Latour, Bruno (1947–)

The Power of Inscription Devices

Laboratory Life is based on fieldwork done by Latour in a laboratory of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California. In the book, [Page 445]Latour and Woolgar introduced the notion of inscription devices to designate laboratory apparatus or any configuration of apparatuses that enable the transformation of material substances into figures, diagrams, or recorded traces, which can be used by scientists to produce knowledge. The scientific production of knowledge is the action of putting something into a form. Scientists use all kinds of devices, including instruments, computers, and written documents, to put their objects of inquiry into scientific form, the most prominent of which is the peer-reviewed scientific article or letter. From the first, perhaps barely comprehensible, recorded traces produced in the laboratory to the final article, and then, perhaps, later to the inclusion into the accepted body of scientific knowledge, the scientific inscriptions undergo a huge change in epistemic modality, that is, the degree of possibility or necessity of some piece of knowledge. Whereas scientists typically express with due uncertainty their interpretations of the first inscriptions produced in the lab, much later inscriptions in the chain of scientific reference are phrased using a much higher commitment to the truth of the statement.

Laboratory Life also was a reflective exploration into the very idea of doing laboratory studies. Latour and Woolgar concluded that, really, the only difference between scientists and anthropologists of science is that they (scientists) have a laboratory. In other words, scientific inscription devices along with techniques for reducing the modalities of inscriptions are much more powerful tools of persuasion than the ones available for anthropologists and others wishing to study scientists at work. If one wishes to question scientific information, one has to disentangle and reinterpret all the inscriptions and all the inscription devices that constitute the information given.

Although Latour and Woolgar did not take their conclusion this far, the powerful inscription devices of science also introduce an asymmetry between scientists and laypeople. In public debates, scientists have at their disposal inscription devices that make scientific objects speak while the general public often has very few and highly unreliable inscriptions to refer to. Many contemporary issues, such as climate change, the depletion of the ozone layer, genetic modification, and technological risk, to a large extent are made possible by the inscription devices of science and technology.

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