Bruno Latour and the Secularization of Science

Many young dreamers who want to be modern up to the tips of their toes, and who think they have gotten rid of these barely imaginable old-fashioned ideas, are, without realizing it, mystics in search of a spiritual experience.

(Gauchet 2003, p. 311)

Several sociologists of science have mobilized secularization metaphors to describe developments in the study of science. Similar to how secularization refers to a decreasing status of religion and God as a transcendent factor in society, the secularization of science refers to an abandonment of Science as something "sacred" and Nature as transcendent. This article aims to explore these secularization metaphors, by arguing for a parallel between how sociologists and philosophers of religion differ and how similar disagreements between sociologists of science and the work of Bruno Latour exist, whose work should rather be linked with that of other philosophers, such as Michel Serres and Isabelle Stengers.

1. Introduction

In his book Governance of Science (2000), the sociologist Steve Fuller noted "the profound historical irony that sociology has been both sanctifier and secularizer of science" (Fuller 2000, p. 99). The fact that sociology contributed to the sanctification of science is found in its origins: the work of Auguste Comte. For Comte the major problem was the societal gap left after the French Revolution: if religion was no longer there to hold society together, what would step in its place? Comte's positivism "anointed the natural sciences the successors of the Roman Catholic Church as keepers of the key to the City of God on earth" (Fuller 2000, 99). For Comte, the secularization of society resulted in the sanctification of science.

However, recently a shift is taking place where "we are in the midst of a second phase of secularization—that of science itself" (Fuller 2000, p. 100). In Fuller's view, sociology secularizes science through means of demystification. This process of "secularizing science" entails depriving science from any transcendent or sacred position in society.¹ According to Fuller, this has been the main impetus in the 1970s of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), which aimed to analyze scientific practices as social practices, to be explained in a similar way as other social practices.

It is important to note that "secularization" in this narrative is used as a metaphor, derived from the sphere of religion and applied to science. The metaphor of secularization thus aims to highlight to how SSK is eroding the "sacred" and "transcendent" status of science, replacing it by a "secularized" view on science, with the connotation that it is more rational, grounded or empirical. The metaphor is thus mobilized, as we will see, as part of a rhetorical story in which traditional philosophy and sociology of science is dismissed as a naïve, pious yet blind admiration of science. SSK is portrayed as a disenchantment, freeing humanity from this idol of Science.

Fuller aspires to even more and exploits another dimension of this metaphor: even if individuals stop believing in the myth of sacred science, the latter nevertheless "continues to occupy a sacred space in modern democracies" (Fuller 2000, p. 101). Another metaphorical secularization is possible: besides the matter of a decrease of belief in the value of science, there is also the question of its political institutions. An increase in science skepticism is one thing, but that must not be too easily equated with an institutional secularization of science.

Inspired by Paul Feyerabend's earlier plea for "the separation of state and science" (Feyerabend 1978, p. 107), Fuller wants "to divest the state's funding of scientific research, while at the same time promoting public access to alternative research programs, each being allowed to find its own funding constituency" (Fuller 2000, p. 97). For Fuller, the institutional secularization of science has not happened yet, although there are some signs that we are heading in that way, such as the US Congress refusal to fund the Superconducting Supercollider in 1993. More recently, Fuller has characterized our current predicament of "post-truth" in these terms, where science and expertise are being secularized (see Fuller 2018). Fuller believes this process...