Latour’s description of the earth in the Anthropocene as “an active, local, limited, sensitive, fragile, trembling and easily irritated envelope.”

most recently in Scienc

Latour realized he was witnessing the beginnings a seismic rhetorical shift: from scientists appealing to transcendent, capital-T Truth to touting the robust networks through which truth is, and has always been, established

In that sense, there is no outside anymore

science was social because it brought together a multitude of human and nonhuman entities and harnessed their collective power to act on and transform the world

to wonder what it would look like to study scientific knowledge not as a cognitive process but as an embodied cultural practice enabled by instruments, machinery and specific historical conditions

possibly overstating the reach of French theory

Those who worried that Latour’s early work was opening a Pandora’s box may feel that their fears have been more than borne out

Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science

At a meeting between French industrialists and a climatologist a few years ago, Latour was struck when he heard the scientist defend his results not on the basis of the unimpeachable authority of science but by laying out to his audience his manufacturing secrets: “the large number of researchers involved in climate analysis, the complex system for verifying data, the articles and reports, the principle of peer evaluation, the vast network of weather stations, floating weather buoys, satellites and computers that ensure the flow of information.” The climate denialists, by contrast, the scientist said, had none of this institutional architecture. Latour realized he was witnessing the beginnings a seismic rhetorical shift: from scientists appealing to transcendent, capital-T Truth to touting the robust networks through which truth is, and has always been, established.