Infernal Alternatives and Alternative Medicines: Navigating the Post-Factual with William James and Bruno Latour

This article examines how the call to #UniteBehindTheScience, justified in climate politics, becomes problematic when extended to therapeutic domains such as complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Drawing on William James’s critique of the modern ‘fear of being duped’, it shows how defensive, error-avoiding epistemic habits solidify into conventions that restrict what may count as real and unintentionally erode trust in science. Focusing on medicine, I argue that the authority of evidence-based practice relies on methodological abstractions that are often forgotten and then reified as ontological claims, marginalizing experiential knowledge, relational effects, and alternative therapeutic frameworks. Through dialogue with James’s radical empiricism and Latour’s shift from ‘matters of fact’ to ‘matters of concern’, the article advocates a culture of the And : a realist yet constructivist stance resisting binary choices.