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Bruno Latour’s pragmatic realism: an

ontological inquiry
a
Francisco J. Salinas
a
Escuela de Sociología, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago,
Chile
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 Global Discourse, 2014
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2014.992597

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Bruno Latour’s pragmatic realism: an ontological inquiry
Francisco J. Salinas*

Escuela de Sociología, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile

This article examines Bruno Latour’s defense of a more realistic approach toward
science and the relations between humans and objects. It concentrates on the main
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roles that pragmatism plays in Latour’s ontology and it proposes understanding his
perspective toward reality as ‘pragmatic realism’. On this basis, the article explores
Latour’s relationship with pragmatic realism in four ways. Firstly, it presents the
central claims of pragmatic realism expressed in the works of William James and
Hillary Putnam. Secondly, it analyzes Latour’s concept of ‘circulating reference’ as a
concrete approach to relating language and objects in a sense that is compatible with
pragmatic realism. Thirdly, it explores the connection between circulating reference
and Latour’s broadest ontological claims. Finally, the article concludes arguing that
‘pragmatic realism’ is a formula that may also be used to describe Latour’s own
realistic ontology.
Keywords: Bruno Latour; pragmatic realism; circulating reference; ontology; actor-
network theory

Latour is a complex author to comprehend. His writings are full of ironic sentences,
ontological assumptions and references to a great variety of intellectual traditions. We
think that the difficulties involved in the study of this author are partly related to the fact
that he is not simply a sociologist or even an anthropologist of science. As Harman (2009,
5) has rightly argued, Latour ‘is a key figure in metaphysics’ too. That is to say, his
particular approach toward science as an assemblage between humans and nonhumans is
held together within a philosophical construct (but not a philosophical system). Although
many commentators have contributed to reconstructing the philosophical grounds of
Latour’s thought, there has been little consideration for what we think is a key underlying
element of his work: a type of philosophical realism.
For instance, Høstaker (2005) has argued for a strong connection between Latour’s
work and Greimas & Courtés’ semiotics, while Harman (2009) has identified him as
the first ‘secular occasionalist’. On the other hand, Ward (1994) has approvingly
examined Latour’s alliance with postmodernism as a direct challenge to realist epis-
temologies. Even more, some scholars paint Latour as a ‘social constructivist’ due to
the priority he grants to the production of knowledge by the practices of scientific
communities (Olivé 2000; McArthur 2003), which would be a reason why he is unable
to accept a purely scientific logic of discovery (Bunge 1998). What all these authors
seem to share is the idea that Latour’s approach to the study of science aims to distance
itself from realism.

*Email: [email protected]

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

 2 F.J. Salinas

Within Latour’s extensive body of work, the book Pandora’s Hope. Essays on the
Reality of Science Studies offers interesting evidence to suggest that these interpretations
are misplaced.
Right at the beginning of this book, the French author declares that the science studies
undertaken by him and his colleagues seek to add realism to science (Latour 1999, 2)
instead of going against it (as some epistemologists have argued). Latour attempts to
establish a more realistic realism than actual realism in a scenario where many scholars
think that his approach is a variety of social constructivism. In this kind of ‘constructi-
vism’, society determines what knowledge actually is and ought to be. Therefore, what I
seek to understand is how science studies supposedly add realism to science. By exploring
this, the objective of this article is to comprehend the kind of philosophical arrangements
that underlie Latour’s key propositions about reality.
The central claims in this article are (1) that Latour’s ontological approach can be
understood as a case of what Putnam (1987) named ‘pragmatic realism’ and (2) that this
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assertion can be supported by looking at ‘circulating reference’ as a key concept within

Latour’s schema of reality. This is because for the author, circulating references are the
expression of the movement of translating knowledge within the frameworks of a unique
and mobile relational ontology. From a scientific perspective approach, circulating refer-
ences are the way in which we can mobilize the forms necessary to connect language,
objects, scientists and common sense in a unique ontological unity. Nevertheless, this
ontological unity can be expressed within the ‘felicity conditions’ of other modes of
existence (Latour 2013a); this is absolutely coherent with pragmatic realism’s statement
that science is some sort of continuation of common sense by other means (Torreti 2007,
82). Furthermore, it will be shown that this sensibility is grounded in William James’
ambulatory approach toward reality.
To carry out these objectives, the article is organized as follows: (1) it starts with a
presentation of the principal ontological arguments established by the pragmatic realism
approach, specifically by presenting some of William James and Hillary Putnam’s con-
tributions on the topic; (2) on the basis of the ethnographic observations made by Latour
in his book Pandora’s Hope, I attempt to define and explain the ontological operations of
the concept of ‘circulating reference’; (3) the relationship between circulating reference
and what Latour defines as reality is explored and (4) by recapping Sections I, II and III, it
is examined the extent to which the pragmatic realism approach also applies to the
realistic ontology defended by Latour.

I. What is ‘pragmatic realism’?

Recently, some scholars have illustrated the importance of pragmatism in the new direc-
tions that the social sciences are taking. For instance, it has been said that Rorty’s
rediscovery of the bounding between action and knowledge within this tradition has
revitalized the discussions about philosophy of the social sciences (Baert 2005). Also,
the importance of the ‘turn to practice’ has been emphasized in the new studies of social
knowledge in the making (Camic, Gross, and Lamont 2011). These contributions are most
likely rooted in Han Joas’ (1993) Pragmatism and Social Theory, where the German
sociologist shows the importance of North American pragmatism even though it was
silenced for decades by Talcott Parsons’ famous convergence theory.1
What these authors fundamentally do is highlight the importance of pragmatism as a
high-performing theory for doing empirical sociological research. This is true, but it is not
enough. My proposition about pragmatism is that inside this tradition, there reside key
 Global Discourse 3

elements about reality’s ultimate constitution: therefore, its relevance is not only practical
but also ontological.
As a starting point, let us go back to an event held at the London School of Economics
(LSE) in 2011. The discussion was about Bruno Latour’s thought and the criticisms made
by Graham Harman in his then-forthcoming Prince of Networks. Bruno Latour and
Metaphysics. The key speakers were Latour and Harman themselves.
Regarding pragmatism, I will focus on a particular part of this debate. When speaking
about the philosophical grounds of Latour’s work, Harman states that Latour has to either
choose a substantial limit where the researcher’s black box opening ends or he has to
accept that the definition of what things are is defined and constructed by people’s
practical uses. Here, Latour, Harman, and Erdélyi (2011, 61) tell Harman that his paradox
is due to a misunderstanding of what pragmatism is about:

[…] pragmatism is not about practice, pragmatism is about pragmata, about objects. It is an
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experimentally-based philosophy. And in that sense I think here you are not employing your
usual generosity with pragmatism because it is precisely the notion of ‘experimental’ that is
very important. (italics in the original)

Therefore, according to Latour, pragmatism is a philosophy interested in the relationship

between objects and experience: a perspective based on the intrinsic affinity between
objects and human consciousness. The point is that pragmatism is not just a stubborn
philosophy about the practical ways of human world-making but a set of ontological
arguments. Pragmatists have something to say not only about how to study reality, but
also about what reality is. By examining some of the central claims in the works of
William James and Hillary Putnam, I will proceed to frame the philosophical perspective
known as ‘pragmatic realism’.2
A sketch of James’ ontological approach can be found in his book The Meaning of
Truth, published in 1909. Specifically, this issue is addressed in a subsection titled ‘A
word more about truth’. In this article, the North American philosopher tries to move
beyond all those perspectives that separate the ‘object’ and the ‘idea’ as opposites on
either side of an unfathomable gap. James thinks that discontinuous approaches toward
experience are limited, as they try to re-relate the object–idea separation by means of a
salto mortale. A salto mortale would be a leaping experience that the subject’s idea must
have in order to reach the object and transcend its own being (James 1987, 900).
Confronting this ‘saltatory’ epistemology, James establishes that his own theory of
knowledge is instead ‘ambulatory’. He explains it as follows: ‘my view describes know-
ing as it exists concretely while the other view only describes its results abstractly taken’
(James 1987, 898).
For James, knowledge is a factor of constant mobilization inside the plane of
concreteness; for him, even what seems highly abstract is no more than some kind of
relation within this same space of cognitive mobilization. Both ‘ideas’ and ‘objects’ are
different elements of the same general tissue and texture of reality acting as a normative
and actual whole:

The idea is thus, when functionally considered, an instrument for enabling us the better to
have to do with the object and to act about it. But it and the object are both of them bits of the
general sheet and tissue of reality at large; and when we say that the idea leads us towards the
object, that only means that it carries us forward through intervening tracts of that reality into
the object’s closer neighborhood, into the midst of its associates at least, be these its physical
neighbors, or be they its logical congeners only […] My thesis is that the knowing here is
 4 F.J. Salinas

made by the ambulation through the intervening experiences. (James 1987, 889, italics in the
original)

The image of an object’s neighborhood visited by the idea can help clarify James’ realism.
Let us imagine that the idea lives in a different neighborhood than the object and wants to
call upon it. How can the idea make it toward the object? The idea will have to travel
somehow, for instance, taking public transport, a taxi or a car. On its way to the object the
idea may get lost, so it will need to ask pedestrians for directions or look at traffic signs,
trying to trace its way to where the object resides. It is on its way toward the object where
experiences intervene and show the complexity of the ontology where our knowledge
mobilizes. Human knowledge is knowledge only as it travels toward reality.
Knowledge happens in between. Without the expression of the materiality where
consciousness travels, both idea and object would be isolated. This is also expressed in
James’ (1950, 336, footnote 12; capitals in the original) Principles of Psychology when
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establishing that ‘we may fairly write the Universe in either way, thus: ATOMS-produ-
cing-consciousness; or CONSCIOUSNESS-produced-by-atoms’. What matters to him is
the world’s total truth. He does not care about the direction of this flux, only about the
mobilization of experience itself.
Along these lines, Hilary Putnam asked at the Carus Lectures in December of 1985 if
anything remained to be said about realism. He declared it possible that William James
might have said something new to us, and, also, that he might have had the right
philosophical program. For Putnam (1987, 17), what James was trying to do was some-
thing unfinished and important, and therefore, there is still something new to say about
reality.
This is consistent with Putnam’s (1982) criticism of analytical philosophers such as
Bertrand Russell and George Edward Moore for believing in the existence of a ‘ready-
made world’ affected by a correspondence problem with language. For Putnam (1982,
164), the world is not ‘ready-made’ and there is no reason for thinking that someone
should aim for an absolute version of the world. This may explain why Putnam declares
in his Carus Lectures that there is something new to say about reality even though James
might have the right theoretical program. Reality is not closed as long as there are humans
that experience it; therefore, this could be a plausible reason for believing that James’
program cannot be finished with his own body of work. The aim for a general tissue of
reality includes all the possibilities of experience in the world: past, present and future.
But it is not just that present experience is an inevitable point missing in James’
writings. He also lacked a suitable name for defining his own program toward reality. In
contrast to the analytical philosophers’ approach – which he calls metaphysical realism –
Putnam (1987, 17, italics in the original) gives the name internal realism or pragmatic
realism to the ontological tradition he feels part of: ‘Internal realism is, at bottom, just the
insistence that realism is not incompatible with conceptual relativity. One can be both a
realist and a conceptual relativist’.3
This statement implies that even if there is a unique reality, the concepts at hand for
describing and apprehending this reality are multiple. Many semantics for describing
reality coexist, and, therefore, reality would be undermined if not considered this way.
This is consistent with what has been thought of as the ‘anti-reductionist’ character of
Putnam’s philosophy (Boyd 2013). The multiple ways of describing, acting and having
experience in reality are what build up what reality is.
Then, following Putnam, the program of pragmatic realism is that which assures the
ontological continuum of experience while accepting diverse ways of it being realized. This
 Global Discourse 5

means that for a pragmatic realist, experience should follow its way throughout language,
common sense, science, materiality and things while simultaneously accepting that this
reality and its concepts can be used in many ways. Consequently, we can express the contents
of the world in a pluralistic manner: ‘the notions of object and existence, have a multitude of
different uses rather than one absolute “meaning”’ (Putnam 1987, 19, italics in the original).
This is the kind of conceptual relativism defended within the pragmatic tradition and explains
why Putnam feels free to say that realism has many faces rather than just one.
At this point, is important to note that pragmatic realism is also the name Andrew
Pickering (1995, 183) uses to define the ontological position used to describe science’s
‘mangle’. The relevance lies in the fact that Pickering’s program for studying science has
been compared to Latour’s for their shared interest in scientific practice and its symmetric
relationship with entangled objects (Jensen 2003). However, Pickering only focuses on
the practical side of pragmatism at the detriment of following the fluxes of pragmata.
When saying that pragmatic realism is ‘agnostic’ about the questions of correspondence
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(Pickering 1995, 183, 185), Pickering cannot see why Putnam argues for the current
relevance of James’ program. Pickering does not realize that for a pragmatic realist,
knowledge and reality cannot be seen as two different realms, nor does he realize that
their existence is traced in a continuous movement of translation. In terms of ontology,
this puts his position closer to Harry Collins’ (1981) relativist program than to that of
Latour, who can sustain this by following what he calls ‘circulating reference’.
This article endeavors to prove that pragmatic realism is a notion that is compatible
with the ontological arrangements present in Latour’s work. As opposed to Pickering,
Latour seems to be defending pragmatic realism in a stronger ontological sense. To
achieve this goal, in what it follows, I outline the way in which ‘circulating reference’,
a key concept within Latour’s thought, is presented in his writings. The analysis of this
concept will let us discern its place within Latour’s broader ontological approach.

II. ‘Circulating reference’ as a key to understanding reality in Latour

The objective of this section is to present Latour’s notion of circulating reference as a
prior step to comprehending his standpoint on reality. Here, I focus on Pandora’s Hope, a
book that can be read as an apology for Latour’s ontological realism, especially if the
reader pays attention to the book’s subtitle: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. This
attempt to portray himself as a realist instead of a constructivist starts in the book’s first
chapter, wherein the author establishes a reflective inquiry based on a question that a
psychologist asks him: ‘Do you believe in reality?’, Latour argues that reality is some-
thing that exists and therefore cannot be brought out as a matter of belief. The arguments
that sustain this position are developed in Chapter 2 of the book, which is dedicated to the
study of what Latour denominates circulating reference.
Scholars have noted the importance of circulating reference as a concept. For instance,
Lewowicz (2003) has stated that the notion of circulating reference is one of the most
innovative and fundamental of Latour’s contributions, but does not offer an argument to
back up this insight. It is Harman (2009, 73) who offers an argument for its importance,
saying that ‘Latour’s phrase “circulating reference” captures the whole of his metaphysical
position, which replaces the tragic gap between subject and object with a single plane of
countless dueling actors’. Using this argument, it seems that this concept expresses a
symmetric continuity between subject and object as parts of a same ‘flatland’ (Latour
2005b, 172) where every entity has the same potential as others to exist and mobilize
allies toward the definition of reality.
 6 F.J. Salinas

So, the big question is: how do we ‘flatten’ the relations between the subject and the
object? In terms of language and reality, Latour (1999, 24) asks it in the following way:
‘How do we pack the world into words?’ In his attempt to respond to this question, Latour
leaves the comforts of his office in Paris and travels to Brazil to do ethnographic field-
work on a group of scientists (botanists and pedologists) who are on the edge of the
Amazon trying to find out if the forest is advancing toward the savannah or if precisely
the opposite is happening. Using this case, Latour tries to uncover the practical way in
which scientists construct a discourse with scientific value, this is, words that actually
refer to the empirical phenomena of their interest.
How can scientists domesticate the world’s complexity and translate it into words? A
representation of the world in signs has to arrive in the hands of the specialist for this to be
possible: ‘Yes, scientists master the world, but only if the world comes to them in the form
of two-dimensional, superposable, combinable inscriptions. It has always been the same
story, ever since Thales stood at the foot of the Pyramids’ (Latour 1999, 29). Maps,
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technological artifacts, notes, numbers, color codes and so on are part of the inscription
objects used by scientists to describe the world.4
An analysis of inscriptions is what can be found in Latour’s ethnographic work. Let us
focus on one part of his observations, when he describes the practical ways in which
pedologists examine a soil sampling.5 Latour describes the procedures that the specialists
of this profession actually employ, especially focusing on how they use an artifact called a
‘pedocomparator’ and work hard to transform the qualitatively complex soil into a
laboratory inscription that can be measured and discussed in terms of scientific statements.
How does this work? As seen in Figure 1, geometrically, a ‘pedocomparator’ is a
square-shaped instrument filled with little cubes that form a sort of Cartesian plane. Its
main characteristics are (1) it can be buried at different depths; (2) the little cardboard
cubes let the phenomena (soil samples) manifest themselves and (3) the artifact can be
transformed into a suitcase so that these samples can be carried to the laboratory, a place
where scientists can work more comfortably than in the middle of the heat of the jungle.
Latour says that pedologists can pack empirical data in their pedocomparators in a
very neat way. The little cardboard cubes can be filled with soil samples at different
depths, each of them characterized by a different tonality of color coded with a particular
number. When they consider (by their discipline’s standards) that they have collected
enough samples, the scientists carefully lock all the suitcases used in their fieldwork and
transport them in a Jeep to laboratories in more urbanized areas. Once in the laboratory,
scientists start feeling that they are masters of the phenomena: they have plucked little soil

Figure 1. Geometric form of the pedocomparator.

 Global Discourse 7

samples from the earth and with these representatives at hand they become confident
enough to venture statements about what is happening at the border between the savannah
and the forest. In the laboratory, when opening their pedocomparators, scientists are able
to take a two-dimensional approach toward the soil. With some preparations, they can
draw and attach this form as a figure within an academic paper. The rest of the numbers,
data, hypothesis, estimates and impressions will serve as the text supporting and accom-
panying these images.
What happened? When did the soil resting on the edges of the savannah and the forest
transform itself into a discourse in a paper? Where is the gap? Here is where Latour’s
wink at pragmatism arises: for him, language and reality operate within the same
ontological plane where scientists – with the help of invariant forms – can let material
things translate into different supports, without letting them become something radically
different than what they were before. In the preceding case, this invariant form is
geometrical; it is the square shape that travels without change within all the material
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transformations that the reference has suffered. So, what is a reference? According to
Latour (1999, 58):

It seems that reference is not simply the act of pointing or a way of keeping, on the outside,
some material guarantee for the truth of a statement; rather it is our way of keeping something
constant through a series of transformations. Knowledge does not reflect a real external world
that it resembles via mimesis, but rather a real interior world, the coherence and continuity of
which it helps to ensure. (italics in the original)

This ‘real internal world’ clearly refers to internal or pragmatic realism. For Latour, the
constant factor in all the material versions of the chain of reference is what permits the
continuity of what Latour calls circulating reference. There is no gigantic gap between
language and things, at least in the work of the scientists; both poles are mediated by
numerous material signs that are traceable as a whole. Scientists tend to add to their
laboratories the different entities that arise at every step of this chain because they know
these are helpful as a valuable proof of having done the necessary actions to attain the
results found in their papers. According to Latour, this lets them go back and forth to the
different parts of the chain; in a hypothetical scenario, they can recur to any of these steps
as long as the circuit of mediators is sustained. This has a concrete consequence: for
Latour, a circulating reference appeals to a truth value only as long as the enrollment of all
the added mediators that are needed for this navigation can be maintained. Any interrup-
tion may express the fragility of truth. In Latour’s (1999, 76) words:

For this network to begin to lie – for it to cease to refer – it is sufficient to interrupt its
expansion at either end, to stop providing for it, to suspend its funding, or to break it at any
other point. If Sandoval’s jeep swerves, […] scattering the little packages of earth, the whole
expedition will have to be repeated. (italics in the original)

From Latour’s ethnography, we have learned a way of comprehending scientific reference

as a circulating reference that lets knowledge mobilize throughout things under the
condition that the summed-up elements that form the circuit are still in alliance, letting
the circulation continue. For this to be possible, the institution of science must be kept
functional, that is, with all its experts working hard to keep the conduits of this flux alive.
Ultimately, the main issues in the process that let the circulating reference perform can
be characterized as follows: (1) it starts as a process of transformation of things into
inscriptions; (2) in this process, there is a flux that continuously transforms things into
 8 F.J. Salinas

other things; (3) there is an invariable form working within the whole process that allows
the same reference to circulate and (4) this whole process is supposedly reversible, but this
reversibility is not granted and can be lost at any time.
For the objectives of this article, the importance of this way of thinking about
knowledge lies in its characterization as a movement on the limits of a unique ontological
plane of circulation. In what follows, I explore how this perspective on knowledge can be
articulated within the particular way in which Latour thinks of reality.

III. Latour’s notion of reality

We know that for Latour, science provides the circulating references that travel within
reality. But I still have not resolved what reality is for this author. This section outlines an
argument that addresses this issue.
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First of all, we have to come back to the basis underlying Latour’s approach, the
actor-network theory, an intellectual movement interested in the role of agency within
networks. As Michel Callon (1989, 93) states: ‘The actor network is reducible neither to
an actor alone nor to a network […] An actor network is simultaneously an actor whose
activity is networking heterogeneous elements and a network that is able to redefine and
transform what is made of’. As part of this movement, Latour clearly accepts this co-
constitutional definition of the relationship between actor and network (see, for instance,
Latour 2005b).
This is relevant to us because of its consequences: Latour’s ontological approach is
highly relational. The basis for this is that in Latour’s thought – except before his project
on ‘Modes of existence’6 – networks with actors inside them are all that exist (Blok and
Jensen 2011, 49). Something with fewer associations has lesser reality than more articu-
lated entities, while something that does not have allies is something whose reality has
been negated by the network as a whole; it is insignificant because it lacks a relational
ontological status. This explains why, in the case of the pedologists, it is so important for
the scientists to preserve all the entities where the circulating reference has traveled: they
are the allies that assure that their work has produced knowledge with scientific value and
that their assertions are not just inventions without reality for the scientific community.
This also shows the fragility intrinsic to the relation’s logic: as they are not originally
attached, linked elements can easily lose their relations because these are not essential but
acquired (Cordero forthcoming). For this reason, in Latour’s ontological scheme, reality is
something that can be ‘added to’ or ‘subtracted from’ the particular entities.
A relational comprehension of reality necessarily implies that reality transforms itself
within the ties that entities may or may not have with each other. More specifically, it is
the resistance in trials of strength between things that makes something existent or not:

[R]eality as the latin word res indicates, is what resists. What does it resist? Trials of strength.
If, in a given situation, no dissenter is able to modify the shape of a new object, then that’s it,
it is reality, at least for as long as the trials of strength are not modified. (Latour 1987, 93,
italics in the original)

This implies that in Latour’s ontology, the resistance of some relations within a given
assemblage is what lets every existent entity confront the constant trials it has to
experience. It is an onto-political matter: elements in existence confront and form alliances
with each other in order to keep being real. As Harman (2009, 228) has assessed, this may
 Global Discourse 9

lead to the problem of reducing entities to the effects upon others, leaving them with
nothing apart.
This given, we have to move on to the next question about Latour’s scheme: what is
the role of circulating references inside reality’s big picture?
Circulating references are what let scientific values with truth claims travel throughout
society. This is a quest for validating the scientific praxis between colleagues and toward
lay people in general. This phenomenon shows how difficult it is to relate the material
world with statements in language; by displaying it as a process, it can be seen that
enrolling nonhumans into a human world is something that requires a lot of work. Science
can add reality to society and let the newly added elements travel within its limits;
scientists’ procedures let the circulation of knowledge flow throughout material transfor-
mations by means of standardization. Science helps reality’s stabilization by standardizing
a common and predictable way in which some elements can mobilize inside society. By
means of circulating references, scientific praxis can limit some possibilities and nudge
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some actions toward stabilization.

But this is just one aspect of the matter. This is inasmuch as for Latour, scientific
reference is just one mode of existence among others that are realized within society. For
contemporary humans, science has expanded and summed up elements beyond what some
think it ought to; it is a phenomenon that can be read as a kind of imperialistic tendency
which attempts to become a totality such as that of political empires aimed at territorial
expansion (see Koutsoukis 2013). Indeed, science has an important role in present society,
and many of the circuits that move inside its reticulum are labeled by its procedures, but it
is important to note that they are not the only circuits of importance inside our society.
The cosmological arrangement that Latour wants to make establishes the limitations of
science as an ontology whose elements are as valid as those of law, economics, politics,
religion and so on. However, a meta-ontological image of them as a package can only be
thought of philosophically: Latour’s statement is that this is possible only insomuch as we
accept and translate the codes of this multiplicity of languages into the language of every
mode of existence. For Latour (2013a, 94), between these distinct modes, continuities and
discontinuities reside. They are different but none of them is better than the others.
Latour’s principle of symmetry between humans and nonhumans expands in his later
work to symmetry between different modes of existence. For example, in religious speech,
there is a message of faith that can be present even it has been transformed and translated
(Latour 2013b, 18), and in legal speech, instead of circulating references, we have to
confront experience within the use of legal terms (Latour 2010, 233).
All of these modes are as valid as science. Science is important but not necessarily
better than any of them: the procedure and enunciation forms used by scientists are a
particular way of describing the world that can, nevertheless, also be described in terms
belonging to common sense or other nonscientific specialties. In other words, a circulating
reference is something that can continue its fluxes in the frameworks of heterogeneous
networks that function according to their own particular rules. As asserted in Section IV,
this kind of sensibility connects this author with the Anglo-Saxon pragmatic tradition.
These different modes of existence – whose number is a priori undetermined, even
though in one of his latest books Latour explores 15 of them – seem to be knotted together
by the relations that emerge between them, a historically situated cosmological pact that in
We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Latour named ‘Constitution’ (with a capital C). In
Latour’s (1993, 15) words, a Constitution is what ‘defines humans and nonhumans, their
properties and their relations, their abilities and their groupings’. This cosmological
arrangement changes historically, depending on the values of the epoch: for moderns,
 10 F.J. Salinas

there is a pact between a nature ‘out there’, a mind ‘in there’, the social ‘down there’ and a
God ‘up there’ (Latour 1999, 14). The knotting is assembled in the relations between
these elements and is what that lets them settle in a specific way. Other arrangements are
possible, for example, in Pandora’s Hope, Latour conceives of an a-modern pact, where
things have a parliament and it is possible to think of mix-ups of hybridization that
moderns cannot conceive of. For this to be possible, this knot has to be untangled at the
same time as the elements of this Constitution rearrange in a different way.
This also has effects on a microscopic level: on what things are. For Latour, things are
themselves knotted in relations to other things, so things do not have an ontic reality for
themselves. Therefore, things are what they are as a result of the actions taken by other
entities that align with them. Everything has two faces: the objects of science can be seen
as ‘ready-made’ or ‘in the making’ (Latour 1987, 4) and things in general can be seen as
‘facts’ or as ‘artifacts’ (Latour and Woolgar 1986, 174 et seq.). For Latour, it is all up to
the observer’s focus: are we interested in the process of how things ‘are made’ or do we
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want to treat them as established substances? When we observe the first, we see how a
multiplicity of entities tries to establish an assemblage through trials of strength; when we
observe the latter, things show themselves as being actor-networks that attain their ontic
position, thanks to their knotting with other entities that coexist inside and outside them.
For instance, in Pandora’s Hope, Latour imagines a projector whose existence as a unity
is considered obvious by everyone until it breaks. Then, its black box has to be opened in
order to study the multiplicity of entities it holds (Latour 1999, 183 et seq.).
Summing up, it can be said the following with respect to Latour’s notion of reality: (1)
it is produced in the trials of strength between relational entities; (2) philosophically,
different modes of existence (not just a scientific approach to reality) assemble within a
cosmological arrangement knotted together by their own relations and (3) the constitution
of things can be seen as either ‘in the making’ or ‘ready-made’. In what it follows, I will
show some arguments for thinking that these three issues can be compatible with prag-
matic realism.

IV. Discussion: Latour as a pragmatic realist

Latour’s connections with pragmatic realism are expressed in at least the three following
elements of his work:

(1) For Latour existent objects are what resist trials of strength. James would be
sympathetic with such an ontological claim, as he thought that the concreteness of
things can resist man’s imagination (Kloppenberg 1996, 113). In this sense, reality
is not a construction of the subject but what results from the co-determination
between humans and objects. This is also consistent with Putnam’s thinking that
the world is not ‘ready-made’ (like the analytical philosopher’s world): therefore,
in his ontological approach, things can persist or collapse in the game of experi-
ence. Resistance is what nourishes pragmata as the pillar of reality.
(2) Latour thinks that science is just one mode of existence among others. As he tells
Harman in their debate at LSE, he has taken James’ ambulatory ontology of
experience as the tool for describing the truth conditions of science as a circulat-
ing reference: ‘it is the continuity of the trajectory of the production of proof
which is so interesting in James, which I took up and expanded a bit in my
industrial definition of truth conditions’ (Latour, Harman, and Erdélyi 2011, 65).
This ‘industrial definition of truth conditions’ appeals to the concept of circulating
 Global Discourse 11

reference and is seen by the author as a phenomenon rooted in James and then
further expanded upon. Latour’s expansion lies in his particular application of this
ontological approach, seeking to observe the mode in which scientific inscriptions
circulate. But, as we suggested in Section III, his expansion does not end here;
circulating references manifest themselves as part of a broader framework of
modes of existence. This is also observable in Putnam’s work, where realism
has many faces and, therefore, cannot be reduced to scientism. For all these
authors, reality is more than what the defenders of science claim it to be. This
sounds quite similar to Latour’s modes of existence, as these operate in a common
background that can be translated into the language of any mode. A scientific
approach toward the world is not better than other descriptions of it. Reality
manifests as the biblical sound of the spirit that lead every single person to hear
everyone else ‘speaking in his own language’ (Acts 2:6).
(3) Latour states that the constitution of things can be seen as either ‘ready-made’ or
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‘in the making’. Within James’ philosophy, this could be interpreted as two
aspects of the way idea and object approach each other inside the same plane of
experience (not as two different realms). Putnam would contribute to this when
declaring that realism and conceptual relativity are not contenders. Consequently,
from this approach, elements of reality can perform in different ways and have
many modes of expression. In Latour, James and Putnam, it seems that the world
is not a stable one: reality is a flux that can be comprehended in many ways and
whose elements have different kinds and levels of presentation.

Therefore, pragmatic realism tries to resolve the relationship between the continuity of
what it is and the differences that its modes of expression have within them. A defender of
this perspective will also argue that objects and ideas operate inside a common ontological
framework: the object–idea continuum in James is translated in Latour for a distinction
between what is in the making and what is ready-made within the same flux.This leaves
space for an ontic performativity across objects and ideas under the same ontological
experience that bridges the relationship between the two poles.
The proposition here is that Latour’s ontological approach can be better compre-
hended in light of Anglo-Saxon pragmatic realism. This does not mean that his enormous
body of work is focused upon it, nor that it is his unique philosophical expression. What
this statement reality implies is that his way of comprehending reality is consistent with
what pragmatic realism defends.
At this point, we can note the conclusions drawn by McArthur (2003) on the
limitations of Pickering’s pragmatic realism when he says that Pickering’s perspective is
undermined by many instances where the sciences appeal to traditional realism within
their integral practices (87). One can ask if this critique also applies to Latour’s pragmatic
realism. Our position is that it does not; in Latour’s approach, even traditional discourses
can be analyzed as statements that circulate within science’s communications. Pickering
reduces pragmatic realism to practical uses inside his mangle; Latour appeals to the
broader ontological sense of pragmatism.
Latour’s realism is heavily influenced by pragmatism: even dualities such as facts/
artifacts, blackboxing/opening the black box and ready-made/in the making reassemble
the continuities within a unique plane that pragmatists try to posit.7 The secret of
pragmata is being simultaneously thing and process: transportation through circulating
references and other hybrid circuits. Latour is a pragmatic realist in that he accepts
multiple languages and ontic performances while claiming a unique ontological plane.
 12 F.J. Salinas

In this sense, he claims that his realism is more ‘realistic’ than the language-world
adequatio defended by traditional philosophy of science. An analysis of science’s reality
cannot end in scientism if it wants to avoid reductionism; therefore, realism is what
appears when transcending this limit in a pragmatic and open manner.

Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Rodrigo Cordero, Tomás Ariztía and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful
comments on earlier versions of this article. I especially thank Eduardo Sabrovsky for guiding the
Master Thesis where many of the ideas here expressed have their roots.

Notes
1. As expressed in Parsons (1968), the convergence theory established that the main problems of
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the social sciences were those that were common to Pareto, Marshall, Durkheim and Weber.
The non-acknowledged traditions were condemned to silence for many decades.
2. Even though my argument is centered on James and Putnam, it is also important to acknowl-
edge that Dewey was another pragmatist that influenced Latour’s thought. As Noortje Marres
(2012) has said, Dewey gives us a practical approach toward the world and a political ontology
that recognizes that nature, technology and democracy are not opposed to each other. This is a
clear influence on Latour’s (2005a, 2004) more political work.
3. It is important at this point to state the confusion that Putnam’s realism has caused among his
pupils, followers and colleagues. Following in the footsteps of Carnap, in the 1960s, the early
Putnam thought there was a metaphysical realm independent of our language. Middle Putnam
(1980s) is the pragmatic realist that has been examined in this section. Present Putnam (1990s to
date) has become a critic of pragmatic realism; supported by a second-Wittgenstein kind of
thought, he has declared that pragmatic realism falls into the same kind of problems as
metaphysical realism. These turns in his thought have been the root of misunderstandings,
criticism and apologies with respect to his conception of reality. See Baghramian (2013) for a
debate between Putnam, his followers and his critics.
4. In this sense, Mialet (2012) has noted that the concept of inscription is central to Latour’s
thought and also specifies that this notion is grounded in the intellectual relationship that the
author had with François Dagoget, who thought that it was important to study formalism in
order to comprehend the thoughts that can be read on the surface of things. However, in
Laboratory Life, the author says that an inscription designates an operation that is more basic
than language and the concept has to be credited to Derrida (1977) (Latour and Woolgar 1986,
88, note 2).
5. At this point, it is important to clarify that pedology is a discipline focused on the study of soils,
by understanding its relationship to chemical, physical and biological factors within its
environment.
6. According to Latour, thinking from a ‘modes of existence’ point of view is what enables the
adding of qualitative data about the diverse and finite values that the moderns defend. This
would expand the possibilities of an ‘actor-network’ model, which is condemned to see
experience as a continuum without qualitative differentiations (Latour 2013a, 42).
7. This seems coherent with the way he has thought of the ontological turn nowadays in
discussion between scholars. This is a challenge to what Peter Sloterdijk thought as ‘monege-
ism’: ‘the discovery that there is one Earth, the unity and habitability of which remains exactly
as puzzling as at the beginning of the 19th century’ (Latour 2013c, 6).

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