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Comment by zamfi | Hacker News Reader

Huh. No one is forcing you to do this. You are 100% free to not give even the slightest mind to Bruno Latour—or any other philosopher’s—writing.

The point is only that it’s easy to dismiss most philosophy because it’s easy to take a common reading, interpret words in ways the author may not have intended, and make them into a contradiction or other ridiculousness—but in contrast it’s hard to do the work to understand the context in which the author is writing, what the author is responding to, and what the author actually is trying to say through those words.

It’s fine to take the easy road here, it’s just not going to teach you anything most of the time—and nor is it going to convince those who’ve done the hard part of anything.

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Wrong, what you are suggesting is the easy road, to treat reading Latour as a thought exercise about intentions and context. Fundamentally you are confusing some useful techniques - contextualization and intellectual empathy - with the critical assessment of philosophical and scientific works. You are also assume Latour isn't invalid like string theorists or even worse like Deepak Chopra and other intellectual charlatans.

Bad philosophy begets bad critical thinking skills, which then reproduces itself in readers who keep making bad arguments. So then it spreads and you get people who are well-read yet lack basic critical thinking ability, and even worse they cannot detect their own mistakes anymore. That's the reason why bad philosophy is especially harmful, because it works on a meta-level. Studying philosophy is not just a thought exercise rabbit hole, some literature (Latour) is actually just bad, and other philosophers have argued this!

You seem confused, I am not actually saying anything about whether Latour is bad or not, and I honestly don’t have an informed opinion there.

Latour may well be bad, but an argument saying so that just attacks a straw man of his work is unlikely to be very compelling.

Then it is you who are confused and lack the correct foundations for rational argument, a strawman is very different thing than contextualization, and in fact the latter is used by neoliberal professionals to relativize values making criticism impossible.

> a strawman is very different thing than contextualization

Yes, that was my point?

At the time I'm writing this, there are three similar replies that use an argument along the lines of "you can simply ignore Latour if you don't like his work". I'm just replying to the first comment.

Unfortunately this argument is not correct. Many, many, people have read Latour, and he has influenced a lot of thought. Ignoring Latour would imply that you'd have to ignore quite a few other people as well, and that is near impossible.

Ironically, it is Latour who writes about the connectedness of things in his "actor-network theory".

Even more ironically, Latour tried to improve mutual understanding in his "Inquiry Into Modes of Existence" project, but apparently it is not that easy.

It might be interesting to hear out the criticisms against Latour's way of reasoning, instead of dismissing it.

> It might be interesting to hear out the criticisms against Latour's way of reasoning, instead of dismissing it.

I’m not sure you read my post, it sounds like you just assumed its contents, which was not in fact about being free to ignore Latour, but about being free to critique him with or without an understanding of what he’s trying to say.

If you read it you’d know that of course I’d be happy to hear out the criticisms against Latour’s reasoning, but they’ll be much more powerful if they come with an understanding of what he’s trying to say in the first place.

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