Narrative Semiotics and the Study of Scientific Practices

The initial stages of the fruitful encounter between structuralist semiotics and Bruno Latour are reconstructed, culminating in the innovative project of analysing the rhetoric inherent in a scientific text. The starting point of what will evolve over time into a full-fledged anthropological approach to scientific discourse is a text published by Latour and Paolo Fabbri in 1977 titled La rhétorique de la science: Pouvoir et devoir dans un article de science exacte. The goal of this seminal essay is to demonstrate that the textual forms of the exact sciences are not reduced, as commonly believed, to the cold and impersonal description of an experimental practice. On the contrary, they manifest the presence of a complex rhetoric at the service of a pragmatic intent: to induce the recipients of the scientific community to recognize as true only the utterances expressed by the authors, while discrediting the adversaries active in the same disciplinary field. The chapter also highlights Françoise Bastide’s decisive role in the pioneering analysis of the semiotics of the scientific text with particular reference to the role assumed by materiality and the practices of use of non-human agents (laboratory instruments) involved in the construction of scientific facts and their narration.