From the page quoted in the previous post's Quote, on an author who gave me no end of grief about 3.5 years ago:


"OF COURSE, the likely response to this from any halfway sophisticated postmodernist will simply be to deny that there is this kind of a mind-independent reality. Consider, for example, the work of French sociologist Bruno Latour. In his book, Pandora’s Hope, he seems to argue—though much of his prose is deliberately opaque—that the objects of scientific knowledge exist only to the extent that they are articulated through the manifold mediations which constitute scientific practice. Thus, for instance, he claims that the proposition “It refers to something there” indicates the safety, fluidity, traceability, and stability of a transverse series of aligned intermediaries, not an impossible correspondence between two far-apart vertical domains.

Needless to say, it is supposed that this kind of contrarian thinking has a number of radical implications. Latour insists, for example, that existence is not an all or nothing property. Rather, an entity gains in reality the more it is associated with other entities which in their turn collaborate with it. Moreover, we should never say “‘it exists’ or ‘it does not exist’” (unless, it seems, we’re Bruno Latour, answering a question posed in our own book a few pages earlier about whether ferments existed before Pasteur made them up; then we can reply: “‘No, they did not exist before he came along’—an answer that is obvious, natural, and even, as I will show, commonsensical!”).

Latour’s general way of proceeding is to employ an absurdly ornate and rhetorical writing style in order to muddy a number of conceptual waters, presumably with the hope that in this way the banal will be rendered profound. Particularly, he likes to blur the distinction between our knowledge of objects and the objects themselves (what Susan Haack calls “the passes-for fallacy”)...

It hardly needs saying that Latour simply asserts here what he needs to demonstrate: namely, that the external world is somehow affected by the process of coming to know about it. Presumably what he is pretending that he is not saying is that the world seems different once we know certain things about it. Very well, but this is just obvious. The rhetorical trick he employs to disguise this truism, or to give it the veneer of profundity, is simply to pretend that he is talking about the world itself rather than our knowledge or experience of it.

Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont complain precisely about Latour’s tendency to mix up statements about knowledge with statements about things in their Intellectual Impostures...

Latour, then, employs a shoddy epistemology, a dodgy grasp of logic, and a fondness for an overblown turn of phrase, in the service of a contrarian project, the main aim of which seems to be to render the obvious mysterious and the banal profound."


Damnit, I knew I wasn't the only one!