Conversing with nature in a postmodern epistemological framework

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 22, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 227-240

  Preston, Christopher ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0004695875     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics200022315     Document Type: Review

References (47)

1. Richard Routley, "Is there a Need for a New, an Environmental Ethic?" in Proceedings of the Fifteenth World Congress of Philosophy (Sophia: Sophia Press, 1973), pp. 205-10.
2. See Callicott's and Norton's critiques of Rolston's position on objective intrinsic value for an illumination of this framework. J. Baird Callicott, "Rolston on Intrinsic Value: A Deconstruction," Environmental Ethics 14 (1992): 129-43 and Bryan G. Norton, "Epistemology and Environmental Values," Monist 75, no. 2 (1992): 208-26.
3. See Callicott's and Norton's critiques of Rolston's position on objective intrinsic value for an illumination of this framework. J. Baird Callicott, "Rolston on Intrinsic Value: A Deconstruction," Environmental Ethics 14 (1992): 129-43 and Bryan G. Norton, "Epistemology and Environmental Values," Monist 75, no. 2 (1992): 208-26.
4. Exceptions to this rule include Michael Zimmerman, Contesting the Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1993), Arran Care, Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis (New York: Routledge, 1995), and Max Oelschlaeger's Postmodern Environmental Ethics (Albany: State University of New York, 1995).
5. Exceptions to this rule include Michael Zimmerman, Contesting the Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1993), Arran Care, Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis (New York: Routledge, 1995), and Max Oelschlaeger's Postmodern Environmental Ethics (Albany: State University of New York, 1995).
6. Exceptions to this rule include Michael Zimmerman, Contesting the Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1993), Arran Care, Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis (New York: Routledge, 1995), and Max Oelschlaeger's Postmodern Environmental Ethics (Albany: State University of New York, 1995).
7. Especially Callicott, "Rolston on Intrinsic Value."
8. Jim Cheney, "Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative," Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 117-34.
9. Ibid., p. 126 (emphasis in original).
10. Val Plumwood, "Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy and the Critique of Rationalism," Hypatia 6, no. 1 (1991): 3; and Bryan G. Norton, Response to Holmes Rolston, III, American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division Meeting, Washington D.C., 29 December 1998.
11. Val Plumwood, "Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy and the Critique of Rationalism," Hypatia 6, no. 1 (1991): 3; and Bryan G. Norton, Response to Holmes Rolston, III, American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division Meeting, Washington D.C., 29 December 1998.
12. I don't agree with this criticism and suggest that a look at major environmental legislation over the last twenty years reveals that the notion of objective intrinsic value has been increasingly useful in policy making. See my "Epistemology and Intrinsic Values: Norton and Callicott's Critiques of Rolston," Environmental Ethics 20 (1998): 409-28. I do agree, however, that epistemic questions could play a larger role in environmental philosophy.
13. Jim Cheney, "Universal Consideration: An Epistemological Map of the Terrain," Environmental Ethics 20 (1998): 265.
14. A similar claim is made by Lorraine Code in her Epistemic Responsibility (Hanover: University of New Hampshire Press, 1987).
15. Cheney, "Universal Consideration," p. 266.
16. Ibid., p. 267.
17. Ibid.
18. The male pronoun is used deliberately to illustrate the contention of many feminists that this was always a masculinist project.
19. Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 575-99
20. Ibid, p. 592.
21. Cheney, "Postmodern Environmental Ethics," p. 119.
22. Ibid., p. 596.
23. Cheney, "Universal Consideration," p. 276.
24. Ibid., p. 274.
25. Cheney has made it clear in generous comments on a draft of this paper that our conception of "conversation" need not be modeled only on the familiar human-to-human exchanges. A broader conception of conversation would be something along the lines of "being in tune with" or "having an attitude of openness towards." I focus on the traditional conception of conversation here as a way of pressing what I take to be an important truth about nature's agency.
26. Jim Cheney, "Rivers of Thought: Confluences of Indigenous and Euro-American Philosophies," paper presented at the Aboriginal People's Conference, Lakehead University, 18-20 October 1996, p. 6.
27. W. V. O. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in From A Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953).
28. The field of laboratory studies, a field that incorporates postmodern epistemological insight, is specifically concerned with challenging the passivity of the nonhuman, material environment that surrounds the scientist. For example, Andrew Pickering's The Mangle of Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995) addresses what he calls the "neglect of the material" in post-Quinean philosophy of science.
29. Alison Wylie, "The Philosophy of Ambivalence: Sandra Harding on The Science Question in Feminism," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 13 (1988), supplement, p. 71. Harding has in fact begun to remedy her previous neglect of the material in Is Science Multi-Cultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). Her section on the agency of nature, however, is depressingly short.
30. Alison Wylie, "The Philosophy of Ambivalence: Sandra Harding on The Science Question in Feminism," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 13 (1988), supplement, p. 71. Harding has in fact begun to remedy her previous neglect of the material in Is Science Multi-Cultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). Her section on the agency of nature, however, is depressingly short.
31. W. V. O. Quine, "Epistemology Naturalized," in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 78.
32. I make this observation in order to combat the belief that Kant was one of the worst villains of modernism. Cheney lambasts Kant for insisting on "conformity - or rather subjection - of the world to our understanding of it" ("Universal Consideration," p. 267). I think it more accurate to cast Kant in a different light. What Cheney pegs as modernist hubris, I see as a precursor of a postmodern humility that acknowledges a continual exchange between mind and world in the production of knowledge.
33. I should perhaps acknowledge that I am using the term modernism rather loosely. I am thinking particular of British empiricism as it was later developed by logical positivists. My target, like Rorty's, is the "mirror of nature" approach to knowing. I am aware that there are some "moderns," for example Hegel and Dewey, who would be very much in sympathy with the dialectical approach I advocate.
34. This point is made by N. Katherine Hayles in "Searching for Common Ground," in Reinventing Nature, ed. Michael Soulé and Gary Lease (Washington D.C.: Island Press, 1995).
35. I borrow this term deliberately from ecological psychologist J. J. Gibson. An affordance is a property of an environment that is always relative to the activities of a particular organism. For example, a particular cliff might afford a nest site for a golden eagle and a climbing opportunity for a recreationally inclined human. Gibson's studies of perception might make an important contribution to future studies of cognition.
36. Mark Johnson, The Body in The Mind (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), p. xiv.
37. Ibid., p. 38.
38. Ibid., p. 205.
39. Ibid., pp. 207, 206.
40. Ibid., p. xxxviii.
41. Ed Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), p. xiv. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz and childhood development psychologist Edith Cobb have also both noted how local environments provide models that structure thought.
42. Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 99.
43. Richard Lewontin, Biology as Ideology (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), p. 58.
44. Hayles "Searching for Common Ground," p. 56.
45. It should also go without saying that there is nothing in this paper intended to question or cast doubt on the notion of a conversation with nature when this notion is located within a Native American epistemological context. As far as I can tell, the notion makes perfect sense within that framework.
46. Much work needs to be done by naturalizers in order to figure out how exactly to put the social explanations alongside the biological ones.
47. I acquired this turn of phrase from David Abram Abram who used it during a philosophy forum presentation at the University of Oregon in the spring 1998.