I found threads running throughout Latour’s essay that I can use in my final paper. I’ll be looking at the rhetoric of science and the disconnect between scientists and the public caused by language. At the beginning of chapter four Latour discusses the asymmetry of anthropology and how to end it. This asymmetry is a problem because he would like to use anthropology to describe the world. However it’s inadequate to compare moderns and premoderns.

Here is the difference, for Bachelard and his disciples, between history and the history of sciences. History may be symmetrical, but that hardly matters, because it never deals with real science; the history of science, on the other hand, must never be symmetrical, because it deals with science and its utmost duty is to make the epistemological break more complete. (p. 92)

     Symmetry will be restored (or “stored” in the first place) when we can confront “the true knowledge to which we adhere totally” (p. 92).

     A science is only sanctioned when it can tear itself away from all contexts (versus ethnosciences that are open to study). However, it is interesting to note that even these sciences which are thought to be incontrovertible are as constructed as anything else in our world. “The only pure myth is the idea of a science devoid of all myth” (qtd Serres, p. 93). I think most of the disconnect between science and the public comes from the differences in vocabulary and how language is used. We all speak in the first person and most other texts are written this way. They are personal. Scientific research and writing is supposed to transcend the researchers and authors. The knowledge “discovered” is the property of everyone and should be available to everyone so scientists have extracted themselves from their work using the passive voice. While this is an important tenet of science, it makes it much harder for the public to relate to. As Jay L. Lemke puts in it Talking Science: Language, Learning and Values (Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1990) “These are subtle features of scientific style. Their cumulative effect very often is to project science as a simple description of the way the world is, rather than as a human social activity, an effort to make sense of the world” (p. 131).