hardy+ response

I thought Bruno Latour’s “A Textbook Case Revisited – Knowledge as a Mode of Existence,” was, though a bit worrying, really interesting. I suppose I always took all scientific observations with a grain of salt—minding their ethereality and flexibility, but I never considered that all facts are only ideas. While scientific conclusions are tested and re-tested, they are formulated through a series of logical assumptions and conclusions. But if scientific conclusions are based on logic (which responds to findings) then I think it’s worth some time to question the idea of logic at all. Even the most accepted truths, such as gravity, are based on logic—on human inference and reasoning: the apple falls, so there is a force making it fall. But what made reasoning? Why is it correct? Have time and experience compacted our great progression of failures and successes into logic? into a platform from which we can reason out our circumstances, and so have a better chance at survival? I don’t know, Latour’s notion that we exist through our own knowledge of our existence, and that it too is ethereal and constantly changing, rattled me a bit. He asks how did a dog run and jump before man created an idea for the way he runs and jumps? I have no answer to that question, but I do have a higher level of skepticism about all this universe. Then again, if I am human, why should I care to exist through any means but my own human mind? Is there any other environment I can live in besides the one fabricated by human knowledge? How do I think without my brain? Maybe there is an Everything star sitting bigly in space eternal, waiting for the right time not to be discovered and added to human knowledge, but to infiltrate the other way ‘round.