Pandoras hope a reading

1
Pandoras hope - a reading
Eric Monteiro, NTNU and Univ. of Oslo Oslo,
spring 2000
2
Contents
Chapters in the book

• Science wars --- Theory of reference ch. 12
• theory of action (1) refinement
  ch. 6
• theory of action (2)
  ch. 9
• social studies of knowledge (SSK) ch.
  45

3
Science wars

• Science studies have been critizied
• Sokal
• Pandora is a response - but only partly explicit

4
Latours strategy

• Never head on - covert
• Ironic, French
• Never proper references
• bits of empirical evidence

5
Epistemology at a glance
Object reality realism
Structure dispositions phenomenology
Subject construction idealism
6
Ex a scissor?
7
Science wars (II)

• Only contstructions idealism
• against science
• Machiavellian descriptions - self-interest

8
Theory of reference
How does words refer to things?
a circle
The world
9
Circulating reference

• The ethnography of a theory of reference
• the philosophic discussion has been unrealistic
• it takes work - a sequence of many translations -
  not a gigant leap

10
Soil science

• Pedology, botany, geography
• Does the forest advance or back-track?
• Pedology savanna
• botany forest

11
No firm ground under your feet

• Science the production of certainty
• from what is not certain
• hence how do you produce certainty??
• Weakness --- strength
• Always from a background of already produced
  certainty
• the map (cf. Hutchins!)

12
Producing certainty
vs.
A single inscription would not inspire trust,
but the superposition of the two (p. 28)
13
The production process (I)
A
B
C
D
4
1
2
3
14
The production process (II)

• For the world to become knowledgable, it must
  become a laboratory (p. 43)
• proto-laboratory
• carve, code, tag,

15
Long distance control

• Successive translations

This is the same reversal of space and time we
have already seen many times thanks to
inscriptions, we are able to oversee and control
a situation in which we are submerged, we become
superios to that which is greater than us, and we
are able to gather synoptically all the actions
(p. 65)
16
Translations (I)

• Ex pedocomporator
• classification box
• the samples will be attached to their originally
  context solely by the fragile link of the numbers
  inscribed (p. 46)
• Global Local
• Ex colour map with holes

17
Translations (II)
A thing can remain more durable and travel
farther and more quickly if it continues to
undergoe transformations at each step of this
long cascade (p. 58) Ex. colour
maps Though seemingly always out of reach, the
threshold between between local and global can
now be crossed instantaneously Without the the
holes, there can be alignment, no precision, no
reading, and therefor no transmutation of local
earth into universal code (pp. 59 - 60)
18
The upshot

• A reference is the the whole sequence of such
  translations
• The crux
• what is constant?
• What is not?
• At each step, most of the elements are lost, but
  also renewed (p. 64)

19
The chain
A construction, a discovery, an invention or a
convention? All four, as always (p. 66) An
essential property of this chain is that it must
remain reversable The word reference
designates the quality of the chain in its
entirety (p. 69) Phenomena are what circulates
all along the reversable chain of
transformations, at each step losing some
properties to gain others that renders them
compatible with already established centres
of calculation (p. 71)
20
Questions

• Worth the philosophical sweat?
• Is science war really about simple-minded ToR?
• Where is the technology?
• Seemingly about philosophy of language
• The crux - the (in)variance of tranlations
• how specific
• the (small) gaps...