TOWARDS AN EPISTEMOLOGY LESSER THAN “SCIENTIFIC” AND LARGER THAN “SOCIAL”

David Antolínez Uribe

Even though the last fifty years science and technology studies (STS) have allowed us to overcome the mystified image of “Science” and to get a better grasp of how the sciences relate to other cultural practices, the epistemological foundations and compromises of social scientists have remained obscure. Bruno Latour, first trained as a philosopher before serving as an honoris causa sociologist of science, might help us elucidate this question. Navigating through his extensive corpus, this essay discusses the rifts between Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and both structuralist sociology and critical theory, stressing the political and epistemological shortcomings of the latter. Then, we shall assess two proposals advanced by Latourianism – understood as the unsystematic, yet encompassing summary of Latour’s work of semiotics, ANT and metaphysics in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME). The first proposal is a quantification of sociology through digital methods. The second one is a humanistic alternative attentive to the thought processes enabled by artisan writing practices. Rather than seeking a definitive solution to the epistemological conundrum, we wish to insist on the irresolute parallelism between these two Latourian contributions to the constant reinvention of the social sciences.