Squeezing Data Science into Latour’s Blackbox. Theoretical Implications of Testing for Unidirectionality

Latour’s Black Box is a dynamic gateway that segregates the continuum of scientific processes into those that occur before and after a certain critical point: the shift from ‘science in the making’ to ‘ready made science’. For reasons that will be explored in this paper, the field of data science does not appear to follow a unidirectional heuristic in the way that technologies transition from ‘in the making’ to ‘ready made’. This paper is a theoretical analysis of the extent to which the fundamental technologies of data science either violate or adhere to this heuristic. If data science does not follow a unidirectional heuristic, is there any evidence as to the causes of this dynamic and, furthermore, are the limitations, as they may exist, a function of technological advancement or a function of the theoretical limits of the field of data science itself?