The Powers of Fac Similes: a Turing Test on Science and Literature

Bruno Latour (1)

1 médialab - médialab (Sciences Po)

The shift from first to second empiricism, requires a new way of handling the empiricism of 'things' instead of the empiricism of 'objects'. To acquire the proper literary resources to do so, it's useful to turn toward the great American Richard Powers and lift out of its novels some of the tool to present again the connections between characters and technical or scientific entities. But the task is even more interesting when those resources are then used to read again a classic of scientific literature, in this case Alan Turing famous article from the 50s where he imagines his famous test. By comparing those two texts, one explicitly literary and the other implicitly so, a common vocabulary might be emerging for realism.

Domains: Sociology

Bruno Latour. The Powers of Fac Similes: a Turing Test on Science and Literature. Burn Stephen J, Dempsey Peter. Intersections Essays on Richard Powers, Dalkey Archive Press, pp.263-292, 2008. ⟨hal-00972982⟩