In sociology, AI and programming language theory, Actants, or more commonly actors, are the principal concern of the actor-network theory. Social interactions of people and their consequences are the subject of sociology studies. ... Look up Ai in Wiktionary, the free dictionary This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... Actor-network theory, sometimes abbreviated to ANT, is a sociological theory developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law. ...
"Actants have a kind of phonemic rather than a phonetic role: they operate on the level of function, rather than content. That is, an actant may embody itself in a particular character (termed an acteur) or it may reside in the function of more than one character in respect of their common role in the story's underlying 'oppositional' structure. In short, the deep structure of the narrative generates and defines its actants at a level beyond that of the story's surface content." Terence Hawkes,Structuralism and Semiotics" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 89
In addition, Latour's use of the actant concept is the key element in his rejection of the social reductionism he sees in the Strong Programme, which was (and, arguably, still is) the most influential theoretical paradigm in SandTS.
In developing the actant concept, Latour signaled his break with the Strong Programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), which was at the time (and arguably still is) the dominant theoretical paradigm in SandTS.
To put this point another way, an actant cannot be said to be natural (which is how scientists see it) or social (which is how Strong Programme scholars see it), because nature and society are the result of the process (e.g., science in the making) by which an actant becomes an actor.
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