This Philosophy & Science Club
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Session 5: Scientific Facts
Reading: Bruno Latour & Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life, chs. 4–6
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The fifth session will conclude its reading of Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life, focusing on the final three chapters and on how a scientific claim becomes stabilised as an undisputed fact. The discussion will move from the microprocessing of facts — the gradual stripping away of modal qualifiers until a statement appears without author, context, or uncertainty — to the idea that laboratory work reduces competing possibilities until a fact becomes too costly to revise, and finally to the credit cycle, in which scientists invest time, equipment, and papers to accumulate credit for further research.