When studying history, people often have epiphanies about contingency.
It will be discovered that certain structures or practices that have survived to this day have no necessary reason to exist, and that their origins depend on certain conditions that are easily subject to change.
Those things that felt essential turned out to be accidental. In Latour's view, necessity and contingency are meaningless concepts.
Latour
They simply refer to the resistance gradient of different actors. His framework even extends to truth and epistemological claims.
Latour said, "A sentence is not connected because it is true, but because it is connected that we say it is true".
Truth is not some kind of floating value that we manage to capture through words, but the impression that the connection of the actor leaves on us, which nevertheless requires a great deal of labor to explain.
Truth is a constant struggle between agents who compete together for the relationship that will keep them going.
Latour said that time itself does not pass, and that time is the key to the contention between various forces.
Time is a product, not an empty container that allows things to happen within its framework.
Actors
An important contribution in Latour's work is that the human subject is unorthodox.
The subject does not occupy a special or privileged position in reality. Language is also not inherently important: it does not deserve to be used as a starting point for analyzing truth.
Latour expressed many grievances with the linguistic turn of philosophy.
All realities involve the negotiation and testing of forces, the relationships that define and shape the structures that have won the sustained existence.
Latour also discarded the fictional notion of "potency".
Potency means that the agent has some kind of intrinsic power that is not activated and will be activated at some later point and become the cause of a particular event.
The plane of existence
For Latour, there is no intrinsic potency. Potency gives the event something beyond itself.
Power is not stored in the actor's body. Everything is real, and nothing exists beyond its own particularity.
Everything else is a projection of future movements.
"The discussion of possibilities is an illusion of the movement of actors, forgetting about the cost of transportation".
Potential is to transcend events, to transcend reality, and for Latour, all existence must be realistic.
The Role of Reason and Language in Latour's Metaphysics
Latour also makes the controversial argument that "there is no deduction", and this conclusion necessarily comes from his denial of "validity".
Thoughts do not flow from one statement to the next, they do not deduce information. He explicitly contradicts Kant's famous "synthetic transcendental" judgment.
There is no foundation or basic principle to be found, and these foundations or basic principles contain everything else.
The tendency to look for fundamentals has always been strong. Since ancient times, mathematicians, physicists, and even philosophers have tried to find a formula, a principle, or a theory of everything, and everything else stems from it.
Latour points out that the world does not provide us with such a foundation, and we cannot deduce everything else from it.
Here, too, Latour violates what is known in philosophy as foundationalism, which holds that beliefs are divided into basic beliefs and derived beliefs, with fundamental beliefs being core beliefs that are not based on other beliefs.
"Structure"
Latour's metaphysical system completely destroys this distinction.
Another option of foundationalism is coherentism, which does not distinguish between basic beliefs and derived beliefs.
However, conformism is said to have the problem of self-referentiality, i.e., belief forms a closed loop that does not allow experience or anything outside of the referential loop.
All beliefs are mutually proven and do not need to be connected to anything external.
Latour's theory does not have this self-referential trap. Since deduction is not reliable, beliefs do not flow to each other in any way.
On the contrary, since the agents are all ontologically identical, whether they are ideas or objects, the resulting system feeds back into each fragment without becoming self-referential or linear.
From these views of reason and deduction, Latour concludes that words do not follow each other either.
He also questioned the concept of metallic language promoted by many linguistic theories and philosophical currents of analysis.
No one language can be reduced to another. There is mediation, translation and resistance, but by no means pure equivalence.
Each word is its own. Its meaning can be translated, but it cannot be reflected in another word in another language.