Bruno Latour’s Science in Action

We can see the science in action by opening the blackbox of science as we follow engineers and scientists through society by following the "cycles of accumulation. Behind all scientific texts lie inscriptions, and all inscriptions are produced through instruments: this is what scientists do in labs, in action. The end result is what is presented to the public in the form of graphs, equations, photos--all scientific texts.

Latour's Science in Action approaches science rhetorically, by highlighting the persuasive and political work that must be done to establish a scientific or technological fact. He bases his analysis on three central figures:

• science as war
• as network, and
  
• as Janus-faced --to help delineate the junctures between Ready Made Science & Science in the Making

Latour attempts to demythologize the authority of science through setting out three rules:
We will enter facts and machines while they are in the making; we will carry with us no preconceptions of what constitutes knowledge; we will watch the closure of the black boxes and be careful to distinguish between two contradictory explanations of this closure, one uttered when it is finished, the other while it is being attempted. This will constitute our first rule of method and will make our voyage possible. ( pp. 13-15.)

The rules of Method

Rules of Method

Rule 1 We study science in action and not ready made science or technology; to do so, we either arrive before the facts and machines are blackboxed or we follow the controversies that reopen them
Rule 2 To determine the objectivity or subjectivity of a claim, the efficiency or perfection of a mechanism, we do not look for their intrinsic qualities but at all the transformations they undergo later in the hands of others
Rule 3 Since the settlement of a controversy is the cause of Nature's representation, not its consequence, we can never use this consequence, Nature, to explain how and why a controversy has been settled.

There are several increases in the number of elements that help establish a claim--papers, labs, new objects, professions, nature, etc (179)

Rule 4 Since the settlement of a controversy is the cause of Society's stability, we cannot use Society to explain how and why a controversy has been settled. We should consider symmetrically the efforts to enroll human and non-human resources.
Rule 5 We have to be as undecided as the various actors we follow as to what technoscience is made of; every time and inside/outside divide is built, we should study the two sides simultaneously and make the list, no matter how long and heterogeneous, of those who do the work
Rule 6 Confronted with the accusation of irrationality, we look neither at what rule of logic has been broken, nor at what structure of society could explain the distortion, but to the angle and direction of the observer's displacement, and to the length of the network thus being built.
Rule 7 Before attributing any special quality to the mind or to the method of people, let us examine first the many ways through which inscriptions are gathered, combined, and tied together and sent back. Only if there is something unexplained once the networks have been studied shall we start to speak of cognitive factors.

Principles

Principles are Bruno Latour's personal summary of the empirical facts, after a decade of work in the area.

First principle The fate of facts and machines is in later users' hands; their qualities are thus a consequence, not a cause, of collective action.
Second principle Scientists and engineers speak in the name of new allies that they have shaped and enrolled; representatives among other representatives, they add these unexpected resources to tip the balance of force in their favour.
Third principle We are never confronted with science, technology and society, but with a gamut of weaker and stronger associations; thus understanding what facts and machines are is the same as understanding who the people are.
Fourth principle The more science and technology have an esoteric content the further they extend outside; thus 'science and technology' is only a subset of technoscience.
Fifth principle Irrationality is always an accusation made by someone building a network over someone else who stands in the way; thus, there is no Great Divide between minds, but only shorter and longer networks; harder facts are not the rule but the exception, since they are needed only in a very few cases to displace other on a large scale out of their usual ways.
Sixth principle History of technoscience is in a large part the history of the resources scattered along networks to accelerate the mobility, faithfulness, combination and cohesion of traces that make action at a distance possible.