The Proof Is in the Pudding. on 'truth to Materials' in the Sociology of Translations, Followed by an Attempt to Improve It

Why are the sociologists stuck with writing? Howard becker says they are conservative. But surely, they are not more conservative than say biologists, and given their rhetorics, they more often try to be “radical”. Why then? Because they are a) believing in a instrumental objectivity pace Galison, while they know at the same time, that the received instruments to produce such objectivity, such as photocameras, do not produce such objectivity for the very knowledge objects they are interested in. The argument against photography, after all is, that you cannot take a picture of anomie, stratification, or an obligatory passage point. The precision and “realism” of photography is not “sociological”, it captures the wrinkles on a face, but not how these wrinkles are part of a habitus of, say, mining people (this argument can easily disputed, see Becker, but that is not the point here). In short, technological objectivity does not really help sociology, because the kind of data sociology is interested in, elude mechanical objectivity. This is not merely an argument by statisticians. It is also an argument in qualitative sociology.