The Habitual Vice of Epistemology

In his recent polemic on #ClimateChange, Bruno Latour writes

But these rational sorts are just as caught up as the others in the tangles of disinformation. They do not see that it is useless to be indignant that people believe in alternative facts, when they themselves live in an alternative world, a world in which climate mutation occurs, while it does not in the world of their opponents.

It is not a matter of learning how to repair cognitive deficiencies, but rather of how to live in the same world, share the same culture, face up to the same stakes, perceive a landscape that can be explored in concert. Here we find the habitual vice of epistemology, which consists in attributing to intellectual deficits something that is quite simply a deficit in shared practice. Down to Earth, p25

Bernard Harcourt adds

A true fact cannot stand on its own, autonomously, independent of social relations, of who tells it, or finds it, or proves it—and where and how it is established. There may well be facticity, but in order for facts to stick, they have to properly form part of social life. And when our shared social life has been scarred by betrayal and exploitation, it will no longer be fertile ground for the trust necessary to maintain truths.

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Bernard E. Harcourt, Bruno Latour on Truth and Praxis (Critique and Praxis 13/13, 16 December 2018)

Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Polity Press, 2018).