WORK
Pandora's Hope
Latour's 1999 collection of essays on the reality of science, the agency of non-humans, and the crisis of realism after the science wars. The book that most systematically defended ANT's non-reductive realism against the charge of social constructionism.
Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Harvard University Press, 1999) collects Latour's major essays on the philosophical status of ANT's realism, written during the height of the 'science wars' of the 1990s. The book defends the position that scientific knowledge is genuinely about reality — not merely social construction — while insisting that the access to reality is mediated by heterogeneous networks of humans, instruments, institutions, and texts that cannot be reduced to either the 'social' or the 'natural' side of the modern constitution. For the AI moment, the book's analysis of technical mediation is particularly important: the essay 'On Technical Mediation' traces how tools transform the actors that use them, providing the philosophical foundation for treating Claude as a mediator rather than an intermediary.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book was written in the aftermath of the Sokal hoax and the broader 'science wars' that pitted scientific realists against scholars