Um sermão fi losófi co travestido de conhecimento social: A etnografi a da ciência de Bruno Latour

Abstract

The article offers a reflection on the criticism of normative epistemology carried out by Bruno Latour in his studies of the scientific community, particularly in Laboratory Life and Science in action, highlighting two internal difficulties in this criticism, namely: 1) in the ethnography of science developed by Latour, unlike promised to the reader, the normative approach does not give way to the empirical approach, since the characterization of the "tribe of scientists" offered there remains clear and unequivocally evaluative; 2) in this ethnography, we have, concurrently, the explicit methodological recourse to empiricism as a general logic of validation of trans-contextual scope, and the defense of the hypothesis that the validation of scientific findings can be exhaustively explained in terms of contextual variables, things that are logically incompatible. Thus, Latour has indeed failed in his attempt, by means of ethnographic research, to overcome the distinction formulated by normative epistemology between empirical explanation and rational justification of human knowledge.