Bruno Latour's Collective Construction; From Object-Subject Dichotomy to the Metaphysics of Negotiation

Even though Bruno Latour is called constructivist, but he severely criticizes social constructivism. He believes that social constructivism and its opposed approach, i.e. naive realism, are going on wrong way; both admit subject-object dichotomy and that’s why they can’t get rid of some tenacious philosophical problems, such as skepticism and relativism. Latour through actant-network metaphysics, considers the relations of actants in another way, he talks about them symmetrically and believes that their relation is based on ‘negotiation’. In this paper we argue firstly that though he relinquishes social constructivism and common realism, it doesn’t mean that he is not constructivist and realist anymore; Latour wants to defend a kind of realistic realism or constructivist realism which is not based on subject-object division. Second we’ll show how Latour’s approach does not become trapped in the hole of those philosophical problems.