Name: Laboratory life
ISBN: 9780691028323

Laboratory life

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. "The pioneering 'laboratory study' in the sociology of scientific knowledge.... The first and, deservedly, the most influential book-length account of day-to-day work in a single laboratory setting."-- ISIS. "Laboratory Life succeeds and will continue to succeed, and to win friends and allies, because it contains good, persuasive ideas, such as the analyses of modalities and of splitting. These ideas have been generated by excellent social scientists. All the rest is so much window undressing."-- H. M. Collins, Isis.

What Hacker News says

sdbrownNov 2024

Are you referring to Bruno Latour or the author of the post? If you're referring to Latour, I would strongly urge you to read "Laboratory Life", which is [as] clear and easy to read today as it was when I first encountered it nearly 20 years ago.

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iansowinskiSep 2022

"Laboratory life" by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar

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GlenchFeb 2018

For research supporting this mode of working, see Bruno Latour's "Laboratory Life":

https://www.amazon.com/Laboratory-Life-Construction-Scientif...

and Ed Hutchins' "Cognition in the Wild":

https://www.amazon.com/Cognition-Wild-Press-Edwin-Hutchins/d...

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cdavidMar 2011

First, it is Lacan, not Latan. Incorrectly spelling author names is not well seen in academia :) One thing that must be said is that not all authors attacked by Sokal are at the same level: some deserved it, and even for a given person, there may be a lot of different quality in their work.

As for understanding where they are coming from: I cannot speak for Lacan (who certainly said stupid things, but who hasn't), but Bruno Latour has done some fascinating anthropological work on science. Reading "Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts" changed my vision of science. Contrary to what Bricmont claimed in one of his article about the affair (French title: "La vraie signification de l'affaire Sokal"), Latour has never claimed to my knowledge that science was just a social construct, but rather that the scientist activity cannot be thought independently of its social environment. When Bricmont says in the same article that "Comment peut-on soutenir sérieusement qu'il n'y aucune raison empirique de croire que le sang circule, que la Terre tourne..." (my quick and rough translation: could one really claim that there is no empirical ground for blood circulation or Earth rotation), that's disingenuous.

But what bothers me the most in the whole affair is that for people who claim defending science and the scientific method, they prefered the polemic, uncontrolled manner rather than an actual experiment to prove their point. That's rather ironic.

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carlobFeb 2013

It's interesting they've started this médialab in Science Po, which is (as the name implies) a social sciences university [0] in Paris [1].

Looking at the team [2] the name of Bruno Latour as a director seems a bit out of place. After his controversial views on the social construction of science [3] I find it astonishing that he is put at the head of the department that is in charge of bridging the world of the social scientists with that of the quantitative methods and hard sciences.

[1] Grande école actually.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sciences_Po

[2] http://www.medialab.sciences-po.fr/en/team/

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour#Laboratory_Life

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