ABSTRACT
In fields of science studies, practitioners associated with what came to be called Actor Network Theory, whose best-known advocate has been Bruno Latour, have often focused their attention on what moves to and from sites of knowledge production. The project of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge was to explore the local social values, such as gentlemanly status, that determined how the validity of knowledge claims were decided. Treating science as a subset of culture, however, runs the risk of not specifying what people thought was particular about the practices or claims of different kinds of knowledge. Even in an age of post-truth politics that includes vicious and superstitious attacks on scientific knowledge, natural reality continues to do its work, whether we attend to it or not. Scientific ideas and practices are meant to examine important aspects of the real world and to stand up to scrutiny, but simply stating a proposition gives it neither veracity nor mobility.
