[_delirium]

I don't see Latour as a particularly bad choice for bridging those worlds. One of his main points is paying close empirical attention to both how scientists actually work, and how non-human things work. Unlike a lot of humanities theorists of science, he actually went into laboratories and wrote down what seem like pretty honest accounts of what he found there. He's fairly controversial among pure social constructionists partly as a result. For example, he had a dispute with David Bloor some years ago [1] over Latour's insistence on including nonhuman objects in his explanation of how science works (rather than treating science as a purely social process). More recently, he's been attacking the tendency, born of the legacy of critical theory, to treat intellectual activity as a series of de-maskings of something the scholar will always find to be "naive" [2].

I mean, the last thing we should want, as scientists, is to have blind faith in a quasi-religious, idealized view of how science works, rather than empirically investigating how it actually works. Plus he seems pretty interested lately in tying in some philosophical ideas with quantitative network-analysis methods: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/123-WHOLE-PAR...

[1] Bloor's attack on Latour, http://reclus.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/bloor-anti-latour...., and a reply, http://www.melissa.ens-cachan.fr/IMG/pdf/latour_-_reponse_a_...

[2] http://www.pathguy.com/Latour.pdf

[mtraven]

I agree, Latour has always been about bridging those worlds, in his own unique way.

Here's his reply to those who misunderstand him as somehow denying reality: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/70-DO-YOU-BEL...

And, next week he is delivering the Gifford Lectures, which should be fun. There is a webcast: http://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2013/gifford-080213

[mtraven]

This probably isn't the place to have a debate on Latour, but let me just say that it is possible to read him unsympathetically (as Sokal does) or sympathetically, to try to understand the viewpoint he is trying to get across. I've found it worthwhile to do the latter, but YMMV.

[_delirium]

I more or less agree. I used to have a more negative view, but I realized that what you get from Sokal et al is a fairly inaccurate and biased reading.

Actually, while I thought the Sokal hoax itself was brilliant, I'm in retrospect quite disappointed by his follow-up book. It reads like a bit of a lazy hatchet-job by someone trying to put together an "attack" piece without having read the stuff he's attacking, and certainly not trying to read it sympathetically.

[carlob]

For the critique from the other end of the social constructionism spectrum, I strongly suggest you read the chapter devoted to him in Sokal and Bricmont's Impostures intellectuelles (I think it was translated as Fashionable nonsense).

It's a little hard to find in print, even in libraries. But I'm sure one could source a digital copy from a less reputable source.