What do you think?
Rate this book
Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts
This highly original work presents laboratory science in a deliberately skeptical way: as an anthropological approach to the culture of the scientist. Drawing on recent work in literary criticism, the authors study how the social world of the laboratory produces papers and other “texts,”’ and how the scientific vision of reality becomes that set of statements considered, for the time being, too expensive to change. The book is based on field work done by Bruno Latour in Roger Guillemin’s laboratory at the Salk Institute and provides an important link between the sociology of modern sciences and laboratory studies in the history of science.
296 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1979
77 people are currently reading
2077 people want to read
About the author
Bruno Latour
163 books765 followersBruno Latour, a philosopher and anthropologist, is the author of Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Our Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, and many other books. He curated the ZKM exhibits ICONOCLASH and Making Things Public and coedited the accompanying catalogs, both published by the MIT Press.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews
May 29, 2013
Laboratory Life is a profoundly annoying book. It gained its status as a classic for being one of the first books to flesh out what an anthropology of science might look like, in which social scientists would follow scientists around their labs to learn about the social construction of facts. Well and good. The problem comes from the authors' obnoxious tone, use of woefully outdated forms of anthropology, and gleeful fact-bashing. Woolgar and Latour expect to be annoying, but not for the reasons they think.
I have no problem with the notion that science is socially and historically analyzable. It seems like a good idea to view the laboratory as a site of particular language use and forms of communication and inscription, just as it seems like a good idea to think about the "microprocessing" of facts in a thoroughly social way, as opposed to assuming that social factors merely add onto the scientific, or worse, distort it. Perhaps the major issue I have here is one that most STS folks of my generation will embrace: we're no longer in the business of thrusting science from her pedestal. We don't care. We accept that science is social, but we don't need to drag it through the mud. Perhaps it has to do with the model Woolgar and Latour are fighting against. Here, science is necessarily universal. If you believe that, or think that other people believe and accept that, of course you'd want to challenge it. But I don't think many people really believe it anymore, if they ever did to the extent that the authors seem to think. For example, most scientists will readily accept the fact that lab work is messy and that they struggle to produce clear concepts/facts. They readily accept that replicating an experiment isn't merely a matter of having the right "information." It's about having the right equipment, the right funding and context, the right language, and the right model organism, etc. We especially see how W&L's understanding of science went awry in how they think the fact of THF was established. They think that it becomes a fact once its context is erased and it can become a free-circulating entity. Nothing could be further from the truth! Any biologist worth their salt would view THF as a node in a network of unproven biological complexity. THF as a biological fact has no meaning outside its organismal context, and you see biologists struggling with the tension between holism and reductionism all the time. It's one of the central problems in the field. Another way of making my point is to say that we are very suspicious of reifications that efface the practical aspects of science. In this way there can be reified concepts like THF that are useful tools, but no one thinks that tidy entity is real in that presentation.
But of course, we must be wary of being seduced by the scientist's words! Latour and Woolgar justify their lack of engagement with scientists explanations for their actions by claiming that this would only reproduce the naive epistemological explanations we always get about science. They would "go native" and in doing so would endanger their ability to remain apart from the culture of science. Bullshit. How does this statement sound: "We should make absolutely sure not to ask Native American informers why they perform this rain dance. Instead we should observe them from our privileged position of colonizers to produce knowledge, our knowledge, about them which is more reliable than their own self-understanding." Yuck! Anthropologists don't do this sort of thing anymore! Whether they were doing it in 1979...that I'm not sure. But it's no longer an acceptable way to perform social research. Your subjects are not ignorant of their position. In fact, they almost always know more about it than you.
What do I like about Woolgar and Latour's account? The way they put material and mental processing at the same level of importance is significant and appealing. It's true that we think with objects, and even if the final presentation of a "fact" minimizes the importance of particular objects, most scientists know that if you don't understand the object, you don't really understand the fact. As someone who's been through it, science education consists in starting out with clear concepts that are easily manipulable. Once you're ready to do research, you know that everything you learned in year 1 was a lie. Woolgar and Latour seem to be languishing in year 1.
The chapter on "Cycles of Credit," however, is important because it overturns the notion that something like Mertonian norms govern the behavior of scientists. L&W notice that their subjects make no distinctions between internal and external factors in explaining their research behavior, which opens up the way for an analysis of laboratory activity in terms of "economics, epistemology and sociology." L&W encourage us to view laboratory activity as a cycle of capital investment to gain credibility (as distinct from mere rewards), which facilitates further investment to gain even more credibility. Much like economic stagnation in which people stop buying and producing more and more stuff, a scientist will quickly be labeled as a has-been if they stop producing articles which can lead to further research investments. Lab activity always ramps up, and in this way I find the comparison to a market convincing.
I have no problem with the notion that science is socially and historically analyzable. It seems like a good idea to view the laboratory as a site of particular language use and forms of communication and inscription, just as it seems like a good idea to think about the "microprocessing" of facts in a thoroughly social way, as opposed to assuming that social factors merely add onto the scientific, or worse, distort it. Perhaps the major issue I have here is one that most STS folks of my generation will embrace: we're no longer in the business of thrusting science from her pedestal. We don't care. We accept that science is social, but we don't need to drag it through the mud. Perhaps it has to do with the model Woolgar and Latour are fighting against. Here, science is necessarily universal. If you believe that, or think that other people believe and accept that, of course you'd want to challenge it. But I don't think many people really believe it anymore, if they ever did to the extent that the authors seem to think. For example, most scientists will readily accept the fact that lab work is messy and that they struggle to produce clear concepts/facts. They readily accept that replicating an experiment isn't merely a matter of having the right "information." It's about having the right equipment, the right funding and context, the right language, and the right model organism, etc. We especially see how W&L's understanding of science went awry in how they think the fact of THF was established. They think that it becomes a fact once its context is erased and it can become a free-circulating entity. Nothing could be further from the truth! Any biologist worth their salt would view THF as a node in a network of unproven biological complexity. THF as a biological fact has no meaning outside its organismal context, and you see biologists struggling with the tension between holism and reductionism all the time. It's one of the central problems in the field. Another way of making my point is to say that we are very suspicious of reifications that efface the practical aspects of science. In this way there can be reified concepts like THF that are useful tools, but no one thinks that tidy entity is real in that presentation.
But of course, we must be wary of being seduced by the scientist's words! Latour and Woolgar justify their lack of engagement with scientists explanations for their actions by claiming that this would only reproduce the naive epistemological explanations we always get about science. They would "go native" and in doing so would endanger their ability to remain apart from the culture of science. Bullshit. How does this statement sound: "We should make absolutely sure not to ask Native American informers why they perform this rain dance. Instead we should observe them from our privileged position of colonizers to produce knowledge, our knowledge, about them which is more reliable than their own self-understanding." Yuck! Anthropologists don't do this sort of thing anymore! Whether they were doing it in 1979...that I'm not sure. But it's no longer an acceptable way to perform social research. Your subjects are not ignorant of their position. In fact, they almost always know more about it than you.
What do I like about Woolgar and Latour's account? The way they put material and mental processing at the same level of importance is significant and appealing. It's true that we think with objects, and even if the final presentation of a "fact" minimizes the importance of particular objects, most scientists know that if you don't understand the object, you don't really understand the fact. As someone who's been through it, science education consists in starting out with clear concepts that are easily manipulable. Once you're ready to do research, you know that everything you learned in year 1 was a lie. Woolgar and Latour seem to be languishing in year 1.
The chapter on "Cycles of Credit," however, is important because it overturns the notion that something like Mertonian norms govern the behavior of scientists. L&W notice that their subjects make no distinctions between internal and external factors in explaining their research behavior, which opens up the way for an analysis of laboratory activity in terms of "economics, epistemology and sociology." L&W encourage us to view laboratory activity as a cycle of capital investment to gain credibility (as distinct from mere rewards), which facilitates further investment to gain even more credibility. Much like economic stagnation in which people stop buying and producing more and more stuff, a scientist will quickly be labeled as a has-been if they stop producing articles which can lead to further research investments. Lab activity always ramps up, and in this way I find the comparison to a market convincing.
September 22, 2008
This book is not a fast read. It should be, there is in fact no reason it couldn't be more interesting. I say this first because I have read several books on similar subjects that were and second because when I could force myself to stay awake and read it the content was interesting once you could get through the dull writing style. Also I've skimmed some of the author's other work and it is far more interesting.
I was assigned 3 chapters of this book for a class but I instead read the entire book. I'm glad I did because a lot of the book assumes that you have read the rest (a reasonable assumption) and states things like "as shown in chapter 2". At least once he alluded to a term previously expanded upon which he never used in the previous discussion of it. An important lesson define terms the first time around or no one can figure out what you are alluding to.
I wouldn't recommend this book not because it's terrible (it's average) but because there are far better sources of information out there on the same topic.
The only time I was excited by this book was on page 256 when he quotes "the observer" as saying:
"In order to redress this imbalance, we would require about a hundred observers of this one setting, each with the same power over their subjects as you have over your animals. In other words, we should have TV monitoring in each office; we should be able to bug the phones and the desks; we should have complete freedom to take EEGs; and we would reserve the right to chop of participants' heads when internal examination was necessary. With this kind of freedom we could produce hard data."
I was assigned 3 chapters of this book for a class but I instead read the entire book. I'm glad I did because a lot of the book assumes that you have read the rest (a reasonable assumption) and states things like "as shown in chapter 2". At least once he alluded to a term previously expanded upon which he never used in the previous discussion of it. An important lesson define terms the first time around or no one can figure out what you are alluding to.
I wouldn't recommend this book not because it's terrible (it's average) but because there are far better sources of information out there on the same topic.
The only time I was excited by this book was on page 256 when he quotes "the observer" as saying:
"In order to redress this imbalance, we would require about a hundred observers of this one setting, each with the same power over their subjects as you have over your animals. In other words, we should have TV monitoring in each office; we should be able to bug the phones and the desks; we should have complete freedom to take EEGs; and we would reserve the right to chop of participants' heads when internal examination was necessary. With this kind of freedom we could produce hard data."
August 20, 2019
One of the best 'finds' I've lucked into this year. Tremendously fascinating insider-account of the 'culture' going on behind-the-scenes in the life sciences. A 'peek behind the curtain', so-to-speak. As I suspected, eggheads are really just quacks and charlatans! No, I'm just kidding. It's not that extreme. But there is a double-standard going on between what scientists claim their work is about, versus how it really operates. It's just as much a soap-opera as any other big industry. 'Progress' is accidental and happenstance and no one really knows what's going on or where things are headed. What troubles me is the sheer recklessness of it all. Meddling and tinkering in the lab can greatly affect all of our lives; and yet the motives behind 'research' are seamy, paltry things like grant money, awards, career-rivalry, and ego. I don't like it.
September 19, 2021
A classic that describes a lot of the elements of actor network theory without this being a thing yet. The chapters are relatively independent from each other; they cover different aspects of the "Laboratory Life".
April 25, 2009
If you have ever wondered what scientists really do, this book is for you. An anthropologist goes to the Salk institute and reports on the tribal behaviors he observers.
August 31, 2014
A. Synopsis: This book is based on Latour’s work as a participant-observer at the Salk Institute from 1975 to 1977. He examines the constitution of a particular fact--TRF (Thyrotropin Releasing Factor). This is an object with a well defined molecular structure which can be purchased and used in research programs that are unrelated to those that gave TRF its existence. The fact became an artifact.
B. Latour and Woolgar develop 6 ‘tools’ to understand scientific activity
1. Construction: This refers to the slow practical craftwork by which inscriptions are compared and accounts are backed up or dismissed. There is no difference between the construction of facts (TRF) and the construction of artifacts. Facts are constructed by the dropping of modalities (ex. “Reported to be”)
2. Agonistic field: Reality is the consequence and not the cause of the construction of facts. The scientist’s activity then is not directed towards ‘reality’ but towards the operations on statements which drop modalities. The sum of these operations is the agonistic field.
3. Materialization: Material elements are key in the production of facts. At one point each piece of equipment in a laboratory was controversial. The process of materialization or reification is when a controversial piece of equipment (either physical or intellectual) stabilizes and can be used by another laboratory.
4. Credibility: This defines the various investments that scientists make in the laboratory. Information is costly. Only credible investments will be made.
5. Circumstances (Micro-fabrication): One of the key points to Latour’s argument is that circumstances are relevant. Science is entirely fabricated out of circumstance.
6. Noise: The ratio of signal of noise is a metaphor for information that is measured against a background of equally probable events.
C. The resulting definition of scientific activity is a grand inversion
1. The result of the ‘construction’ f facts is that it appears unconstructed by anyone. The result of making statements more true in the ‘agonistic field’ is that the participants themselves are convinced that they are not convinced. The result of ‘materialization’ is that people argue that the material competent of the laboratory plays a minimal part in the thought process. The result of ‘credibility’ is that participants claim that economics and beliefs have no influence on science. The result of ‘circumstances’ is that they simply do not alter science in any way. The result of ‘noise’ is that it is simply erroneous data.
D. The “anthropology” of science: Latour and Woolgar’s method
1. While we have a good understanding of exotic tribes, we are ignorant about the tribe of scientists. So Latour and Woolgar study the scientists as they would an exotic tribe. They regard all objects as foreign in the lab
2. “Our most general objective is to shed light on the ‘soft underbelly of science’”
3. They argue that their is no distinction between the social and technical. It is all social.
4. Reflexivity: Observers are engaged in methods that are similar to those who they study
5. Intent: They are concerned with the social construction of scientific knowledge in so far as this draws attention to the process by which scientists make sense of their observations.
6. This is the ‘strong program’ in the social construction camp.
E. The construction of order
1. Two main considerations concerning the way scientists draw order from disorder. First is that there are always a number of alternate sociological features which could explain a scientific action. Second, is reflexivity. This means that the observer is in the same position as the scientist trying to construct order from disorder.
2. The massive number of alternative readings creates background noise. The scientists construct a framework by which background noise can be reduced against an apparent coherent signal. The process by which frameworks are constructed and imposed is the object of this study. The observer makes order from disorder by adopting a theme by which to organize his notes.
3. Methods of validation to reduce background noise.
a) Etic validation: The audience will assess the validity of a description of a community of fellow observers. Mertonian because it pays little attention to the participants technical culture
b) Emic validation: The adequacy of the description rests will the participants. This is “going native” understanding the cultural context
c) Etic/Emic: B&W take this approach. They take seriously the concepts used by members in the lab, yet they resist “going native” by explaining the use of these concepts as a social phenomena. The authors seek a middle path between the extreme position of total newcomer (Etic: an unattainable ideal) and the complete participant (Emic: going native precludes one from successfully communicating to the fellow observers)
F. Literary inscription (this creates order from disorder)
1. One simple principle can make sense of the laboratory: It is as if two types of literature are being juxtaposed
a) One type is published outside the laboratory
b) The other comprises documents from within the lab
c) The desk is the hub of the productive unit
2. The entire lab process (from samples taken from rats to the final curve which appeared in publication) requires an enormous amount of apparatus
a) Particular significance can be attached to the apparatus which provides written output
b) Items which do not for example are machines which transform matter from one state to another
c) The other apparatus are called “inscription devices.” This is any item which can transform a material substance into a written diagram (output which is directly usable in an argument)
G. How are facts ‘stabilized?’ Facts are stabilized by the elimination of modalities.
1. How to make sense of the content of the papers. 5-Fold classification scheme
a) Type 5: A taken for granted fact
b) Type 4: A stated relationship for a truth. A to B. Ex. Of teaching texts
c) Type 3: A Type 4 with a modality. Ex. “Reported to be”. Found in review articles
d) Type 2: Papers and drafts. A tentative suggestion
e) Type 1: Conjecture or speculation
H. Complaints of the book by its readers
1. Incoherence of narrative (this was intended they say)
2. Marxist scholars are critical because they say that it is a product of a “bourgeoisie sociology of science”. B&W say Marxists are wrong because they desire a scientific/objective view
3. What does it mean to be ethnographic? Usually means to include a description of a tribes technology and belief system. B&W’s current position is that they do not know the nature of the society under study
4. The place of philosophy. The most interesting philosophical interpretation is a confirmation of the falsificationist theory of science. “A corroboration of Popperian philosophy of science”. The amount of effort in undermining others claims is substantial. They say that is not common in everyday life. I think that it is
5. The demise of the social. Social construction no longer has meaning. All interactions are social, thus “social” is devoid of any meaning
B. Latour and Woolgar develop 6 ‘tools’ to understand scientific activity
1. Construction: This refers to the slow practical craftwork by which inscriptions are compared and accounts are backed up or dismissed. There is no difference between the construction of facts (TRF) and the construction of artifacts. Facts are constructed by the dropping of modalities (ex. “Reported to be”)
2. Agonistic field: Reality is the consequence and not the cause of the construction of facts. The scientist’s activity then is not directed towards ‘reality’ but towards the operations on statements which drop modalities. The sum of these operations is the agonistic field.
3. Materialization: Material elements are key in the production of facts. At one point each piece of equipment in a laboratory was controversial. The process of materialization or reification is when a controversial piece of equipment (either physical or intellectual) stabilizes and can be used by another laboratory.
4. Credibility: This defines the various investments that scientists make in the laboratory. Information is costly. Only credible investments will be made.
5. Circumstances (Micro-fabrication): One of the key points to Latour’s argument is that circumstances are relevant. Science is entirely fabricated out of circumstance.
6. Noise: The ratio of signal of noise is a metaphor for information that is measured against a background of equally probable events.
C. The resulting definition of scientific activity is a grand inversion
1. The result of the ‘construction’ f facts is that it appears unconstructed by anyone. The result of making statements more true in the ‘agonistic field’ is that the participants themselves are convinced that they are not convinced. The result of ‘materialization’ is that people argue that the material competent of the laboratory plays a minimal part in the thought process. The result of ‘credibility’ is that participants claim that economics and beliefs have no influence on science. The result of ‘circumstances’ is that they simply do not alter science in any way. The result of ‘noise’ is that it is simply erroneous data.
D. The “anthropology” of science: Latour and Woolgar’s method
1. While we have a good understanding of exotic tribes, we are ignorant about the tribe of scientists. So Latour and Woolgar study the scientists as they would an exotic tribe. They regard all objects as foreign in the lab
2. “Our most general objective is to shed light on the ‘soft underbelly of science’”
3. They argue that their is no distinction between the social and technical. It is all social.
4. Reflexivity: Observers are engaged in methods that are similar to those who they study
5. Intent: They are concerned with the social construction of scientific knowledge in so far as this draws attention to the process by which scientists make sense of their observations.
6. This is the ‘strong program’ in the social construction camp.
E. The construction of order
1. Two main considerations concerning the way scientists draw order from disorder. First is that there are always a number of alternate sociological features which could explain a scientific action. Second, is reflexivity. This means that the observer is in the same position as the scientist trying to construct order from disorder.
2. The massive number of alternative readings creates background noise. The scientists construct a framework by which background noise can be reduced against an apparent coherent signal. The process by which frameworks are constructed and imposed is the object of this study. The observer makes order from disorder by adopting a theme by which to organize his notes.
3. Methods of validation to reduce background noise.
a) Etic validation: The audience will assess the validity of a description of a community of fellow observers. Mertonian because it pays little attention to the participants technical culture
b) Emic validation: The adequacy of the description rests will the participants. This is “going native” understanding the cultural context
c) Etic/Emic: B&W take this approach. They take seriously the concepts used by members in the lab, yet they resist “going native” by explaining the use of these concepts as a social phenomena. The authors seek a middle path between the extreme position of total newcomer (Etic: an unattainable ideal) and the complete participant (Emic: going native precludes one from successfully communicating to the fellow observers)
F. Literary inscription (this creates order from disorder)
1. One simple principle can make sense of the laboratory: It is as if two types of literature are being juxtaposed
a) One type is published outside the laboratory
b) The other comprises documents from within the lab
c) The desk is the hub of the productive unit
2. The entire lab process (from samples taken from rats to the final curve which appeared in publication) requires an enormous amount of apparatus
a) Particular significance can be attached to the apparatus which provides written output
b) Items which do not for example are machines which transform matter from one state to another
c) The other apparatus are called “inscription devices.” This is any item which can transform a material substance into a written diagram (output which is directly usable in an argument)
G. How are facts ‘stabilized?’ Facts are stabilized by the elimination of modalities.
1. How to make sense of the content of the papers. 5-Fold classification scheme
a) Type 5: A taken for granted fact
b) Type 4: A stated relationship for a truth. A to B. Ex. Of teaching texts
c) Type 3: A Type 4 with a modality. Ex. “Reported to be”. Found in review articles
d) Type 2: Papers and drafts. A tentative suggestion
e) Type 1: Conjecture or speculation
H. Complaints of the book by its readers
1. Incoherence of narrative (this was intended they say)
2. Marxist scholars are critical because they say that it is a product of a “bourgeoisie sociology of science”. B&W say Marxists are wrong because they desire a scientific/objective view
3. What does it mean to be ethnographic? Usually means to include a description of a tribes technology and belief system. B&W’s current position is that they do not know the nature of the society under study
4. The place of philosophy. The most interesting philosophical interpretation is a confirmation of the falsificationist theory of science. “A corroboration of Popperian philosophy of science”. The amount of effort in undermining others claims is substantial. They say that is not common in everyday life. I think that it is
5. The demise of the social. Social construction no longer has meaning. All interactions are social, thus “social” is devoid of any meaning
Read
October 18, 2023review will come when thoughts are digested (which i'm praying will happen before i present this book in a few weeks to the seminar)
December 26, 2021
Latour and Woolgar in Laboratory Life bring an anthropological lens to what they refer to as the “tribes of scientists” and “their production of science” (17). They see in neuroendocrinology “all the attributes of a mythology” (54) with its constellation of rituals, beliefs, and folklore. They do so not to undermine the truths that these enterprises produce. As they point out mythologies through which cultures represent themselves are rarely wholesale falsehoods (55). Rather, they are challenging notions of authority that exoticize the scientist as someone whose mode of thinking and reasoning is so incomparably distinct from those used in other cultures more commonly subject to the anthropological gaze (29).
The mundane occurrences of the Salk Institute laboratory detailed by the authors remind me of my own experiences working at a research laboratory in small power engineering firm. Experiences that I have often subjected to untrained ethnographic observation in my own personal reflections, as it was an environment I personally felt alienated and strangely detached from throughout my years there. One of the products we were developing was a niche device. There were only had a handful of prototypes in the field at various research institutes. Though far less sophisticated as merely electrical power test equipment, it did share commonalities with the Merrifield invention (Automatic Peptide Synthesizer) that Latour and Woolgar bring up (68). The endocrinology lab’s research depended upon there being a “marketable, self-contained, reliable, and compact” inscription device out there that was worth making under a capitalist market economy. The dependence on this “inscription device” shows how intimately tied the production of scientific knowledge is with technology and political economy. The price tags of such research technology raised for Latour and Woolgar a fascinating question: “How can we account for the fact that in any one year, approximately one and a half million dollars is spent to enable twenty-five people to produce forty papers?”
Inscription devices, in generating data, also raise hermeneutic questions. Latour and Woolgar mention a situation where an artefact in a curve becomes interchangeable with an object of scientific inquriry. They go so far as to say an “object was constructed out of the difference between peaks on two curves” (125).
I can understand the criticism the authors make about treating facts as objects ‘out there’ as opposed to (social) constructions. I have a harder time comprehending their critique of a “realist theory of science” (178) or how scientific work produces reality ‘out there’, rather than phenomena (unfolding under specific conditions with predictable regularity) causing the creation of a fact (alongside a human observer). I am still unsure if the authors speak of reality as a notional construction, or as the phenomena that would continue to behave with regularity whether a human (or more-than-human) observer is there to try to make sense of it or not. Bracketing whatever it is the Latour and Woolgar are trying to say about reality, I do think the emphasis of social construction is illuminating. I'm especially interested in the way reification of 'reality' as a construction is problematized in this text using Marx of all people (a quote where he emphasized practice over theory) but also mentioning the potential to extend commodity fetishism into the domain of scientific facts. Latour and Woolgar write in a footnote:
"(Both fact and fetish share a common etymological origin.) In both cases, a complex variety of processes come into play whereby participants forget that what is "out there" is the product of their own "alienated" work."
The example of selenium in water affecting the repeatability of lab results was an interesting example of the way a scientific insight that occurs in contingent ways between people can become individualized as a sort of divine revelation that pops into the genius mind of the scientist (169). Even when considering thought processes and modes of reasoning, these internal activities are deeply formed by social communities, where scientists are working things out with imagined interlocutors or anticipating objections to their conclusions.
The example of Guillemin abandoning further study of TRF because of dismissive assertions made by the more reputable rival Schally shows how deeply social power dynamics can influence the course of scientific research and knowledge production. The cycles of credit the authors discuss are helpful for understanding that science does not occur in isolation from the political economy or social currents within which scientists live their daily lives. Humans have an immensely complex spectrum of motivations from which they act, and the actions they undertake as scientists are not insulated from this reality, nor is the knowledge they produce.
There's a fascinating footnote that draws on Marxist notions of use value and exchange value (actually a classical Smithian notion), but applies it to the economy of citations, which I found hilarious. The exchange of citations as commodities, and questioning how useful they really were in contrast to how much credibility those citations constructed is a very useful way of understanding academic literature in my view. I found this a productive use of Bourdieu.
The Postscript of Laboratory Life also has a response by Latour and Woolgar to Marxist critiques of their work published in "Radical Science Journal". Having never heard of the journal I looked it up and stumbled upon this fascinating article about the origins of Science as Culture.
The mundane occurrences of the Salk Institute laboratory detailed by the authors remind me of my own experiences working at a research laboratory in small power engineering firm. Experiences that I have often subjected to untrained ethnographic observation in my own personal reflections, as it was an environment I personally felt alienated and strangely detached from throughout my years there. One of the products we were developing was a niche device. There were only had a handful of prototypes in the field at various research institutes. Though far less sophisticated as merely electrical power test equipment, it did share commonalities with the Merrifield invention (Automatic Peptide Synthesizer) that Latour and Woolgar bring up (68). The endocrinology lab’s research depended upon there being a “marketable, self-contained, reliable, and compact” inscription device out there that was worth making under a capitalist market economy. The dependence on this “inscription device” shows how intimately tied the production of scientific knowledge is with technology and political economy. The price tags of such research technology raised for Latour and Woolgar a fascinating question: “How can we account for the fact that in any one year, approximately one and a half million dollars is spent to enable twenty-five people to produce forty papers?”
Inscription devices, in generating data, also raise hermeneutic questions. Latour and Woolgar mention a situation where an artefact in a curve becomes interchangeable with an object of scientific inquriry. They go so far as to say an “object was constructed out of the difference between peaks on two curves” (125).
I can understand the criticism the authors make about treating facts as objects ‘out there’ as opposed to (social) constructions. I have a harder time comprehending their critique of a “realist theory of science” (178) or how scientific work produces reality ‘out there’, rather than phenomena (unfolding under specific conditions with predictable regularity) causing the creation of a fact (alongside a human observer). I am still unsure if the authors speak of reality as a notional construction, or as the phenomena that would continue to behave with regularity whether a human (or more-than-human) observer is there to try to make sense of it or not. Bracketing whatever it is the Latour and Woolgar are trying to say about reality, I do think the emphasis of social construction is illuminating. I'm especially interested in the way reification of 'reality' as a construction is problematized in this text using Marx of all people (a quote where he emphasized practice over theory) but also mentioning the potential to extend commodity fetishism into the domain of scientific facts. Latour and Woolgar write in a footnote:
"(Both fact and fetish share a common etymological origin.) In both cases, a complex variety of processes come into play whereby participants forget that what is "out there" is the product of their own "alienated" work."
The example of selenium in water affecting the repeatability of lab results was an interesting example of the way a scientific insight that occurs in contingent ways between people can become individualized as a sort of divine revelation that pops into the genius mind of the scientist (169). Even when considering thought processes and modes of reasoning, these internal activities are deeply formed by social communities, where scientists are working things out with imagined interlocutors or anticipating objections to their conclusions.
The example of Guillemin abandoning further study of TRF because of dismissive assertions made by the more reputable rival Schally shows how deeply social power dynamics can influence the course of scientific research and knowledge production. The cycles of credit the authors discuss are helpful for understanding that science does not occur in isolation from the political economy or social currents within which scientists live their daily lives. Humans have an immensely complex spectrum of motivations from which they act, and the actions they undertake as scientists are not insulated from this reality, nor is the knowledge they produce.
There's a fascinating footnote that draws on Marxist notions of use value and exchange value (actually a classical Smithian notion), but applies it to the economy of citations, which I found hilarious. The exchange of citations as commodities, and questioning how useful they really were in contrast to how much credibility those citations constructed is a very useful way of understanding academic literature in my view. I found this a productive use of Bourdieu.
The Postscript of Laboratory Life also has a response by Latour and Woolgar to Marxist critiques of their work published in "Radical Science Journal". Having never heard of the journal I looked it up and stumbled upon this fascinating article about the origins of Science as Culture.
May 6, 2018
This wonderfully readable study of scientific lab culture should be essential reading for science buffs. The authors take a philosophical and sociological approach to scientific inquiry, and that might be tough going for people used to hearing secular myths about how science "discovers the truth" about the world.
I think Latour and Woolgar have done something extraordinary here. They’ve humanized the process of scientific inquiry, and demythologized the notion of scientific “facts.” We can no longer look at what we know about natural phenomena except in terms of the work that was involved —and the tools that people used— in creating it.
I think Latour and Woolgar have done something extraordinary here. They’ve humanized the process of scientific inquiry, and demythologized the notion of scientific “facts.” We can no longer look at what we know about natural phenomena except in terms of the work that was involved —and the tools that people used— in creating it.
April 22, 2025
this man sat in a lab for 2 years a wrote a book about it, very awesome!
I read it for my dis so digging through the dense writing was fine, but would not rec for anyone who doesn't need it ahaha.
I read it for my dis so digging through the dense writing was fine, but would not rec for anyone who doesn't need it ahaha.
August 29, 2019
I've been working backwards through Latour's stuff, so my reading of this is coloured by some familiarity with later works. It's striking how much can be found (retrospectively) in infancy here, while helping make sense of a lot, especially in the immediate works that followed like Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society.
Here are some personal notes for future reference:
-Starts with an interesting foreword by Jonas Salk where he claims "The authors' tools and concepts are crude and qualitative" (12) and that he has "doubts about this way of thinking [about the relationship between science and society] and, in my own work, find many details which do not fit this picture" (13). However, he commends them, saying:
He even concludes with:
-His book summary in his last chapter:
-Latour's antipathy to norms and the structuring aspect of power starts here, in part because he seems to think of norms only as external, coarse-grained impositions and in part because agents themselves don't bring it up. For him, "Norms, the socialisation processes, deviance, and reward are the consequences of social activity rather than its causes." (205)
Accordingly, he says things like
-Locates his work as trying to balance a concern with whether or not scientists' concepts are correctly used with the theat of "going native"
-Perhaps becasue it's one of his earliest books, or because it was co-written with the British sociologist Steve Woolgar, there's a section which talks about 6 key concepts used and their sources:
-Paragraph with an iconic, even infamous, line:
-In contrast to the standard assumptions about order being the rule, and disorder in need of elimination and explanation, Latour argues that 4 approaches in his work that suggest this needs to be inverted, with disorder being the rule and order being a rare achievement (both in the laboratory and in his work about the lab)
-In response to skepticism from scientists about the relative weakness of his own work to theirs, Latour hilariously remarks:
Here are some personal notes for future reference:
-Starts with an interesting foreword by Jonas Salk where he claims "The authors' tools and concepts are crude and qualitative" (12) and that he has "doubts about this way of thinking [about the relationship between science and society] and, in my own work, find many details which do not fit this picture" (13). However, he commends them, saying:
their will to understand scientific work is consistent with the scientific ethos. Their courage, and even brashness, in this undertaking reminds me of many scientific endeavors in which nothing stands in the way of the pursuit of an inquiry. (12)
He even concludes with:
Even if we do not agree with the details of this book, or if we find it slightly uncomfortable or even painful in places, the present work seems to me to be a step in the right direction toward dissipating the mystery that is believed to surround our activity. I feel certain that in the future many institutes and laboratories may well include a kind of in-house philosopher or sociologist. (14)
-His book summary in his last chapter:
In examining the construction of facts in a laboratory, we have presented the general organisation of the setting as constituted by someone unfamiliar with science (Chapter 2); we showed how the history of some of the laboratory's achievements could be used to explain the stabilisation of a "hard" fact (Chapter 3); we then analysed some of the microprocesses by which facts are constructed, looking especially at the paradox of the term fact (Chapter 4); we then turned to the individuals in the laboratory in an attempt to make sense both of their careers and the solidity of their production (Chapter 5 ). (235)
-Latour's antipathy to norms and the structuring aspect of power starts here, in part because he seems to think of norms only as external, coarse-grained impositions and in part because agents themselves don't bring it up. For him, "Norms, the socialisation processes, deviance, and reward are the consequences of social activity rather than its causes." (205)
Accordingly, he says things like
We are not concerned with a sociological analysis in the functionalist tradition which tries to specify norms governing scientists' behaviour" (32)
our concern with the "social" is not confined to those nontechnical observations amenable to the application of sociological concepts such as norms or competition (32)
attempts to derive the existence of norms from the kind of material available to us are prone to major difficulties (Mulkay, 1975). In particular, we were unable to identify explicit appeal to the norms of science, except in very few instances. Some of these more nearly constituted an appeal to counternorms (189)
At best, norms simply delineate large-scale trends in behaviour; at worst, they simply refer to themes of ideological discourse (Mulkay, 1975). In either case, the explanatory power of norms falls well short of our objective of understanding both science and the scientists who make it. (189-90)
The complexity of these self-representations through economic or business metaphors contrasts sharply with the simplicity of norms. (191)
Scientists are thus interested in one another not because they are forced by a special system of norms to acknowledge others' achievements, but because each needs the other in order to increase his own production of credible information. (202-3)
Hagstrom was struck by the apparent absence of transfers of money. But this feature should not lead to the formulation of a model designed to preserve the existence of norms. Do scientists read each other out of deference to norms? Does one individual read a paper so as to force its author to read his work in return? Hagstrom's exchange system has the aura of a rather contrived fairy tale: scientists read papers as a matter of courtesy, and similarly thank their authors out of politeness. Let us look at one more example of scientific exchange in order to show that this view is needlessly complicated. (204)
-Locates his work as trying to balance a concern with whether or not scientists' concepts are correctly used with the theat of "going native"
The scheme which favours the deductive production of independently testable descriptions is oriented towards what has been called etic validation (Harris, 1968), that is, the audience who will ultimately assess the validity of a description is a community of fellow observers. The main advantage of this scheme is the comparative ease with which the reliability and replicability of descriptions can be assessed. By contrast, the scheme which favours the "emergence" of phenomenologically informed descriptions of social behaviour is most appropriately amenable to emic validation, that is, the ultimate decision about the adequacy of description rests with participants themselves. This has the advantage that descriptions produced by an observer are less likely to be mere impositions of categories and concepts which are alien to participants. At the same time, however, descriptions based on the categorical systems of participants in particular situations can provide problems for their generalisation to other situations. Furthermore, the observer remains accountable to a community of fellow observers in the sense that they provide a check that he has correctly followed procedures for emic validation. (39)
-Perhaps becasue it's one of his earliest books, or because it was co-written with the British sociologist Steve Woolgar, there's a section which talks about 6 key concepts used and their sources:
Construction [From Knorr]
Construction refers to the slow, practical craftwork by which inscriptions are superimposed and accounts backed up or dismissed. It thus underscores our contention that the difference between object and subject or the difference between facts and artefacts should not be the starting point of the study of scientific activity; rather, it is through practical operations that a statement can be transformed into an object or a fact into an artefact. (236)
Agonistic field [From Lyotard]
If facts are constructed through operations designed to effect the dropping of modalities which qualify a given statement, and, more importantly, if reality is the consequence rather than the cause of this construction, this means that a scientist's activity is directed, not toward "reality," but toward these operations on statements. The sum total of these operations is the agonistic field. (237)
Materialisation, or reification [From Satre]
Once a statement stabilises in the agonistic field, it is reified and becomes part of the tacit skills or material equipment of another laboratory. (238)
Credibility [From Bourdieu]
We used credibility to define the various investments made by scientists and the conversions between different aspects of the laboratory. Credibility facilitates the synthesis of economic notions (such as money, budget, and payoff) and epistemological notions (such as certitude, doubt, and proof). (238)
Circumstances [From Serres]
Circumstances (that which stands around) have generally been considered irrelevant to the practice of science. Our argument could be summarised as an attempt to demonstrate their relevance. Our claim is not just that TRF is surrounded, influenced by, in part depends on, or is also caused by circumstances; rather, we argue that science is entirely fabricated out of circumstance; moreover, it is precisely through specific localised practices that science appears to escape all circumstances… Rather than being a structure or an ordered pattern, a field consists only of positions which influence each other in a way which is not itself orderly. The notion of position enables us to talk about the "right" time, or the "right" assay, or in Habermas's (1971) terms, to replace the historicity in science. (240)
Noice [From Brillouin, Singh]
Noise (or, more exactly, the ratio of signal to noise), which is borrowed from information theory… but our usage is very metaphorical… we have retained the central idea that information is measured against a background of equally probable events (239-40).
-Paragraph with an iconic, even infamous, line:
The portrayal resulting from the above combination of concepts used throughout our argument has one central feature: the set of statements considered too costly to modify constitute what is referred to as reality. Scientific activity is not "about nature," it is a fierce fight to construct reality. The laboratory is the workplace and the set of productive forces, which makes construction possible. Every time a statement stabilises, it is reintroduced into the laboratory (in the guise of a machine, inscription device, skill, routine, prejudice, deduction, programme, and so on), and it is used to increase the difference between statements. The cost of challenging the reified statement is impossibly high. Reality is secreted. (243)
-In contrast to the standard assumptions about order being the rule, and disorder in need of elimination and explanation, Latour argues that 4 approaches in his work that suggest this needs to be inverted, with disorder being the rule and order being a rare achievement (both in the laboratory and in his work about the lab)
1. the history of science can be characterised as demonstrating the chain of circumstances and unexpected events leading to this or that discovery. However, this mass of events is not easily reconciled with the solidity of the final achievements.
2. sociologists have demonstrated the importance of informal communication in scientific activity. This well-documented phenomenon takes on a new meaning against the newly modified assumption: the production of new information is necessarily obtained by way of unexpected meetings, through old boy networks and by social proximity... Formal communication is the exception, as an a posteriori rationalisation of the real process.
3. citation analysts have demonstrated the extensive waste of energy in scientific activity. Most published papers are never read, the few that are read are worth little, and the remaining 1 or 2 percent are transformed and misrepresented by those who use them. But this waste no longer appears paradoxical if we accept the hypothesis that order is an exception and disorder the rule.
4. growing sociological interest in the details of negotiation between scientists has revealed the unreliability of scientists' memories and the inconsistency of their accounts. Each scientist strives to get by amid a wealth of chaotic events. Every time he sets up an inscription device, he is aware of a massive background of noise and a multitude of parameters beyond his control; every time he reads Science or Nature, he is confronted by a volume of contradictory concepts, trivia, and errors; every time he participates in some controversy, he finds himself immersed in a storm of political passions. This background is ever present, and it is only rarely that a pocket of stability emerges from it. The revelation of the diversity of accounts and inconsistency of scientific arguments should therefore come as no surprise: on the contrary, the emergency of an accepted fact is the rare event which should surprise us. (251-2)
-In response to skepticism from scientists about the relative weakness of his own work to theirs, Latour hilariously remarks:
The difference in credibility accorded the observer's and the informants' constructions corresponds directly to the extent of prior investments. Occasionally, when members of the laboratory derided the relative weakness and fragility of the observer's data, the observer pointed out the extent of the imbalance between the resources which the two parties enjoyed. "In order to redress this imbalance, we would require about a hundred observers of this one setting, each with the same power over their subjects as you have over your animals. In other words, we should have TV monitoring in each office; we should be able to bug the phones and the desks; we should have complete freedom to take EEGs; and we would reserve the right to chop off participants' heads when internal examination was necessary. With this kind of freedom, we could produce hard data." Inevitably, these kinds of remarks sent participants scurrying off to their assay rooms, muttering darkly about the "Big Brother" in their midst. (256-7)
December 8, 2017
You know that really boring English teacher on Ferris Bueller? That's what reading this book is like.
March 25, 2012
Latour manages a book that is both highly theoretical and intensely detailed. Written at one of the high points of the post-modern turn in STS, and deeply involved in the Strong Programme to explain successful and unsuccessful science in the same way, Laboratory Life shows how abstruse theory and ethnography can mutually support each other. Latour spent 21 months as a participant-observer in a neuro-endocrinology lab, and from his time develops a comprehensive picture of the scientific process as an act of rhetorical destruction--eliminating alternatives until only one is left, scientists as economic-strategic actors seeking to increase their stock of 'credit' in the community, and science as a difficult struggle to make Order out of Chaos.
It's interesting seeing the evolution of Latour's thought from Laboratory Life to Science in Action to We Have Never Been Modern. You see facticity as an historical construct assembled out of a whole textus of inscriptions, but the later Latour dropped the idea of 'credit' as a reward (perhaps it is not analytic enough, but to me, it does describe the difference between a decent scholar and great one), and the whole notion of We Have Never Been Modern, that the Enlightenment goal of separating the world of science from the world of politics, and the world of humans from the world of nature is doomed to failure, is not yet evident. Though Latour still makes it very clear how contextual science is, in this book at least, he seems to believe that the work of science might yet succeed in making the entire world legible.
It's interesting seeing the evolution of Latour's thought from Laboratory Life to Science in Action to We Have Never Been Modern. You see facticity as an historical construct assembled out of a whole textus of inscriptions, but the later Latour dropped the idea of 'credit' as a reward (perhaps it is not analytic enough, but to me, it does describe the difference between a decent scholar and great one), and the whole notion of We Have Never Been Modern, that the Enlightenment goal of separating the world of science from the world of politics, and the world of humans from the world of nature is doomed to failure, is not yet evident. Though Latour still makes it very clear how contextual science is, in this book at least, he seems to believe that the work of science might yet succeed in making the entire world legible.
January 12, 2008
This book is nothing short of a tour de force, an eye-opening examination of the construction of facts and artifacts at the level of the day-to-day laboratory. Reading this books has crystallized my own previously amoeba-like ideas about how science exists. After reading the book, I wonder at my own employment of inscription devices, trace overlays, and modality changes, even in the simple protocols I produce for fellow scientists in the laboratory. I found especially affirming the theme of order-from-disorder that pops up occasionally in early chapters but is fully pronounced near the end in it's own section. The philosophy of evolution comes to bear on epistemology!
May 29, 2011
The essential first text for anyone interested in qualitative studies of science and technology.
May 6, 2024
fui ler esse livro por recomendação de uma professora (beijo Ana Arnt) que leciona uma disciplina sobre o papel da ciência, as noções de natureza e tudo o mais. me pareceu interessantíssimo ver o olhar de um antropólogo para uma comunidade considerada do alto escalão da sociedade: os cientistas. as conclusões do estudo não são revolucionárias, mas fazem pensar: a ciência, por exemplo, não é um método de descoberta e estudo de objetos reais, de fatos, mas sim um método de construção de uma realidade a partir de narrativas e conflitos. é interessante pensar sob esse ponto de vista e dar espaço para o questionamento. será que a ciência constitui uma verdade, como é colocado na nossa sociedade atualmente? não, e esse livro deixa claro porquê. mas daí surgem outros questionamentos que o livro não aborda (também porque não se propõe em fazê-lo): "o que difere a ciência do senso comum?", "a ciência representa uma narrativa mais próxima da 'realidade'?", "se a ciência é só uma série de narrativas, porque ela funciona tão bem tecnicamente?". enfim, caí em uma série de questões e relativismos que não consigo responder ou enfrentar, o mais grave deles é por que eu faço ciência?
February 24, 2017
WARNING! I am writing this directly after reading the book. This is a bad idea. One should cool off for a few days before writing reactions!
---
Some books are written to piss people off. Mission accomplished! Not so much because it is threatening in its iconoclasm and challenging of a sacred mythology (which, no doubt, is how all critics of this polemic masquerading as research are dismissed by those who swallow this tripe). Rather, I can stick to the pretty standard line that the argument being made is sloppy, utterly relativistic (despite attempts to evade that label), and obnoxiously proud of itself for seeing what all the other "sheep" can't. Yuck.
What is true about the insistence the authors have regarding the construction of facts is not particularly profound, even if I don't dispute much of what they say regarding the nature of generating knowledge. All human understanding of any reality is by proxy, has to be translated into symbols to attempt agreement between subjective agents, and is subject to reevaluation via persuasion, which is always through social interactions amid a messy web of underappreciated factors. Sure. It does not follow, though, that because our symbols are necessarily proxy that there is no referent or that there are not more effective ways to check the shared subjective experiences of humans in a systematic way against each other to refine knowledge of the referent. And for all their aped objectivity (of course, they can't call their attempts at objectivity "objectivity," because that's what they are criticizing, so they put it in the sociologists terms and say they are resisting "going native"), the authors make an argument by using a method (what they call ethnography I'll for what it is: investigative journalism) that makes such use of equivocation and confusion of terms (except the ones they make such a show of carefully "analyzing") that one wonders if the book is just a marvelous and self-conscious troll on the methods of anthropology rather than a serious effort to understand the sociology of research institute culture. Alas, it ain't so.
The reason, though, that I haven't left this little dollop of postmodern snark only one star is that there is actually one segment of the book that does a decent job of, well, actual anthropology/sociology. This is the description of the "Strategies, Positions, and Career Trajectories" of academic science. The "cycles of credit" and the dynamics of scientists career paths provided a pretty accurate (from my experience) and illuminating addition to the stock explanations usually given to explain why career scientists and technicians do what they do. It was so shockingly out of sync with the rest of the book it took me much by surprise to find it amid all of the semiotic knots, invented paradoxes, and ranting that constituted the rest. But if they had left it at that, who would have read it? Would anyone be bothered enough to remember the names of the authors decades later, and rant about them? Hmm... that makes me wonder if there might be a reason that their grasp of "Strategies, Positions, and Career Trajectories" was so much better than their grasp of the philosophical concepts they tried to upend.
---
Ok... I'm editing this after cooling off a bit. Maybe I am being a touch too harsh. After all, I am no sociologist and I am not well versed in the intellectual atmosphere of the time of Laboratory Life's writing. Maybe they were being very serious and charitable from a certain point of view. Also, I did appreciate their comment that Laboratory Life might be seen as a confirmation of a Popperian view of science, insofar as they detail how much effort goes into disproving others in the actual functioning of science.
---
Some books are written to piss people off. Mission accomplished! Not so much because it is threatening in its iconoclasm and challenging of a sacred mythology (which, no doubt, is how all critics of this polemic masquerading as research are dismissed by those who swallow this tripe). Rather, I can stick to the pretty standard line that the argument being made is sloppy, utterly relativistic (despite attempts to evade that label), and obnoxiously proud of itself for seeing what all the other "sheep" can't. Yuck.
What is true about the insistence the authors have regarding the construction of facts is not particularly profound, even if I don't dispute much of what they say regarding the nature of generating knowledge. All human understanding of any reality is by proxy, has to be translated into symbols to attempt agreement between subjective agents, and is subject to reevaluation via persuasion, which is always through social interactions amid a messy web of underappreciated factors. Sure. It does not follow, though, that because our symbols are necessarily proxy that there is no referent or that there are not more effective ways to check the shared subjective experiences of humans in a systematic way against each other to refine knowledge of the referent. And for all their aped objectivity (of course, they can't call their attempts at objectivity "objectivity," because that's what they are criticizing, so they put it in the sociologists terms and say they are resisting "going native"), the authors make an argument by using a method (what they call ethnography I'll for what it is: investigative journalism) that makes such use of equivocation and confusion of terms (except the ones they make such a show of carefully "analyzing") that one wonders if the book is just a marvelous and self-conscious troll on the methods of anthropology rather than a serious effort to understand the sociology of research institute culture. Alas, it ain't so.
The reason, though, that I haven't left this little dollop of postmodern snark only one star is that there is actually one segment of the book that does a decent job of, well, actual anthropology/sociology. This is the description of the "Strategies, Positions, and Career Trajectories" of academic science. The "cycles of credit" and the dynamics of scientists career paths provided a pretty accurate (from my experience) and illuminating addition to the stock explanations usually given to explain why career scientists and technicians do what they do. It was so shockingly out of sync with the rest of the book it took me much by surprise to find it amid all of the semiotic knots, invented paradoxes, and ranting that constituted the rest. But if they had left it at that, who would have read it? Would anyone be bothered enough to remember the names of the authors decades later, and rant about them? Hmm... that makes me wonder if there might be a reason that their grasp of "Strategies, Positions, and Career Trajectories" was so much better than their grasp of the philosophical concepts they tried to upend.
---
Ok... I'm editing this after cooling off a bit. Maybe I am being a touch too harsh. After all, I am no sociologist and I am not well versed in the intellectual atmosphere of the time of Laboratory Life's writing. Maybe they were being very serious and charitable from a certain point of view. Also, I did appreciate their comment that Laboratory Life might be seen as a confirmation of a Popperian view of science, insofar as they detail how much effort goes into disproving others in the actual functioning of science.
May 27, 2025
This is an anthropological meditation on the day-to-day experience of working in the lab sciences. Latour observes scientists at work and provides observations, summaries of existing literature, and his own theories about the way that the process of doing science shapes the construction of our current body of scientific knowledge.
Maybe I was fooled by the title and my own interest in epistemology, but I thought this book was a bit lighter on philosophical background than I was hoping for. Instead, it's a lot more ethnographic, and so most of it centers around observations and theories that stem from those observations. This is not a bad thing, but I think it made the book feel more contrived than I wanted it to be, especially given its density.
I'd still recommend this book with an interest in scientific process and the incentive schemes that drive the research industrial complex.
Maybe I was fooled by the title and my own interest in epistemology, but I thought this book was a bit lighter on philosophical background than I was hoping for. Instead, it's a lot more ethnographic, and so most of it centers around observations and theories that stem from those observations. This is not a bad thing, but I think it made the book feel more contrived than I wanted it to be, especially given its density.
I'd still recommend this book with an interest in scientific process and the incentive schemes that drive the research industrial complex.
September 3, 2017
I personally enjoyed this book - Bruno Latour definitely provided a fresh perspective by importing an anthropological outlook to the "laboratory environment". This book is based on Latour's 2 year research in one biology laboratory, so it does not necessary apply to all scientific disciplines, nor the entire discipline of science - It is a study of one "tribe" of scientists based on their practices in daily life.
Scientific research is an integral part of our society, yet there is an inevitable gap between the insider and outsider of the scientific disciplines. We need to collectively come up with ways to bridge this gap - and I think Latour started this process so that non-scientits can make a first step to try to understand science. A lot of the methodologies and processes expressed in this book is still at its infancy, however, thought provoking. Looking for more books like this!
Scientific research is an integral part of our society, yet there is an inevitable gap between the insider and outsider of the scientific disciplines. We need to collectively come up with ways to bridge this gap - and I think Latour started this process so that non-scientits can make a first step to try to understand science. A lot of the methodologies and processes expressed in this book is still at its infancy, however, thought provoking. Looking for more books like this!
February 7, 2021
bardzo ciekawa analiza konstruowania faktów naukowych zarówno dla wszystkich zaciekawionych światem nauki, jak i dla osób pracujących w laboratoriach, które zastanawiały się kiedyś dlaczego tak bardzo oddzielamy kwestie socjalne od technicznych i nie uwzględniamy nas - nieidealnych eksperymentatorów, którzy mają różne emocje, które na to konstruowanie faktów wpływają i sprawiają, że inaczej je analizujemy. natomiast, co sami autorzy zauważyli w posłowiu do drugiego wydania (pozwolę sobie zacytować) "nie podjęli się zbadania powiązań między konstruowaniem faktów naukowych, hierarchicznymi relacjami wyzysku w nauce oraz podziałami klasowymi w społeczeństwie, jako całości", a szkoda, bo brakowało mi tego.
June 13, 2023
I am very happy to have read this at the end of my grad school experience. We read excerpts from some Latour in a philosophy of technology course my first semester and i never got around to reading this in full. It was almost revelatory to read this description of observing scientific research after just having done basically the same 2 year stint accidentally doing the same thing. My research experience was fun and interesting on an object level, but I found myself struggling with similar questions to the ones that the authors eloquently frame here. Very convincing account in their methodology and the way they position their inquiry on a raft above a swirling sea of uncertainty.
March 19, 2025
As a mathematician, I can still relate to many of the ideas in this book. It's an eye-opening introduction to the so-called anthropology and/or sociology of science, where the authors show that there's much more to science than actual research. As such, science becomes shaped by humans and all their flaws, finally being shaped into a product of the society. It's challenging and there's much to disagree with, but a reader cannot deny the authors' careful examination of lab life, as well as their daring arguments and conclusions. I would even argue that it's because of their intriguing and original conclusions this is a worthy read.
March 19, 2019
The description of the normal activities in the laboratory is rich, although biased by their (recognized) ignorance of biology and physics.
When we read the interpretation we can only see an idealist speech that tries to make the TRH a relative fact and totally dependent of social (discursive, above all) circumstances. Although they mention their objective was not to attack the "scientific truth", that is the result. They seem not to realize that the social generation of the TRH does not invalidate the truth about the fact.
(Sorry, my English is not quite well)
When we read the interpretation we can only see an idealist speech that tries to make the TRH a relative fact and totally dependent of social (discursive, above all) circumstances. Although they mention their objective was not to attack the "scientific truth", that is the result. They seem not to realize that the social generation of the TRH does not invalidate the truth about the fact.
(Sorry, my English is not quite well)
September 11, 2019
hard to read and trul process, but a wealth of knowledge here on the construction of (scientific) knowledge, focused on its anthropological aspects. found the idea of recording scientific observations and the methods of producing knowledge as literary inscription to be fascinating and useful, enraptured by the overarching theme of science being formulated through the decisions and circumstances of the scientists.
June 10, 2017
Como nos outros livros, Latour, à primeira impressão, tem uma forma de escrever que parece não ter muito sentido. Mas avançando um pouco mais, tudo passa a se encaixar. Para quem trabalha no meio científico, você começa a ver que as conclusões de Latour são realmente muito próximas do que é visto, mas ignoramos ou não refletimos.
January 21, 2022
It is a very intriguing and surely original ethnography for the time it was first published. But the structure of the book did not convince me in some way. I join other critiques that pointed out the way too long explanations on TRH function, leaving behind other aspects such as a more in-deep insight of the informants/the workers of the laboratory.
Read
March 2, 2022First, I love that every book I read now is for class. However, this book completely opened my eyes to a new perspective on what scientific fact means, and presented a fascinating answer to the ever-present question "What is science?". I absolutely would read this book again (for real, not just desperately half-reading in a week).
Read
November 10, 2024Donośna książka, będąca olśnieniem w zakresie tłumaczenia procesów naukowych i konstruowania faktów naukowych, a także mechaniki kariery naukowca.
Przy czym, niestety, sucha jak wiór, jest to wyzwanie czytelnicze. Nie to że ma jakoś szczególnie trudny język (choć to też), ale ta bezosobowa narracja jest niezwykle męcząca.
Przy czym, niestety, sucha jak wiór, jest to wyzwanie czytelnicze. Nie to że ma jakoś szczególnie trudny język (choć to też), ale ta bezosobowa narracja jest niezwykle męcząca.
May 29, 2023
This is one the best books on the sociology but also philosophy of science. It should be read by anyone pursuing a scientific field at the beginning of their journey, in the middle, and at the end. It humbles all of us invested in scientific progress.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews