Cherished beliefs were in the balance as two heavyweight philosophers squared up at HKU. Steve Cray took a ringside seat

IT WAS BILLED as the big match - a historic meeting of intellectual heavyweights who had hitherto managed to elude each other.

The long-awaited debate was to be between two famous academics with opposing views on crucial issues at stake in the famous 'science wars' - an often heated discussion on the relationship between social and natural science played out in academic journals over the last decade.

In one corner: Bruno Latour, 55, professor at the Centre de la Sociologie de l'Innovation, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Paris.

Professor Latour was trained first as a philosopher and then an anthropologist. After field studies in Africa and California he specialised in the analysis of scientists and engineers at work. His books include Laboratory Life - The Construction of Scientific Fact, Science in Action, and Pandora's Hope - Essays in the Reality of Science Studies.

In the other corner: Steve Fuller, 43, professor of sociology at the University of Warwick in England.

Professor Fuller is a renowned philosopher, historian and sociologist of science and founder of the study of social epistemology. His books include Science; Philosophy of Science and Its Discontents; Philosophy, Rhetoric and the End of Knowledge; and The Coming of Science and Technology Studies.

The venue: the University of Hong Kong (HKU) for the second Knowledge and Discourse Conference, organised jointly by the university's English and language centres. More than 200 participants from all over the world were gathered to attend this debate and a host of other lectures and seminars on a wide range of issues.

What made the meeting historic, said Dr Colin Barron, one of the conference organisers, was that European universities had been trying to arrange a match between the two philosophers for years, but had failed.

'People might even look back at this debate in 50 to 100 years or so and see the beginnings of the development of a new way of interpreting knowledge,' he said.

So it was with more than a casual air of intellectual anticipation that conference members and invited guests took their ring-side seats in an HKU lecture theatre.

There had already been an indication of how the match might go. Sparring had started a few days earlier with Professor Latour's keynote conference speech, Toward Public Experiments: the New Politics of Nature.

Western philosophy, he told that meeting, was based on false dualisms, distinctions between subject and object, fact and value. He preferred to think of things in the world as being 'states of affairs' comprising any number of relationships between humans and 'non-humans' - defined as all things not human rather than just nature and animals.

Philosophers and scientists tended to think of themselves as 'modern', that is to say living in an age in which they could differentiate between subjective thinking and empirical fact. Not so, he said. Empiricism was a politically charged concept intended to confuse matters by falsely distinguishing between minds and bodies, societies and nature, values and facts.

He proposed that the words 'fact' and 'value' be 'repackaged', with fact replaced by a hybrid of 'perplexity' and 'institution'. Value should be replaced by a mix of 'consultation' and 'hierarchy'. This, he said, more accurately reflected science and its relationship with the world. Scientists were 'perplexed' before 'consulting' on their findings to create new 'institutions' (formerly called facts), which were then 'hierarchised' according to their value in the world. He called this a technical democracy.

Professor Latour said the false 'modernist' position had produced an elitist culture that thought it was superior simply because it was able to differentiate between facts and fictions, superstitions and realities, whereas it had really simply constructed just one world view among many. He argued it was healthier to 'trade tricks' with other cultures than try to force them to share the 'bland house of modernity', comprising global economics and a standard world view, among other things.

Thus no one should have been surprised when, warming to his theme, the professor went even further two days later in the main event as he spoke in support of the motion 'A strong distinction between humans and non-humans is no longer required for research purposes'.

Remaining seated and punctuating his speech with a liberal peppering of jokes and asides, he opened his case with a casual delivery in a thick French accent that gave the performance an almost intimate book-at-bedtime feel.

Revisiting his keynote attack on dualism, he said he had made a 'little discovery'.

The distinction between subject and object was not designed to be overcome, he said. With its origins in the 'politics' of separation between Man and God, body and soul, it was a fiction designed to do damage and keep people in their place. 'It's made to be 'unovercomable', it's made to do politics, it's made to do war, it's made to do science wars,' he said.

As an example of the kind of stand-offs it could cause, he conjured up a hypothetical academic debate on the causes of anger. One side of a campus might argue it was the result of genetic conditioning (nature), the other might cite cultural determinants (nurture) as a major factor.

But these were the kind of 'false debates' caused by 'downloading the old plug-in of dualism' through which to interpret things. He proposed a new 'plug-in', one which merely analysed 'states of affairs' without relying on the distinction.

To illustrate this, he gave another example. A singer had once told him she 'polished her voice like shoes in the morning' and said her voice told her 'what to do and when to stop'. Using a traditional model, he argued, social scientists would reject the singer's words as 'false consciousness'. Using his, on the other hand, he would accept the comment at face value. It would tell him something about the way artists work.

His approach was about allowing more data to be acceptable for research. Humans and non-humans were treated equally as states of affairs or the constituent parts of states of affairs.

'What I am saying is very simple. As social scientists, either we change the way we talk about schools of practice or we ignore our data,' he said.

'As social scientists our duty is not to put order in the world. We are not rabbis, we are not priests, we are not managers.'

And so to Professor Fuller.

Standing at a lectern and with amplified delivery, his style was more that of proselytiser than philosopher.

'You can tell I'm the bad guy, I'm dressed in black,' was his only joke of the night as he set about trying to demolish the argument that social science was solely about collecting data for research.

He said the breakdown in distinction between human and non-human was a modern trend and that Professor Latour's position was 'not a million miles away' from that of geneticist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, where no distinction was made 'because evolution is about genes propagating themselves' in the natural environment.

Also, he said, the way the professor used the concept 'social science' was an 'equivocation'. 'It does not have the meaning most people attribute to it. It's not really social in the sense in which those of us who do social science think of it as being different from natural science.

'It's an important point because when people wanted to establish something called social science they thought there was a difference. It was a moral project.'

And this was the crux of Professor Fuller's sermon as he worked to convert the audience.

In full cry, he boomed that it was simply 'not good enough' to accept a science that 'counts things'. Social science was a moral project, he insisted.

'The whole point of social organisation is specifically about the ways in which human beings combine to go against the natural course of things. There is a sense in which resistance and conflict is what characterises the distinction between the human and the non-human - not going with the flow.'

Moral 'autonomy' was a determining factor in what it was to be human, he said, with implications for all modes of human behaviour, including education.

'The concept of autonomy has been essential to the organised knowledge-production practices in the West. Science and the idea of the university are tied to the idea of autonomy. The sense of autonomy that is relevant here is the one that involves resisting taking things for granted, ordinary ways of understanding, taking things at face value.

'Bruno may poke fun at the idea of false consciousness, but that's what organised inquiry is all about. There is a larger project. Admittedly it has been conducted in a high-handed kind of way, but that does not mean it's not worth pursuing,' he said.

Professor Fuller said that if social science did not go down the route of 'autonomy' - taking a moral position - it simply 'followed the agents around, following this and following that'.

'No, sorry, that is not science,' he said. 'Science is bringing some sort of order to this diversity of phenomena. That's what distinguishes science not only from animal cognition, but from taking things for granted.

'Where do we end with this? It is about saying no to nature, it is about drawing the line. Unless social science wants to abdicate any kind of responsibility for the future politics, we are going to have to redraw these sorts of distinctions,' he warned.

It was the last blow of the prizefight, an exhausting, complex and often obscure exchange of views with precious little focus on the motion. Professor Laurence Goldstein, professor of the philosophy of language and mind at HKU, had the unenviable task of summing up the debate.

Declaring candidly that he had been unable to follow much of what had transpired - in company with most other people in the room, judging by comments afterwards - he did his best to compare the professors' respective arguments to theories forwarded by the great Ludwig Wittgenstein at various stages in his life.

Speaking afterwards, Professor Goldstein described much of the debate as 'obscure' and accused Professor Latour of being 'self-indulgent, frivolous and evasive'.

'I deal with difficult philosophical notions every day. It is my bread and butter,' he said. 'I know when material is tough and when it's not worth dealing with.'

The debate may have been billed as the big match - and it was certainly a stimulating, lateral insight into the nature of social science - but with both philosophers arguing to their own agendas rather than the motion, it could be better seen as a grandiose display of shadow-boxing. And since this one has taken ten years to organise, don't bet on a rematch in a hurry.

For more information visit:

Science wars - www.members.tripod.com/~sciencewars/

Professor Bruno Latour - www.ensmp.fr/~latour/

Professor Steve Fuller - www.warwick.ac.uk/~sysdt/index.html