Bruno Latour & Steve Woolgar - Laboratory Life ... - Pedro P. Ferreira

above is the more plausible. It might, for example, be argued that the reading of the utteranceas a complaint is more consistent with other available evidence than is it's reading asadmiration. It could thus be said that Hoyle's comments were made in the aftermath of theaward of the Nobel Prize for the pulsar discovery; that this resurrected Hoyle's dormantbitterness about his previous dealings with the Cambridge group; and that this is consistentwith the interpretation of Hoyle making a complaint.4 Of necessity, however, arguments forthe consistency of one particular reading with other evidence depend, in some complex way,on readings of other utterances made by proponents of the argument. If asked to justify these"auxiliary" readings, proponents would be forced either to invoke yet further readings or toreturn to the original utterance for justification. In either case, requests for justification cannever, in principle, be exhausted. In practice, of course, even persistent challengers yield theirground and a reading is produced. In other words, a particular reading is made for practicalpurposes at hand. The point here, however, is that in principle any alternative can bequestioned. The fact that many observers would regard the reading of complaint as moreplausible than that of admiration is largely irrelevant. Alternative readings are always possibleand any one reading can always be undermined or faulted.By extending this argument to the observer's use of any observation, rather than just anutterance, we can provide the following provisional formulation of a major theme of ourdiscussion. The observer has to base his analysis on shifting ground. He is faced with the taskof producing an ordered version of observations and utterances when each of his readings ofobservations and utterances can be counter-balanced with an alternative. In principle, then, thetask of producing an incorrigible version of the actions and behaviour of the subjects of hisstudy is hopeless. Nevertheless, we know that observers regularly produce such orderedversions for consumption by others. His production of order must therefore be done "forpractical purposes," which means that he proceeds by evading or ignoring difficulties of((36))principle.5 If this is the case, then it becomes important to understand how observers routinelyignore the philosophical problem of the constant availability of alternative descriptions andreadings. In other words, one reaction to the recognition of these fundamental problems is toinvestigate the methods and procedures by which observers produce ordered versions of theutterances and observations which they have accumulated. The focus of investigation fromthis point of view is the production of order.It is not difficult to realise that the work of scientists may well involve similar problems ofprocedure. It became clear in the study of pulsar research, for example, that participants weredivided over the correct interpretation of reports of the discovery made by one of the principalinvestigators at Cambridge (Woolgar, 1978). Some claimed that these reports demonstrated