Jeremy Harding on the late #BrunoLatour @lrb on

"From the start, he saw the laboratory as a space with a history and a social context, rather than a hermetic capsule where scientific truth could bring itself into existence: ‘hard’ science was no different in the end from any other intellectual activity. Over and above the business of growing cell cultures and isolating molecules, ‘the main objective of their activity’, the lab workers told him, was the publication of scientific papers. Latour ploughed his way through these ‘inscriptions’ only to find that the ‘facts’ themselves were better described as ‘claims’, while the statements of fact were more like statements endowed with ‘fact-like status’."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n24/jeremy-harding/where-do-we-touch-down