Olivier Lallemant – Entry No. 3 (Latour)

Bruno Latour is one of the greatest Science Philosophers of our times. He wrote a lot about how we perceive Science and where his vision comes from. In the first chapter of The Pasteurization of France, Latour describes, and denounces the way Louis Pasteur’s researches are considered to be today. He writes that our vision of how hygiene became an undisputable norm in the modern medical society is wrong. The main argument of the beginning of The Pasteurization of France is the fact that the figure of the “Genuine Scientist”, who discovers an implement a revolution in Sciences, is misleading.

Actually, Latour starts his argument by using Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In his book, Tolstoy, wrote that “Great men” are not the ones who make History. On the Contrary, this is every single individual, every single person, who is leading History to its purpose. Latour writes that this is the same for Science. Science historians usually say that this or that scientist revolutionized Science by his researches, but the author disagrees with this point of view. He takes the example of Louis Pasteur, who implemented strict rules of hygiene in medical interventions, in order to lower the risk of death by infection and contamination. But Latour goes further than Tolstoy in his explanations. Indeed, he writes that if Pasteur was the only one to promote hygiene, his researches would have faced some problems of “diffusion”. Usually, Science analysts consider society as a “mechanism”, which does not need specific mediums to diffuse innovations. It just diffuses them by itself. Latour writes on the contrary that Pasteur needed several other scientists to promote his ideas; he needed allies to get his innovative researches accepted by everyone. That is why he writes that to diffuse an idea, we need to be “at least two”. If Pasteur’s peers would not have been here to transmit his ideas, they would have been ignored by the greatest number of people. On the other hand, his work made some skeptical scientists appears to counter his “revolution”, which was too uncertain for them. But his partisans did what was needed to get these ideas recognized. And this is exactly this idea of recognition that is decisive in this process. Because Science is based upon fact, and to get a fact recognized as true, you have to get the recognition of already recognized scientists. And that is the reason why good ideas need contradictors to finally be recognized. Because this is all a game of allies and enemies, and the more you are able to get allies in the first place, to more you are likely to win at last.

The second idea of Latour’s text is uncertainty and how it is decisive in the implementation of an innovation. By the phrase “There are more of us than we thought”, he says that we cannot master all the factors that can influence our activity, or good health in the case of Pasteurization. We cannot apprehend all humans, animals, trees, microbes, bacteria that exist in the world. That is the reason why Pasteur’s innovations were decisive in the advance of science, but this is also why it cannot be totally efficient. We cannot master every single thing that has an influence on what we consume, or what/who we interact with, because we don’t know them. On the other hand, this immensity that we cannot apprehend is also underpinning the fact that great discoveries do not come from only one scientist. Discoveries are made by the global progression of society. Hence we cannot explain discovering by punctual “revolutions”. It comes to explain an event by “time”. This is human progress that discovered Pasteurization, and Pasteur alone could have never discovered it only by himself. This is what Steven Johnson calls “the adjacent possible” in his recent book Where Good Ideas Come From. Innovations are coming from society, and this is a specific vision of society by a specific man, that creates the actual innovation. That is the reason why for innovations come from different scientists from different countries at the same time, even if they never worked together. The discovering of the Theory of Relativity by Henri Poincarré and Albert Einstein at the same time is a good example of it.