Les mystifications philosophiques du professeur Latour
Les sciences exactes et les sciences “souples” sont effectivement dans le même bateau.
Apart from the debate itself (which I only learned about recently), this notion of «sciences souples» in opposition to “exact sciences” is quite interesting.
Surely, others have discussed it but the term isn’t sticking yet. I like it, though. It’s telling and rather “neutral.” Not sure “flexible” is the right word in English. “Soft” would be obvious (“softener” for «assouplisseur») and is used on occasion (I do use it) but doesn’t render the same idea. «Souple» is the opposite of “rigid” but “nonrigid” is too negative a way to put it.
Any new suggestions for this? I’m translating a Latour paper and, yup, a search shows that it’s yet another idiosyncratic usage. For right now I have it as “soft”, in quotes, since hard and soft science is a pretty standard English usage and it looks like it’s non-standard in French, especially if you say it’s more opposed to rigid.
Well, the word itself, in other contexts. «Souplesse» is opposed to «rigidité», I’d say. Depending on context (as in, how closely you want to adhere to Latour’s logic), “soft” might be fine. If you want to make it obvious that this is a marked usage, you could go with “flexible”. The English version of Sokal’s text has “hard” and “soft”.
Yeah, I think I’m going to go with flexible and put a footnote. I think it has to be left as flexible to avoid the pejorative sense of soft science which it looks like Latour is trying to avoid. In other places I see sciences dures contrasted with sciences souples, which is definitely trying to avoid a connotation. Thanks for the help.