Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour (1947–2022) was a French sociologist and philosopher of science whose work demolishes the boundary between the 'social' and the 'natural' by treating scientific facts as achievements produced by heterogeneous networks of humans and non-humans. His most influential contribution, actor-network theory (ANT), reframes scientific knowledge not as the discovery of pre-existing reality but as the stabilization of associations within a network of instruments, institutions, and inscriptions. Where philosophy of science traditionally asks whether a theory is true, Latour asks what assemblage of forces had to hold together for the theory to become indisputable.

Latour is often dismissed as a relativist by philosophers who have not read him carefully. The deeper provocation is not that all facts are constructed, but that the distinction between 'constructed' and 'discovered' is itself a construction — and one that serves particular disciplinary interests.