the Soul (Hacking 1995) waslabeled ldquoa classic of social constructionismrdquo (1999 p viii) Yet in his stillearlier Representing and Intervening (Hacking 1983) he takes a leaf from theconstructist analyses of the preceding decade ldquoTraditionally scientists aresaid to explain phenomena that they discover in nature I say that oftenthey create the phenomena that then become the centerpieces of theoryrdquo(Hacking 1983 p 220)

Hackingrsquos adoption of this stancemdashnow a constructivist commonplacethen still a small philosophical rebellionmdashis signicant for our purposes


here especially because it was formulated as an explicitly realist anti-positivist argument (the immediate target was van Fraassen 1980) I arguein another place (2002 pp 63hellip81) that Hackingrsquos fusion of constructiv-ism and realism captured nicely by his slogan ldquoif you can spray them thenthey are realrdquo (Hacking 1983 p 23) fails exactly where the framework ofthe realism debate forces him to inadvertently revert to (what he himselfcontemptuously names after Dewey) ldquothe spectator theory of Knowledgerdquo(p 130) This very shortcoming is rather an advantage here it allows us toinvestigate how far one can proceed in solving Latourrsquos dilemma withoutsuccumbing to Latourrsquos extraordinary demand that we completely aban-don the distinction between Nature and our knowledge about this Nature

A possible admittedly indirect resolution stems from Hackingrsquos thor-oughly constructive analysis of microscopic observation ldquoyou learn to seethrough a microscope by doing not just by lookingrdquo (p 189) This byHackingrsquos admission is a reinstatement of Berkeleyrsquos ldquoTheory of VisionrdquoldquoWe see the tiny glass needlemdasha tool that we have ourselves crafted underthe microscopemdashjerk through the cell wall We see the lipid oozing out ofthe end of the needle as we gently turn the screw on a large thoroughlymacroscopic plunger John Deweyrsquos jeers at the lsquospectator theory ofknowledgersquo are equally germane for the spectator theory of microscopyrdquo(p 190)

This analysis is an important achievement for constructivism because itapplies the idea that ldquoscientic knowledge is a human creation made withavailable material and cultural resourcesrdquo (Golinsky 1998 p 6) directly toobservation Observation needless to mention has always been epistemol-ogyrsquos leading metaphor and within the empiricist tradition was always as-sumed to be the fundamental level of knowledge acquisition But ifknowledge is produced at its most basic and primitive levelmdashthat of directobservationmdashthen there is no more reason to worry about scientic con-cepts than about everyday ones

This seems to be the non-scientic support for the use of scienticontology that Latour requires in order to justify using scientic vocabu-lary in explaining science Hackingrsquos line of thought does not come closeto insuring that scientic concepts touch ldquothings-in-themselvesrdquo but itdoes suggest that no other way of engaging with these ldquothingsrdquo is doing abetter job In other words if we cannot be assured that in using scienticvocabulary we are actually allowing ldquothings-in-themselvesrdquo to participatein ldquocausal accountsrdquo of science at least we are advised that we have no realchoice There is nothing in hands and microscopes Hacking tells uswhich relates to nature in a more direct or a less problematic way than thevocabulary of the participants and if this vocabulary happened also to beours then so be it We have we realized only one science and there is no


external ldquoepistemologicalrdquo point of view from which to judge its epi-stemic claims

8 Tentative ConclusionThis authorization to follow Latour and remain an upright constructivistmay strike one as unsatisfactory specically because of its skeptical over-tones but it does highlight an important aspect of Latourrsquos dilemmaHackingrsquos brand of constructivism is anything but social Entrenched as itis in the traditional epistemology it sets out to challenge it is personalknowledge that Representing and Intervening is commonly arguing aboutand its examples and analyses are characteristically individualistic intone15 The examples deal with the solitary observer the single experi-menter the lone expert rarely are the large systems of ldquobig sciencerdquo fa-vored by constructivists or even the whole laboratory explored by Latoureven mentioned This is a problematic approach not simply because it del-egates the public aspect of science to someone else Science the socialconstructivists taught is public in essence Theories experiments mathe-matical demonstrationsmdashall these claim and gain their epistemic author-ity in the public realm and cannot be reduced to the knowledge held pri-vately by individual scientists16 But like the previous failure I noted inHackingrsquos critique of epistemology this one also has a clear advantage inour context by applying constructivism strictly and directly to the indi-vidual Hacking avoids the two pitfalls of social constructivism whichLatour pointedly marked out the assumption of a sui generis society andthe assumption of free-for-all data

From the social constructivist point of view individualism is too steepa price to pay even if one gives heed to Latourrsquos complaint The socialcharacter of knowledge in general and science in particular the principlethat ldquoknowledge [is] whatever is collectively endorsedrdquo and ldquoknowledge isbetter equated with culture than with experiencerdquo (Bloor 1976 pp 3 12)is too basic a principle for the Strong Programme It is more deeply en-trenched in fact than the constructive principlemdashthat knowledge is ahuman product Yet it is exactly this individualism that allows Hackingto bring in the notion that knowledge is produced ldquoall the way downrdquomdashtodirect observationmdashjust as the need ldquoto let society inrdquo forced Bloor to as-sume a level of agreed-by-all observation one in which all individualistconstituents of the constructive epistemologymdashskills expertise com-mand of instrumentsmdashare neutralized and elementary consensus can beestablished (see above)


15 As cited above Rewriting the Soul (Hacking 1995) is markedly different in thatrespect

16 The most elaborate case for this claim is made by Shapin (1994)

This line of reasoning suggests that Latourrsquos dilemma may be foundedon an unexpected conict between ldquosocialrdquo and ldquoconstructivismrdquo in theiroriginal coupling The (not necessarily social) constructivist claim that theagency involved in creating knowledge is human rather than Naturersquos is adirect assault against the dichotomy between the knowing human and theknown Nature The claim also aims against the sharp distinction betweenindividual and society To wit the traditional solipsistic puzzles proceedfrom assuming Manrsquos detachment from objects to worrying about hisloneliness amongst his fellow humans and constructivism eschews bothassumption and worry The social (but in fact not necessarily) construct-ivist claim that knowledge is a social entity on the other hand creates astrong stake in preserving and strengthening the individual-society di-chotomy Thus by the same token it provides a prop for the knower-Nature one The dichotomy between ldquoindividual experiencerdquo on the onehand and the ldquocollective vision or visions of realityrdquo which ldquosociety fur-nishesrdquo on the other (Bloor 1976 p 12) is dependent upon ldquosustainingthe distinction between subject and object driving a wedge betweennature itself and the descriptions of itrdquo (Bloor 1999 p 94) Since forthe adherents of the Strong Programme it was society with its groups in-stitutions interests and practices which was to provide our knowledgewith structuremdashrdquostability [of inductive generalizations] is the stability offorms of life or taken-for-granted-practicesrdquo (Collins 1985 p 18)mdashtheldquowedgerdquo was necessary the individual had to be posited as stranger in herown world

This leads to a somewhat different interpretation of the social-constructive predicament than the one offered by Latour himself It is notthat the Strong Programme lost its verve and courage when confrontedwith the nal application of the symmetry principle viz when it had tocome to terms with the historicity of the distinction between subjects andobjects It is rather that in spite of symmetry being perhaps their greatestclaim to fame the commitment of the Programmersquos adherents to thisprinciplemdashwhich all but embodies constructivismmdashwas less than com-plete to begin with As long as the relations between social individualand Nature were assumed to be what they were ldquoconstructivismrdquo had tobe compromised if it were to be ldquosocialrdquo17

One may be lead to conclude that there is in fact no real dilemmathat the insistence of constructivists like Bloor (1999) to not use sciencersquosaccounts of Nature in their own accounts of science reects only the in-ability to fully incorporate their own constructive principles In particular


17 One can read Latourrsquos arguments for favoring anthropology over sociology as pro-ceeding along the same line Cf his 1993

they seem to unwittingly share with all empiricists since Bacon the in-stinctive conviction that knowledge cannot be both real and constructed despiteBloorrsquos excellent arguments why this conviction is supported by nothingbut instinct (1976 pp 5hellip19)18 Of course where their old rivals werecareful to steer clear of all idolsmdashall human interventionsmdashthe con-structivists opted to celebrate those interventions But by actually shun-ning science by refusing to employ its resultsmdashtheir vehement avowal ofits method notwithstandingmdashthey are in practice if not in rhetoric re-fusing to accept its claim on truth They show themselves to accept thesame empiricist exclusive disjunction either science is real or it is con-structed but not both Without that in-built suspicion of their ownconstructivism without this requirement to delineate a space for ldquothe so-cialrdquo so the claim would go there would be no Latourrsquos dilemma itwould not seem like we are prejudging the historical process of acquiringknowledge about nature by applying our current knowledge of nature inthe historical account

Like the previous suggestion this resolution strikes one as unsatisfac-tory If the basic structures available for the historical account of scienceremain unchanged the complaints of traditional social constructivistsagainst Latourrsquos suggestions seem to remain valid regardless of all philo-sophical niceties either knowledge is the outcome of the process or itsmotor either the agency is with the human inquirers or with the Natureinquired either science has a profane history of human interpretation ora sacred one of Naturersquos revelation If one wishes to keep constructivismbut avoid social-idealism to re-introduce realism but avoid Whigism toestablish super-symmetry without dismantling symmetry so it seemsthese basic narrative structures should be radically altered and with themthe relations assumed between their main actorsmdashNature society andindividual

Latour attempts to do just this

9 Latourrsquos SolutionBeyond Latourrsquos sometimes heavy metaphorics which is at least partlyresponsible for the vehemence in which he is opposed lies a bold and sim-ple solution to assign historicity directly to things Instead of attemptingto guarantee the temporal contingent status of germs by pitting the his-torically situated Pasteur against the eternally entrenched Nature Latour


18 Regrettably in his (1999) Hacking appears to succumbs to this habit as wellThough he says on p 68 that epistemological constructivism ldquois very different fromdoubting the truth or applicability of any propositions widely held in the natural sci-encesrdquo the whole tenor of his analysis of constructivism in general is as a type ofconspiration-exposing relativism

suggests we should afx the sign of time on germsrsquo own sleeve The worrywas that by letting scientic objects participate in shaping (the outcomeof the very historical process that brought about) their own existence andcharacter we are giving in to the myth of their being a part of a never-changing Nature awaiting discovery But this is a misplaced worry stem-ming from the same dichotomy that Latour explicitly rejects He does notsuggest a new distribution of creditmdashfor germs or light raysmdashbetweensociety on the one hand and nature on the other Super symmetry meansthat neither end is a primitive originary source of agency but rather thatboth ends are idealized abstractions of the real thingsmdashgerms and differ-ently refrangible raysmdashwhich are both historically situated and ldquooutthererdquo

Germs Latour teaches do not have to remain passive in order to savetheir contingency and historicity Yes they did help Pasteur in his disputewith Pouchetmdashbut they could not have done so before 1857 Until 1854germs hardly existed although in 1861 after Pasteur won the Acadeacutemiersquosprize for his Memoire they became his main allies By then their existencehad stabilized enough thanks largely to Pasteurrsquos deployment of hisexperimental instrumental rhetorical cultural and political skills Andindeed Pouchetrsquos eggs can also claim credit for his courageous standingwithout them he would have lost the dispute back in 1859 True by1864 when the Acadeacutemie ruled in favor of Pasteur and against Pouchetthey were no longer in a position to helpmdashthey were growing extinct Thefabric of experimental instrumental rhetorical cultural and political con-nections upholding them was becoming undone This was partly due ofcourse to the work of Pasteur

So dare one say that when Pasteur was sick before 1854 it was due towhatever mysterious reasons but when Pouchet caught the u after 1864he was being infected by vicious microorganisms Why not One can ofcourse retort to the more intuitive idea that the young Pasteur was alsosuffering from the long reach of his yet-to-be-discovered germs some-times we extend their efcacy into the much more remote past as whenwe apply tuberculosis to the mummy of Ramses II (Latour 2000 pp 247hellip251) But we would be better advised to remember that that is exactlywhat we are doing namely extending and applying and that this extensionand that application are not automatic Science is most human most con-structed when it makes its most general and furthest reaching claims it isthere that it resorts to the most complex instruments most heterogeneoustechnologies least rigorous mathematics

How would this approach adjudicate the dispute between Shapiro andSchaffer Did the Liegravege group lose their bout with Newton because oftheir experimental incompetence or was this incompetence the outcome of


Newtonrsquos careful efforts to marginalize and discredit their claims The an-swer if we follow Latour is wholly dependent on the point in time aboutwhich the question is asked By 1678 and denitely after 1704 the Jesu-its of Liegravege were simply incompetent By then Nature has been shaped toyield Newtonrsquos results when properly observed Similar claims can bemade concerning Venetian glass by 1730 it was much too crude to allowNature to fully expose itself Had Hooke and his interests in the colors ofthin lms won the day back in 1672 this greenish veined glass mighthave been necessary equipment for any optician but by 1704 this was nolonger an option Hooke was dead and the success of Newtonrsquos reectingtelescope back in 1672 set him on a track for the Principia the Optics thepresidency of the Royal Society and enough fame and prestige all over Eu-rope to be calling all the shots in all scientic debates Did Newton have ahand in this change Most denitely But neither was he nor the RoyalSociety nor the rest of the London-Cambridge-Liegravege axis impervious tothe change that began in 1666 when he removed the screen to 20-somefeet from the symmetrically placed prism The process which broke lightinto primitive colored rays each equipped with its own index ofirrefrangibility had engulfed all Nature society and Newton himself

10 ConclusionsIt is one thing to sympathize with the historiographical and epistemo-logical motivations that Latour discharges by suggesting that the realthings are hybrids of natural law and social order It is a wholly differentmatter to adopt this audacious suggestion The neat solution of theShapiro-Schaffer dispute suggests that from the historiographical point ofview Latourrsquos totemism his fusion of nature and society may be a practi-cal methodological approach even if its successful application still re-quires some further exercise (Latourrsquos most daring attempt in this direc-tionmdashhis aforementioned Aramis is to my judgment only a partialsuccess) It is yet a much more difcult question whether it is also a viablemetaphysical position Playing around with the subject-object dichotomyis a dangerous game and it remains to be seen how Latour is going to sur-vive it However I would like to point out by way of conclusion that thedangers he is facing do not come from any of the expected directions

Perhaps the most expected one is the allegation of historicism Theinstinctive apprehension instigated while reading Latour is that histotemism is nothing but reication of the historical process In an attemptto avoid naiumlve realism on the one hand and naiumlve sociologism on the otherthe feeling emerges Latour falls into naiumlve historicism not wanting to as-sign either Nature or society the responsibility for the creation of thingshe assigns it to history


This is a false allegation What saves Latour from becoming an SSKHegelian is not only his irony and light-hearted skepticism that deesthe self-righteous systematicity of old historicism More signicant isthat his offer to assign historicity to things does not reconstitute historyas the ultimate substratum of necessity Just the opposite Latourrsquoshistorization of natural things is an attempt to provide a space for the con-tingency of human knowledge without falling into the trap of burdeningthe human knowing subject with more agency than it can or should bearContingency I argued above is the most fundamental feature ofconstructivism It is its contingency that makes science historical a devel-opment within human history rather than a gradual manifestation of rea-son independent of this history Thus constructivism in general is histor-ical rather than historicist and Latourrsquos totemism in particular accentuatesthis point The disputes between Newton and the Jesuits and betweenPasteur and Pouchet Latour points out could have just as well gone theother way and the destiny of rays and germs could have been completelydifferent

If the charge of Hegelianism turned out to be fairly easy to fend off onemay expect Latour to nd the challenge from the realist camp much moredevastating In fact from the realist point of view there is one good reasonand one bad reason to object to Latourrsquos totemic metaphysics The bad rea-son is the seemingly more obvious one namely that by adding humanhistory to the make-up of natural things we are abrogating the rst princi-ple of realism viz ldquohumankind confronts an objective world somethingalmost entirely not of our makingrdquo (Wright 1986 p 1) To the degreethat such a complaint reects a pious concern for the independence of theldquoobjective worldrdquo from human machinations it is badly misdirectedLatourrsquos main motivation one should recall is anti-idealist he challengessocial constructivism to nd an aperture through which things can enterinto human history and ldquomake a differencerdquo (1999 p 117 italics in origi-nal)mdashnot vice versa Indeed for that to be achieved without symmetry be-ing compromisedmdashwithout assuming that things control human historyby simply revealing themselves at their heartrsquos desiremdashwe heed to havesubjects and objects share one causal structure In relating human historyto natural historymdashin rejecting idealismmdashwe indeed eschew the total in-dependence of objects from subjectsmdashthings cannot be completely indif-ferent to humans if they are to be causally connectedmdashbut this is a far cryfrom subjecting things to human agency Latourrsquos world is still ldquoalmostentirely not of our makingrdquo in spite of the utterly non-standard way inwhich it is granted this independence If anything it is a more ldquoobjectiveworldrdquo than usual as the human part of this world appears less ldquoof ourmakingrdquo than we used to think


This argument will probably strike the realist as utterly unsatisfactoryLatourrsquos way of assuring that the world is ldquonot of our makingrdquo is too for-eign to commonsense realism to be made palatable with one neat turn ofphrase The intuitive rejection could probably be wrapped with a solidcounter-argument but more interesting still would be to follow the lightit sheds on the intellectual instincts behind realism especially in itsanti-skeptic mode Since Latour does not subject the objective world tothe human mind it appears that the aspect of his proposal that the realistnds so troubling is rather the subjugation of the human mind to the ob-jective world This suggests the (somehow not completely surprising) pos-sibility that realism was less interested in protecting the objective worldagainst the intervention of its human inhabitants than in preservinghuman independence or rather estrangement from that world This is anintriguing suggestion partly because such estrangement pits realismagainst its classic allymdashmaterialism the belief that everything humansincluded is made of one basic substancemdashmatter There is no prima faciereason why anti-materialist realism is not a tenable metaphysical positionbut it is probably not one that your run-of-the-mill realist would haveexpected to nd himself holding

This line of reasoning takes us beyond the scope of this paper Theentanglement of humans and things I claimed was the obvious but mis-taken reason for a realist to reject Latourrsquos ideas The less obvious butmuch more difcult challenge to the realist wishing to adopt these ideas istheir incongruence with the principle with which we have started vizthat science though it is historical and contingent is unique There isno outside perspective from which the objects of science can be viewedand sciencersquos account of them questioned19 Yet that is exactly what Latourseems to offer a claim about the makeup of these objects supportedby non-scientic arguments which stands in complete opposition tothe claims made by science The uniformity of laws of nature over timeand space is perhaps the most basic metaphysical cum methodological as-sumption of science since the early seventeenth century and it pervades allof sciencersquos theoretical and practical work One may of course decidewhether to believe statements based on such assumptions or not but onecannot purport to be a realist especially of the anti-representational sortif one chooses to believe science while rejecting the status it assigns itsobjects


19 According to Michael Friedman (1999 esp pp 2hellip11) a very similar realizationwas at the heart of the scientism of early logical positivism As Friedman acknowledgeshis interpretation is not uncontested (fn 3 p 3) but if he is correct it underscores thesimilarity between logical positivism and social constructivism discussed above

This is a very strong argument but it does not entail I think thedefeat of constructivism a-la Latour It is rather an aporia arrived at fol-lowing a realist train of thought Realism as an attempt to bridge thewall between knowing subject and known Nature faces the constant em-barrassment of nding itself fortifying that wallmdashthe previous argumentwas just another instance of this phenomenon If realism were to providean alternative to oppositional metaphysics and its correspondingvisualistic epistemology it would have to start ldquofrom the middlerdquomdashfromthings as we know them Alas we know them historically and as they arepart of our history we are ipso facto part of theirs There are no standinggrounds from which to view the relations between humans and realityldquofrom sideways onrdquo (McDowell 1994 p 34) but if the planets had a dif-ferent effect on European society before and after Copernicus if germseffected French economy differently after Pasteur and if we already fullydigested and assimilated the understanding that the difference is notwell-grasped by the simplistic notion of ldquodiscoveryrdquo than we are forced tolook for this middle kingdom where human history and natural historymeet That this kingdom is not a place we feel comfortable in is notLatourrsquos fault

ReferencesBarnes Barry 1977 Interests and the Growth of Knowledge London

Routledge and Kegan PaulBernstein Richard J 1985 ldquoPhilosophy in the Conversation of Man-

kindrdquo Pp 54hellip86 in Hermeneutics and Praxis Edited by RobertHollinger South Bend IN University of Notre Dame Press

Bloor David 1976 Knowledge and Social Imagery London Routledge andKegan Paul

mdashmdashmdash 1999 ldquoAnti Latourrdquo Studies in History and Philosophy of Science3081hellip112

Collins H M 1981 ldquoStages in the Empirical Programme of RelativismrdquoSocial Studies of Science 113hellip10

mdashmdashmdash 1985 Changing Order London Sagemdashmdashmdash 1994 ldquoWe Have Never been Modernrdquo (Book review) Isis

85672hellip674Collins H M and Steven Yearly 1992 ldquoEpistemological Chickenrdquo

Pp 301hellip326 in Science as Practice and Culture Edited by AndrewPickering Chicago University of Chicago Press

Daston Lorraine ed 2000 Biographies of Scientic Objects Chicago Uni-versity of Chicago Press

Finocchiaro Maurice A 1989 The Galileo Affair a Documentary HistoryBerkeley University of California Press


Friedman Michael 1999 Reconsidering Logical Positivism CambridgeCambridge University Press

Gal Ofer 2002 Meanest Foundations and Nobler Superstructures Hooke New-ton and the Compounding of the Celestial Motions of the Planets DordrechtKluwer Academic Publishers

Golinsky Ian 1998 Making Natural Knowledge Cambridge CambridgeUniversity Press

Hacking Ian 1983 Representing and Intervening Cambridge CambridgeUniversity Press

mdashmdashmdash 1995 Rewriting the Soul Multiple Personality and the Sciences ofMemory Princeton Princeton University Press

mdashmdashmdash 1999 Social Construction of What Cambridge Mass HarvardUniversity Press

Haraway Donna 1996 ldquoSituated Knowledgesrdquo Pp 249hellip263 in Feminismand Science Edited by Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen E Longino OxfordOxford University Press

Knorr-Cetina Karin D 1981 The Manufacture of Knowledge OxfordPergamon Press

mdashmdashmdash 1983 Science Observed London Sage PublicationsLatour Bruno 1993 We Have Never been Modern Translated by Catherine

Porter New York Harvester Weatsheafmdashmdashmdash 1996 Aramismdashthe Love of Technology Translated by Catherine

Porter Cambridge MA Harvard University Pressmdashmdashmdash 1999 ldquoFor David Bloor and Beyond A Reply to David

Bloorrsquos lsquoAnti Latourrsquordquo Studies in History and Philosophy of Science30113hellip129

mdashmdashmdash 2000 ldquoOn the Partial Existence of Existing and NonexistingObjectsrdquo Pp 247hellip269 in Biographies of Scientic Objects Edited byL Daston Chicago University of Chicago Press

Latour Bruno and Steve Woolgar 1986 Laboratory Life PrincetonPrinceton University Press

McDowell John 1994 Mind and World Cambridge Mass Harvard Uni-versity Press

Nola Robert ed 1988 Relativism and Realism in Science DordrechtKluwer

Papineau David 1987 Reality and Representation Oxford Basil Black-well

mdashmdashmdash 1995 ldquoTheories of Nothingrdquo (Review of A Pickeringrsquos TheMangle of Practice) Nature 377491hellip492

Pickering Andrew 1995 The Mangle of Practice Time Agency and ScienceChicago University of Chicago Press

Putnam Hilary 1987 The Many Faces of Realism Lasalle IL Open Court


Rescher Nicholas 1987 Scientic Realism Dordrecht ReidelRorty Richard 1979 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Princeton

Princeton University PressSchaffer Simon 1989 ldquoGlass Works Newtonrsquos Prisms and the Uses of

Experimentrdquo In The Uses of Experiment Edited by David Gooding et alCambridge Cambridge University Press

Sellars Wilfrid 1956 ldquoEmpiricism and the Philosophy of Mindrdquo In Min-nesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 1 Edited by Herbert Feigl andMichael Scriven Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press

Shapin Steven 1994 A Social History of Truth Gentility Civility and Sci-ence in Seventeenth-Century England Chicago University of ChicagoPress

Shapin Steven and Simon Schaffer 1985 Leviathan and the Air-PumpPrinceton Princeton University Press

Shapiro Allen E 1996 ldquoThe Gradual Acceptance of Newtonrsquos Theory ofLight and Color 1672hellip1727rdquo Perspectives on Science 459hellip140

Strawson P F 1959 Individuals London Methuenvan Fraassen Bas 1980 The Scientic Image Oxford Clarendon PressWittgenstein Ludwig 1958 Philosophical Investigations Translated by

G E M Anscombe Oxford Basil BlackwellWright Crispin 1986 Realism Meaning and Truth Oxford Basil Black-

well


an independent perspective from which to view and adjudicate our knowl-edge no neutral language to talk about both nature and its representa-tions All the various arguments and positions in the debate our imaginedhistorian would explain were attempts at answers to one fundamentalquestion bereft of the illusion of an epistemic vantage point external toscience what should be our commitment towards the categories conceptsand terms of that same science Should we despaired of the possibility tofound these concepts on rock bottom adopt empiricist skepticism Orperhaps the inexistence of external foundations implies rather immunityfor scientic ontology from such epistemological criticism The realismdebate was quick to lose its vivacity she might conclude because as manyof its participants noticed (Rescher 1987 p xi) it had turned ldquotechnicalrdquobefore coming to grips with this basic dilemma Philosophy it seems hasadopted realism as its ofcial stance on science while hardly noticing thatit has chosen ipso facto the latter of the two alternatives and withoutreecting upon the metaphysical and epistemological ramications of thischoice

In particular realismrsquos quick ascendance to the throne of mainstreamphilosophy of sciencemdashdriving the incumbent logical positivism out ofits last strongholdsmdashhas obscured the fact that the title ldquorealistrdquo stood fortwo completely different philosophical personae The one represented byeg Wright (1986) Harreacute (1986) Rescher (1987) Musgrave (in Nola1988) and Putnam (1987) perceived the above dilemma as a reenactmentof the old philosophical struggle with the skeptic who has simply takenon a small array of new guisesmdashanti-realist about this aspect of science orthe other The other persona assumed by the likes of Rorty (1979)Hacking (1983) McDowell (1994) and Putnam of ldquoThe Meaning ofMeaningrdquo was engaged to varying degrees of reection and success in aground-breaking project of dismantling the very opposition in which theformer type of ldquorealistrdquo was taking a side Taking their key from previousassaults on the sets of dichotomies and hierarchies dening the Philosoph-ical Kingdom of the battered positivist sovereignmdashSellars on the ldquomythof the givenrdquo Quine on the dichotomy between ldquoanalyticrdquo and ldquosyn-theticrdquo Davidson on that between ldquoschemerdquo and ldquocontentrdquomdashthey set adevastating challenge to what Rorty called ldquothe visual metaphors ofknowledgerdquo and Hacking following Dewey summarized as ldquothe specta-tor theory of knowledgerdquo

The realism debate subsided but the absence of an Archimedean sup-port for science has lost none of its epistemological signicance and thatfundamental dilemma left unresolved by philosophy has come to hauntthe neighboring disciplines of history and sociology of science Indeed thestudents of these disciplines did not originally experience the philosophi-
























































































































































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Category:	Documents
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Constructivism for Philosophers (Be it a Remark on Realism

Documents