ABSTRACT
In the opening pages of his book Pandora’s Hope, Bruno Latour tells the story of a conversation he had once with a respected psychologist. This conversation occurred while Latour was attending a cross-disciplinary conference in Brazil which aimed to promote more productive interactions between scientists and science studies scholars. As Latour recounts, the psychologist approached him one evening, nervously clutching “a crumbled piece of paper on which he had scribbled a few key words.”1 Taking a deep breath, the psychologist asked just a single question of Latour, whose name he had no doubt recognized-or misrecognized, as the case may be-as belonging to a school of thought which argues that scientic knowledge is socially constructed and thus contingent upon a range of human-produced variables including vocabularies, technical instruments, epistemologies, and the like. To this perceived representative of the postmodern turn-in his mind perhaps, to the living embodiment of postmodern theorizing about knowledge-the psychologist asked, “Do you believe in reality?”2
