Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society.

The Pasteurization
of France by Bruno Latour; Alan Sheridan; John Law
Review by: Ian Hacking
Philosophy of Science, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Sep., 1992), pp. 510-512
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science Association
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BOOK REVIEWS
BRUNOLATOUR.
Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through
Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1987), ix + 274 pp., $13.95 (paper);
and The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1988). An
expanded version of the translation by Alan Sheridan and John Law of Les Microbes:
Guerre et Paix (Paris: Editions A. M. Metailie, 1984). 273 pp., $32.50 (cloth).
Bruno Latour delights some of us and infuriates others, but either way he has, for the
past decade, been one of the most brilliant and original writers about science. Science in
Action is about "technoscience", a neologism intended to put "science, technology and
society" into one word. It expresses a philosophy that denies that there is science and
technology; it also denies that there is science, technology and also society. It is against
all traditional divides that create something inner and outer (e.g., science as knowledge,
and inner, as opposed to technology, what we do with knowledge in the outer world).
Latour's most radical claim in this direction-so radical that some traditional readers
have read the book and not even seen that the claim is being made-is that there is no
relevant distinction between people and things. The subject of technoscience is the relation
of power established among "actants". That is another neologism, intended to free us from
the more human connotations of "agent" and "actor". When we follow scientists and engineers through society we find a network of alliances that involve more than people and
societies. They involve the very machines they devise or the microbes they reveal. These
also are actants that are members of the alliances.
Thus Pasteur, the subject of the older book under review, and which has been given the
silly title in English, was literally idolized in France during and after his lifetime. Idolized
not only by having France's most celebrated institute named and funded in his honor, not
only by the innumerable rues, avenues and boulevards Pasteur littered like confetti across
France, but also by the construction of an enormous brazen image of the man, larger than
life. Any sociologist of knowledge will agree that Pasteur needed all sorts of alliances for
his research to proceed and solidify into certain knowledge. He needed the medical hygienists-social men, often socialists, who were at war with the established physicians of
the clinics. He needed an outbreak of anthrax so that he could turn a chicken ranch into
a laboratory, and he needed frightened farmers to let him do it. And of course these allies
needed Pasteur-that is why alliances are formed. We well know some additional moves
that can be made in what is by now an old-fashioned sociology of knowledge, one which
describes the interests of the various agents, and perhaps even arguing that the facts discovered by Pasteur are a "social construct", facts only after they have been constructed.
But Latour has taken the game some distance beyond "knowledge and human interests".
Actants include more than actors. Pasteur needed microbes that cooperated with him. We
are not to distinguish this kind of cooperation from that between Pasteur and the medical
hygienists. It takes two to ally: The microbes needed Pasteur. Tongue in cheek here? I do
not believe so, although one would have thought that in this case the microbes exercised
poor judgement. There is some brilliant quoting of words from the time of Pasteur to make
you see that Latour is just taking literally what real scientists of the day said. (1896: "I
have just outlined the way in which pathogenic microbes evolve in society.. .. Society
can exist, live and survive only thanks to the constant intervention of microbes, the great
deliverers of death, but dispensers of matter" [1988, 37].) As Latour put it in this, his
first foray into actantism, there are more of us than we thought.
Do not imagine that Latour is generalizing on the school biology lesson that parasites
live in a symbiotic relation with their hosts-parasites cannot get too strong, for if they
do, they kill off all their hosts, and so themselves become extinct. Latour regards the inert
or at any rate purely chemical and physical objects of science as actants too. More importantly, machines are actants. Excellent use is made, in Science in Action, of Diesel.
Likewise for the triumph of Bell's telephone over Western Union's telegraph. Triumph?
Not exactly, for it was precisely the net of telegraph wires and above all the repeater which

510

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BOOK REVIEWS

511

made Ma Bell possible, which made the money, and which sent A.G. Bell back to preaching the oral method of educating the deaf. Latour's message is not biological but political.
There is only one model for technoscience, and that is politics, so long as you insist that
the actants who form political networks might be anything.
Les microbes is a good place to start with this way of thinking. Half of the book is,
inter alia, an imaginative and well-informed account of what Pasteur did, although the
form of the story is certainly nonstandard. It is rich in quotations that other scholars ignored. The second half of the book is a fascinating, wandering series of meditations and
reflections which will certainly delight some readers, but which will be impenetrable to
most readers of this journal. It is, in fact, a presentation in the form of numbered aphoristic
paragraphs, of the main ideas that inform his subsequent book.
I shall say no more about Les microbes except to add that it serves to make a vivid
contrast between Latour's project and work deriving from the Edinburgh strong program
in the sociology of knowledge. He shares with them the idea of facts being made, not
discovered, but has abandoned any thought that it is human interests, social classes and
economic forces that do the making. He calls all that, somewhat dismissively, "interest
theory". By now the (mostly British) sociology of scientific knowledge scholars suspect
that Latour is a dangerous reactionary. This is a reminder of different national histories.
French intellectuals of a previous generation simply lived, spoke, breathed Marxism in a
way that was never true in the United Kingdom. People of Latour's ilk and age have grown
past that, while for his contemporary British thinkers that is still something to be fascinated
by because it has not yet been fully experienced.
Science in Action is about networks, networks of endless sorts, but chiefly having to do
with relations of power and control. It is a story of technoscience as interaction among
actants. But the interactions come in many forms. For an example that contrasts with
microbes, storms are among the actants over which forecasters have no power, not even
the power of knowledge. Weather predictions are stunningly bad, as any statistician will
tell you. But meteorologists fare well, not only on TV, but also in their ability to call on
the vast technoscience of satellite photography and modeling in Cray computers. We seldom take a step in our lives, neither picnic nor plane trip, without ourselves or someone
consulting the forecasters. The alliances are here forged with complete indifference to the
actants, the storms, who proceed blissfully independent of the forecaster, just as the forecaster has a very good living independent of the storms.
Latour is answering the question, "What is science?" in a reductive way. Technoscience
is nothing more than a set of networks. He provides lots of examples and invites the reader
to carry on. He wants to describe everything that happens, in a sense without trying to
explain it, without trying to give the real causes. I do not know if Latour has noted it, but
there is something strongly reminiscent of Wittgenstein's advice that in philosophy we
should only describe, not explain.
On a more familiar tack, Latour is sure that an explanation of what is happening never
involves nature, or reality, or truth, or facts. These are words tacked on at the end of
science, prizes and praises that are products, not causes, of consensus. The acceptance of
a conclusion is never explained by prior facts about "the world"-or by prior facts about
the interests of the investigators or accepters. Of course this does not prevent Latour from
agreeing with, for example, Bloor that there is no asymmetry between explaining right
conclusions as rationally grounded on evidence, and wrong ones as resulting from extrascientific aberrations. "Rationality" has even less cachet in this book than "reality".
Irrationality, in contrast, is not to be despised, just understood. Long ago Gilbert Ryle,
rightly in my opinion, insisted that despite the antique doctrine that Man is a Rational
Animal, almost always it is the word "irrational"that does the work in argument or debate
or evaluation. Latour structures his book using six chapters, for each of which there is a
principle and a rule of method. (Marx may have died, but Descartes lives). The fifth
principle is: "Irrationalityis always an accusation made by someone building a network
over someone else who stands in the way. . .harder facts are not the rule but the exception,
since they are needed only in a very few cases to displace others on a large scale out of
their usual ways" (1987, 259). This redirecting of the humdrum questions about rational
theory choices seems to me invaluable. And we completely reverse the usual attention to

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512

BOOK REVIEWS

what makes facts "firm"; that is a rare quality used only for those who block network
formation. For once we have an author who is talking about science in action.
The book is not free of flamboyant overstatement. The examples-which flash by with
the speed of images in a rock video-inadequately support the principles, or so most
readers will judge. The logician will be offended by the very statement of some of the
principles, even the first: "The fate of facts and machines is in later users' hands; their
qualities are thus a consequence, not a cause, of a collective action" (ibid.). Thus? The
premise, that the fate of facts and machines is always in the hands of later users may make
us open our eyes, but the claim is evident. How could this "fate" be in the hands of anyone
or anything else? But the conclusion does not follow from what makes the premise true.
No matter, the book is not for logic. It is an incredibly rich resource of examples put
to creative uses. In the 1979 Laboratory Life by Latour and Woolgar we were told that
the chief product of the endocrinology laboratory is not a method for synthesizing a supposedly important tripeptide, but rather a certain set of inscriptions. Now we find the
general argument, which does not in fact convince me, that the product of the laboratory
is the inscription, and that the dialectical task is to create a set of inscriptions that cannot
be challenged-which leads on to the networks created by inscriptions. The book makes
us think about all the bashful silences that so affect anglophone philosophy of science.
Take calculation, the topic of the final chapter. Aside from some hints in Kuhn (and of
course worries in another domain called philosophy of mathematics), philosophers treat
calculation as something that may connect propositions of interest to empirical science,
but do not think that it is in itself problematic. New calculating techniques are hard to
invent and invaluable in use; what more is there to say? Latour says a lot more, starting
with the anthropologist's observation that there are "centres of calculation", immense factories for calculating, as well as the gentle unraveling of formulae by the most powerful
minds of a generation. His assertion that calculation is essentially a tool of network building commences an entirely new line of discussion-as does so much else in this truly
imaginative book. Ian Hacking, University of Toronto.
L. HARPER
ANDWILLIAM
BRIANSKYRMS
(eds.). Causation, Chance, and Credence: Proceedings of the Irvine Conference on Probability and Causation, Volume 1. Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers (1988), xii + 284 pp., $90.50; and WILLIAML. HARPERAND
BRIANSKYRMS
(eds.). Causation in Decision, Belief Change, and Statistics: Proceedings
of the Irvine Conference on Probability and Causation, Volume 2. Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers (1988), xix + 252 pp., $90.50.
The papers in these two volumes, all but one of which (Clark Glymour's) were presented
at a symposium at the University of California at Irvine in 1985, provide a very good
sampling of recent work on the topic of causation and its relation to foundational issues
in probability theory, decision theory, and belief change. The quality of the papers is in
general high, and some of them break significant new ground. The introductions to the
two volumes, by the editors, are helpful guides to the material that follows, and provide
useful background information on the issues under discussion. Those not already somewhat
familiar with these issues may find the introductory material a bit too terse, but at least
on the topic of probabilistic causation, old ground is so thoroughly retrodden that the
uninitiated need have no fear.
The first half of volume 1 is concerned with probabilistic analyses of causation. These
analyses differ in detail, but all agree that because of the problem of spurious correlation,
it is not sufficient for event C to be a cause of event E, that knowledge of C's occurring
raises the probability of E's occurring; rather, C must raise the probability of E conditional
on certain appropriately chosen background factors.
A host of questions arise concerning analyses of this type. Will the same analysis work
for both type and token causation? How do we pick the appropriatebackground factors to
be held fixed? Can we do so without appealing to preexisting beliefs about causal influence? Should the probabilities be construed objectively or subjectively?
I think the fairest conclusion that can be drawn from the exchanges between the partic-

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