A Well-Articulated Primatology - Bruno Latour

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$Factures/fractures: de la notion de réseau à celle d ... - Bruno Latour$

3 7 2 Chapter Seventeen How can we explain this action of making something else visible? Either it is made, or it is visible, but how can it be made visible? How can we replace the passive resultant of the model we have now discarded by an action that seems to have contradictory features? To be sure, we could use the traditional vocabulary of fabrication and construction, but this might entail artificiality, invention, and even deception. If we say that facts are fabricated or constructed, we clearly imply, in the common parlance at least, that they have some innate vice that makes them forever unable to "fly." It seems that we have no way-in modern Western language at least flullien 1995)-to entertain the possibility of saying at once, in the same breath, fabricated fhus autonomous. We are always asked to choose "Is it real?" or, on the contrary, "ls it fabricated?" even though, in practice, we keep saying things like: "l tried to give my sheep the opportunity to behave like chimps." One way out of this difficulty might be to talk abovt propositions.a A Iittle bit of philosophy is necessary at this luncture, and I apologize to my colleagues for this little excursus, but it is crucial for allowing me, in the next section, to frnd another way of discriminating between good and bad science. As everyone will admit, the goal is worth a little pain! Propositions should not be limited to statements made of words uttered by a human "aoout" a natural thing. As the name indicates, they are offers made by an entity to relate to another under a certain perspective. Propositions are not limited to the human domain of language and consciousness. For instance, Uexkùll's canonical tick can be considered as a proposition and as a certain way of inhabiting the world by eliciting in its multiplicity a tiny number of relevant traits. To use another philosophical word, one could say that the tick "offers an interpretation of the world." But so does a fleld site with its research assistants on mopeds, its focus sample method, its archives, its portable computers, etc. The field site inhabits the world in a certain way and establishes certain types of connections that will modify the others. The passage of any hot-blooded animal will make the tick tick; the appearance of a new animal in the f,eld site will make all the assistants suddenly attentive. A statement says in words what a thing is. A proposition designates a certain way of loading an entity into another by making the second attentive to the Êrst, and by making both of them diverge from their usual path, their usual interpretation. A simple figure might help to grasp the abstract difference between a statement and a proposition. A statement pertains to the human language and is utterly separated bv an unbridgeable gap from the things it talks about. There is always an abvss between words and world, human and objects. This gap may be bridged, however, by the very mysterious act of establishing a correspon-
A We Il - Arti cul ate d P rim ato I ogy 373 STATEMENT language world human I s"n l - l I conespondance \J l n a t u r e PROPOSITION diffe rence s Fig. 3. The difference between a statement in language about a reference, on the one hand. and a proposition, on the other, lies in the situation of the tw-o concepts: in the latter the difference between word and world is no longer pertinent. dence between words and world so as to provide the statement with a truth value. If, and only if, the cat is on the mat will the sentence "the cat is on the mat" be verifled. But since between the dimensionless sentence "the cat is on the mat" and a three-dimensional black furry cat on the mat there is no possible resemblance, the correspondence is always tentative and the gap between the two may never be fllled, no matter how many hundreds of thick tomes the philosophers of language have thrown into it. The word "dog" does not bark any more than the word "cat" purrs. Because of their infinite distance n'ith things-distance created artiflcially, for political reasons, by the erasure of all the intermediarv steps of data constructions-statements are aln'ar-s running the risk of not corresponding to the world in an exact way, thr-rs conder.nning the huntan Iocutor to life imprisonment, locked away in the cell of language. Skepticism directly descends from this implausible definition of truth as correspondence between words and the world. Propositions, on the other hand, do not pertain to language but to the world. This world, however, does not resemble a nature made of things foreign to human consciousness that has been made to stand like an enemy camp opposite the human camp. It is made of interpretations, or propositions, sent fo others so that they might behave differently. In between propositions there is thus not one gap but man,v tlifferences. Meaning is not obtained by this very implausible correspondence between language and oblects which have been made totally foreign to one another
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A Well-Articulated Primatology - Bruno Latour

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