Answers to Latour

1. Latour’s throw-away explanations are both weak and strong:
   a. they (i.e. a set of throw-away explanations) are weak cause-and-effect explanations to partly explain results seen in the story; he simply says that there is not just "the" deductive theory from which everything should be derived,
   b. by exposing the politics of these explanations one should render it impossible to evaluate the scientific process or let someone find the one responsible determinant in order to make rational decisions the next time a similar process is at stake. The point here is that Latour doesn’t agree that there is just the perfect explanation for every phenomenon. The result of scientific research is not necessarily the best one you can get, it’s just the one that fitted into the whole setting and convinced as many people as were needed to be convinced. Clinging to "the" explanation just draws a completely wrong picture of what is really happening in natural science.
2. Of course, there is no value per se to Latour’s aspired "originality" in writing. Your text can be inventively written and still contain nonsense. The point here is just that he condemns the aim of conventional writing to find "the" meta-language to talk about natural sciences in order to put social sciences above natural sciences. By trying to invent a meta-language which is so abstract that no one can tell if you actually said anything the whole sense of sociology goes astray. Following Latour your objective ought to be showing that sociology is already part of the natural science in the making process and should not be regarded as a new discipline yet to develop. The main focus here is: Use social science methods, but don’t forget what you are talking about! The objects you are analysing are still alive (scientists and also artifacts), "so treat them as such". Don’t make it sound like you are talking about some history.
3. Following his own philosophy Latour actually shouldn’t think that his position is any truer than others. There’s no point in discussing how to write a text, but in order to exemplify what other social scientists usually do he shows how not to write a text.
4. Latour does not actually confuse explanation with representation. He is rather not fond of promoting the big explanation behind the scenes, but explaining the scenes themselves by describing - or finding a fitting representation for the moment - what is happening in front of them, i.e. in the making process of natural science. When you try to look at the example he took from the bible: The women are trying to look behind the scenes, the angel merely states what has happened and thus the women - and the reader - maybe or maybe not - get the point. Of course, there still is the point to discuss if the biblical style of writing should be an alternative to write sociological texts or not, but on the other hand, wouldn’t that be something really unseen?
5. The main focus of Latour is, at least as I understood his argumentation, not to overinterpret certain "big explanations" like capitalism for being responsible for everything, because the big explanation itself could not have been established if the whole environment wouldn’t have supported it. In this argumentation the environment would become the cause again and the former explanation would become the effect. But this is exactly what should not be possible once you find "the" explanation. In terms of ontology there surely is something going on in the world, but on the other hand, this something is rather not ONE big thing like the ratio behind the scenes, but rather a complex, dynamic set of smaller things working in combination.

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