A Critique Of Latour and Woolgar’s Argument For The Social Construction Of Scientific Facts In Laboratory Life: The Construction Of Scientific Facts (1986)

A Critique Of Latour and Woolgar’s Argument For The Social Construction Of Scientific Facts In Laboratory Life: The Construction Of Scientific Facts (1986)

BAKUWA JAPHET

University of Malawi
Utrecht University
Stellenbosch University’s Stellenbosch University Centre for Research on Evaluation

КЛЮЧЕВЫЕ СЛОВА: ARGUMENT, SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION, LABORATORY, SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE, INCOMPATIBLE, ETHNOGRAPHIC, EXOGENOUS, PHENOMENOTECHNIQUE

АННОТАЦИЯ:
This paper is an attempt to critique Laboratory Life by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar. This is done by: presenting a summary of the arguments in the text; contextualising the text (and the authors) in the scholarship of the time; and assessing whether the authors have succeeded in carrying out the overall purpose of the book. Suffice to say that much as they argue for the social construction of scientific facts, their account of the social construction of facts is probably unconvincing to those researchers who still conceive the social (or human affairs) and the scientific as two incompatible worlds.