Irony of modernism.
Modernism by its own nature is ironic for Latour, because it argues that it's better or more advanced than previous generations, but that was exactly the kind of preference that made religious people so unbearable to the modernists in the first place.
In other words, Modernism is not better or worse than other world views, because that would depend on objectivity, and we're human, so we aren't exactly unbiased. The claim of modernism is ironic because it does the exact thing it attempts to eradicate—allowing cultural assumptions to act objective, when they're really social constructs. Since modernism is itself a social construct, it should be a self-defeating argument.
Irony of ontology and subjectivity.
Ontology is the objective process. It's the action of acknowledging what there is. However, since the faculties that a person uses to assess what those words mean in the first place, even ontology is subjective. This is a ironic mystery.
The irony of external and internal knowledge.
Latour takes the paradoxical nature of his claims back to the source by studying Plato. By analyzing the types of arguments that proceed scientific inquiry, Latour reminds us that our preference for logic is a social construct, just like the cultures that modernism alleged to have surpassed. Therefore, since we cannot truly know external reality except by our internal faculties, modernism relativity destroys even modernist views.
The irony of the scientific method.
The irony of the scientific method is simple, for Latour. What can we know about the world? By science, we can know everything with respect to tests and observations, but what about the things that can't be tested? For many, science is a kind of grand explanation that somehow alleviates our human need for community and religion, but for Latour, this strange view of science is obviously outside the bounds of science, meaning that it's a religion, which is the thrust of his argument, although he says it in more academic language.
The irony of religious views and knowledge.
The study of what constitutes belief versus knowledge is called Epistemology. Basically, the running definition is that a belief that is verifiably true is knowledge, and a belief that cannot be verified is belief. However, since belief underpins both types, even knowledge isn't quite subjective. Ironically, knowledge is belief that one suspects is true based on other beliefs. Still, we have not managed to escape the most basic paradoxes about human experience.
