Still Bunk After All These Years

So here's an article from Quillette about "social constructionism" ��� in particular how postmodernists have applied the concept to the sciences, and how bad an idea it is. I was amused to see that one of the examples cited in the piece is Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's book Laboratory Life, because that book was one of the course readings in my introductory History of Science course at the University of Chicago. I even wrote a paper about it (on a typewriter, so no copy survives).

What I remember about the book was its thundering disingenuousness. The authors reduced the work of a biochemistry laboratory to nothing more than making measurements and writing papers, which got them funding to do more measuring and writing. I was struck by the fact that the concept of information simply never came up in Latour and Woolgar's analysis.

It's particularly odd since of course that is exactly how the two authors would describe their own work. They weren't hanging around someone's lab taking notes, then writing a book for which they were paid. If you asked Latour and Woolgar what they were doing, they'd answer that they were gaining, and communicating, an understanding of how science works ��� in short, they were producing information. Just like the subjects of their study!

Way back in 1985 I concluded that social constructionism was bunk, and nothing I've seen in the past thirty years has changed my mind about it. Glad to see contemporary commentators are catching up with 19-year-old me.

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