Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Bruno Latour

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This is a nice two-minute journey through the thought of Bruno Latour, a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist who argued that scientific facts are the result of social construction in a network of scientific dialogue, instrumentation and institutions. "Day-to-day research — what he termed science in the making — appeared not so much as a stepwise progression toward rational truth as a disorderly mass of stray observations, inconclusive results and fledgling explanations" ... which is a pretty good description of my own work. Latour was also instrumental in the development of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) whereby "a scientific instrument, a scrap of paper, a photograph, a bacterial culture — could acquire enormous power because of the complicated network of other items, known as actors, that were mobilized around it."

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
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Last Updated: Dec 21, 2024 10:05 p.m.

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