A Well-Articulated Primatology - Bruno Latour

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

376 Cha7ter Seventeen Farmers do not give the sheep a chance, whereas Thelma's setups are unusual because she actively counteracts the farmer's customs, allowing the sheep to establish hierarchies and social relations wherein they stand a slightly better chance of being socially complex. This case also nicely shows that propositions are in no way confined to language. The forms of life, in their entirety, in which farmers interact with sheep by selecting thern for their docility and sheepishness, will not allow them, i.e. the farmers, to let tlrcm, i.e. the sheep, Ûe tolked about in any other r,r'ay. Speech is not an exact propert,v of the human phonic apparatus, of the human inner subjectivity, of the human consciousness. It is more a property of the whole setting in which very heterogeneous elements have been gathered and connected: barns, enclosures, grass flelds, and r.t'ool in the farmers' fonn of life; barns, enclosures, grass fields, libraries, genes, papers, and ethological rneetings in Thelma's form of life. Whoever enters the farmer's setting lvill be tnade to sdl that boring sheep are boring sheep; whoever enters Thelma's quasi-laboratory will be made to say that sheep too ntav be "charismatic animals," in spite of the distance between primates and runrinantsl In practice, it is rrelt'r.thc case that ne utter statements by n-rerely using the resource of language and then only afterward check to see if there exists a correspondir-rg thing that will verify or falsif.v our utterance. No one has ever begurr bv sal,ing the "cat is on the mat" and thert turned to the proverbial cat to see whether or not it is sitting grar-rdly on the proverbial mat. Our involvement in what we say is at once much more intinnte and much morc indircct than that of the traditional picture: we are allowed to say new things when we enter well-articulated settings. Articulation between propositions is much deeper than speech. We speak because the propositions of the rn'orld are themselves articulated, not the other way around. More exactly, \r'e dre allowed to speak interestitrgh'b1'r+'hat we ollov,to speak interestirrgli'tDespret 1996). The notion of articulated propositions establishes entirely different relations between knower and known than the traditional view, but it captr.rres much rnore precisely the rich repertoire of scientific practice and is much better adapted to the reflexive task requested by the organizers' brief. A simple diagram might clarify the shift from one shibboleth to the other. The traditional touchstone tries to distinguish scientific statements about primates from rronscientific statements. The first t1,pe is said to corrcspond to a state of affairs "out there," while the other will be elaborated ll usir.rg only the resources provided at one time by the available stock of presuppositions, clichés, rnyths, a prioris, or paradigms, without the benetrt of anvthing "out there." To be sure, this touchstone provides a very Lr.tlul clinrension for sorting out dictionary science. But it does not can-
A \Uell-A rticulated P rimato I o gy, ,,i F z !:l F .* non ô PROPOSITIO\S anlculate rnartrcu lulc ific A n I B scientific C D Fig. .1. The classical distinction between scientifrc and nonscientific statements i\ n()t
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A Well-Articulated Primatology - Bruno Latour

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