Latour reading

It is commendable that Latour not only confronts the questionable objectivity of science but also HOW said objectivity has become questionable: "'How have we come to doubt that we are able to know objectively, to the point of seeing as proofs of skepticism and relativism the obvious features that allow truth conditions to be met?' I am turning the tables here..." (20). To agree with Sari, science cannot possibly deliver absolute fact. Facts are changing entities. Indeed it seems only natural that facts, that science, that evolution itself is not linear but instead shifting, for human beings (the discoverers of such facts) are also consistently changing. Latour lists the reasons why we do not always err: "we have time...we are equipped...we are many...we have institutions" (15). I would say that it is for these same reasons we DO err. Time is moving; we are equipped to adapt to new answers, new questions; institutions are vast networks of different sorts of agencies all discovering different things at once or challenging old ideas.

Revisiting history is a wise idea. Like Chiefly Feasts, an exhibit that presents facts and then quickly reworks them can be hard to stomach. As Aaron mentioned, there exists a history of knowledge about the world - not the world itself. Logic is not just the understanding of facts; it, too, is made up of ideology, of ideas and affirmations that eventually became facts. This seems like an existential crisis at its core but museum exhibits like the horse display prove that this need not be troubling. We ought to grow with our changes and accept that objects, explanations, even something like gravity have histories.