Conference: Social Critique and the Concept of Nature

2000

This work examines the ways in which the relationship between society and nature is problematic for social theory. The Frankfurt School’s notion of the dialectic of enlightenment is considered, as are the attempts by Jurgen Habermas to defend an ‘emancipatory’ theory of modernity against this. The marginalising effect Habermas’ defence of reason has had on the place of nature in his critical social theory is examined, as is the work of theorists such as Ulrich Beck and Klaus Eder. For these latter authors, unlike Habermas, the social relation to nature is at the centre of contemporary society, giving rise to new forms of modernisation and politics. ¶ Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics and governmentality is examined against the background of his philosophical debate with Habermas on power and rationality. The growth of scientific ecology is shown to have both problematised the social relation to nature and provided the political technology for new forms of regulatory intervention in the management of the population and resources. These new forms of intervention constitute a form of ecological governmentality along the lines discussed by Foucault and others in relation to the human sciences.

Progress in Human Geography, 2002

This paper seeks to clarify what is meant by the 'social construction of nature', which has become a crude but common term used to describe very different understandings of nature, knowledge and the world. I distinguish two broad varieties of construction talk in the social sciences: construction-as-refutation and construction-as-philosophical-critique. The first uses the construction metaphor to refute false beliefs about the world and is consistent with orthodox philosophical stances, such as positivism and realism. By contrast, I identify four other, more radical sorts of construction-as-philosophical-critique that use the construction metaphor to question the culture/nature, subject/object and representation/reality dualisms that provide the conventional philosophical foundation for distinguishing true conceptions of nature from false ones. Another source of confusion has been the question of precisely what is meant by the term 'nature'. Making distinctions among different senses of the term can provide some badly needed clarity in debates about the social construction of nature. It also highlights a broad difference between those for whom the social construction of nature refers to the construction of our concepts of nature and those for whom the construction of nature refers to the process of constructing nature in the physical and material sense. That distinction, in turn, suggests two major, if also somewhat related, points of theoretical contention: first, the epistemological significance of understanding concepts of nature as constructed; second, the philosophical and political implications of arguing that nature is a socially constructed and contingent phenomenon. These are difficult philosophical and political questions, and the variety of constructionisms suggests that it is possible to answer them in a number of different ways.

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, 2020

Six words are especially significant in our world-view; they model the world we view: (1) 'Nature'; (2) 'Environment'; (3) 'Wilderness'; (4) 'Science'; (5) 'Earth' and (6) 'Value' as found in nature. But how far are these words for real? Have they extensions to which their intensions successfully refer? "The world' is variously 'constituted' by diverse cultures, as we are lately reminded, and there is much doubt about what, if anything, is 'privileged' about the prevailing Western concepts. All words have been made up historically by people in their multifarious coping strategies; these six now have a modernist colour to them, and the make-up of the words colours up what we see. More radically, all human knowing colours whatever people see, through our percepts and concepts. Trees are not really green after we have learned about electromagnetic radiation and the optics of our eyes, though we all view the world that way. Indeed, the scepticism runs deeper. Many question whether humans know nature at all, in any ultimate or objective sense (the pejorative word here is 'absolute' comparable to 'privileged' as revealing our bias in 'right' or 'true'). Rather we know nature only provisionally or operationally ('pragmatically' is the favoured word). We will first look in overview at the tangle of problems in which these words are caught up, then turn to each word in more detail. Natural science seems a primary place where humans know nature for real; that couples the first and the fourth of these signifying words, with epistemic success. No, some reply, humans know nature through socially-constructed science. Catherine Larrère claims that nature per se 'does not exist.. . Nature is only the name given to a certain contemporary state of science.' 1 Science exists-no one doubts that-but science knows nature conditionally, perhaps phenomenally; science is an interaction activity between humans and a nature out there that we know only through the lenses, NATURE FOR REAL 39 theories and equipment that we humans have constructed. Science does not know an unconditioned nature objectively, or noumenally, certainly not absolutely. Alexander Wilson claims: 'We should by no means exempt science from social discussions of nature. .. In fact, the whole idea of nature as something separate from human existence is a lie. Humans and nature construct one another.' 2 Turn then to the more modest word 'environment'. Surely humans know a local external environment; that, after all, is what environmentalists are trying to save. Be careful, though, warns Arnold Berleant: I do not ordinarily speak of 'the' environment. While this is the usual locution, it embodies a hidden meaning that is the source of much of our difficulty. For 'the' environment objectifies environment; it turns it into an entity that we can think of and deal with as if it were outside and independent of ourselves. .. 'The' environment [is] one of the last survivors of the mind-body dualism ... For there is no outside world. There is no outside. .. Person and environment are continuous. 3 Environments are horizons that we carry about and reconstitute as we move here and there. Objectively, there are no horizons in nature. Try again. 'A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.' 4 That seems to take people out of the picture. Alas, once more-so the selfconscious humanists will protest-we are still very much in the picture. Roderick Nash, tracing the history of Wilderness and the American Mind, reaches a startling conclusion: 'Wilderness does not exist. It never has. It is a feeling about a place ... Wilderness is a state of mind.' 5 That seems extreme; still, wilderness does have to be designated, as it has been by the US, Congress. A society has to decide what wilderness means and where they will have it. Wilderness is another one of Berleant's human environments, even though one about which we have made atypical designations, resolving to leave such areas untrammelled. 'Wilderness' is a foil we have constituted in contrast to late twentieth-century, Western, technological culture. Nash concludes: 'Civilization created wilderness.' 6 Apparently, then, we are going to have to look all over the world, the Earth, to find nature for real. No, the search is impossible-the objectors continue-because the problem is not what we are looking at, some world-Earth, it is what we are looking with, a world-view: our reason, our culture and its words. We must not think, warns Richard Rorty, that 'Reason' offers 'a transcultural human ability to correspond to reality'; the best that reason can do is ask 'about what self-image society should have of itself.' 7 The big mistake is 'to think that the point of language is to represent a hidden reality which lies outside us.' 8 Jacques Derrida's remark, 'There is no outsidethe-text,' by this account, forbids any correspondence theory of truth. 9 We can hardly have descriptions, much less valuations, of nature as it lies outside of us. That is 'the world well lost'. 10 40 HOLMES ROLSTON III Philosophers have perennially found themselves in an epistemic prison, as every freshman discovers early in the introductory course. There is no human knowing that is not looking out from where we are, using our senses and our brains, from an anthropocentric perspective. That is the lesson of Plato's myth of the cave from ancient Greece, or the tale of the blind men and the elephant from India. These fables, all over again (so they say), enshrine the deepest truth of all: all knowledge is relative; there is no 'mirror of nature'. 11 Viewing one's world, the realist hopes 'to detach oneself from any particular community and look down at it from a, more universal standpoint.' 12 This can't be done. Hilary Putnam explains to us 'why there isn't a ready-made world.' 13 Yes, but at least there are those magnificent pictures of Earth taken from space, and the conviction returns that we humans can look over the globe at least, and find a world that had 'already made' itself. We ourselves are part of its making, whatever making up we do after we arrive and turn to view it. Using our 'reason', somewhat trans culturally it would seem, 14 perhaps we can couple the question what self-image our society wishes to make of itself with what to make of this planet we find on our hands, imaged in those photographs. So there is an epistemic crisis in our philosophical culture, which, on some readings, can seem to have reached consummate sophistication and, the next moment, can reveal debilitating failure of nerve. We need to ask, in theory, whether nature is for real to know, in practice, whether and how we ought to conserve it. Mirrors or not, the self-image question is entwined with the image of nature. Environmental ethics is said to be 'applied philosophy' (sometimes with a bit of condescension), yet it often probes important theoretical issues about nature, which (we add with matching condescension) has been rather mistreated in twentieth-century philosophy, overmuch concerned with the human self-image. Is environmental philosophy another of those para-professional 'philosophy and. .. ' spinoffs, not really philosophy per se, only philosophy 'ad hoc'? Yes, but philosophy is always philosophy of X: and if the object, X, is 'nature' described and evaluated, is not such enquiry axial philosophy, right at the centre? Now we reach the sixth, and most loaded, of our appraisal words. Surely, comes the retort 'value' is something we humans impose on the world. Nature may be objects there without us. There may be a ready-made world, but human values are not found ready-made in it. We make up our values. But not so fast: perhaps we humans do find some non-human values, or some of our values already made up, in the evolutionary history of our Earth, or our ecology. We ought not to beg that question. After all, the less we really know about nature, the less we can or ought to save nature for what it is in itself, intrinsically. Indeed, if we know that little, it may be hard properly to value nature even instrumentally. We cannot correctly value what we do not to some degree correctly know. Even if we somehow manage to value wild nature per se without making any utilitarian use of it, perhaps this valuing project will prove to be a human interactive construction. Such value will have been projected onto nature, constituted by us and our set of social forces; other peoples in other cultures might not

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2003

For over a century, geographers have sought to describe and explain the society-nature interface. When, James Bryce (1886, p. 426) -one of geography's early advocates -characterized the discipline as "a meeting point between the sciences of Nature and the sciences of Man [sic]" he sought to create a distinctive place for it within the academic division of labor. As we enter the twenty-first century, geography remains one of the few subjects dedicated to exploring the relations between humanity and nature. To be sure, the geographical project extends beyond the study of these relations. But many geographers remain convinced that the society-nature nexus should be a central disciplinary preoccupation. It's easy to understand why. The world has changed enormously since Bryce penned his words in the genteel surroundings of Victorian Oxford, where he was a university professor. In the twenty-first century, society-nature relations seem to be marked by a new breadth, depth, and consequentiality. By breadth, I simply mean that few areas and aspects of nature today remain untouched by human hands; by depth, I mean that many society-nature relations extend 'all the way down,' even to the level of genetic modification; and by consequentiality, I mean that what happens to nature today may be of world-changing importance, both for ourselves and other species. In short, Bryce could scarcely have anticipated a future in which mass deforestation, global warming, the collapse of commercial fisheries, chronic species extinction, transgenic organisms, a growing ozone 'hole,' and desertification would be just a few of the problems arising from human transformations of nature. And he could hardly have imagined that such problems would spawn a global environmental movement, or that governments worldwide would put the question of nature near the top of their political agendas.

The Sociological Review, 2010

The social sciences have been faced with a series of challenges to their relevance since the beginning of the 21st century. In particular, the growing urgency of environmental crises and the remarkable increase in knowledge of genomics have raised questions about sociology's ability to analyse the contemporary world and, especially, its ability to understand the relationship between the natural world and human societies. The argument of this volume is that sociology has a significant contribution to make to this understanding and that it is imperative that sociologists become involved in what are often seen as purely scientific and technical discussions. In this opening chapter we contribute to this engagement by considering the question of how sociology understands the natural and the social and why many sociologists are re-thinking this relationship. We argue that this rethinking is due, on the one hand, to political and theoretical developments within and without sociology and, on the other hand, to the challenge of climate change and recent scientific interventions in, and transformations of, 'nature'. First, however, we discuss the relationship between nature and society that underpinned the development of sociology as a discipline.

■ Abstract Twenty years ago, two environmental sociologists made a bold call for a paradigmatic shift in the discipline of sociology—namely, one that would bring nature into the center of sociological inquiry and recognize the inseparability of nature and society. In this essay, we review recent scholarship that seeks to meet this challenge. The respective strands of this literature come from the margins of environmental sociology and border on other arenas of social theory production, including neo-Marxism, political ecology, materialist feminism, and social studies of science. Bringing together scholars from sociology, anthropology, geography, and history, each of these strands offers what we consider the most innovative new work trying to move sociology beyond the nature/society divide.

Progress in Human Geography, 1997

The dualism between society and nature and the processes by which nature is being socially constructed has become an area of increasing concern and interest to geographers in recent years. In this article, the abstract and concrete interrelationships between nature and society will be problematized, drawing on the work of Lacko, Wittgenstein, Harre , Bourdieu and Lefebvre, among others. A number of concepts that will enable us to work across the boundaries conceived to exist between the physical, the mental and the social and thus of great importance for the analysis of the social construction of nature will be proposed.

Sociological Review, 2010

The social sciences have been faced with a series of challenges to their relevance since the beginning of the 21st century. In particular, the growing urgency of environmental crises and the remarkable increase in knowledge of genomics have raised questions about sociology's ability to analyse the contemporary world and, especially, its ability to understand the relationship between the natural world and human societies. The argument of this volume is that sociology has a significant contribution to make to this understanding and that it is imperative that sociologists become involved in what are often seen as purely scientific and technical discussions. In this opening chapter we contribute to this engagement by considering the question of how sociology understands the natural and the social and why many sociologists are re-thinking this relationship. We argue that this rethinking is due, on the one hand, to political and theoretical developments within and without sociology and, on the other hand, to the challenge of climate change and recent scientific interventions in, and transformations of, 'nature'. First, however, we discuss the relationship between nature and society that underpinned the development of sociology as a discipline.

At the present time the USA's Federal Government spends big tax monies for Scientific Research and Development (R&D). How to best organize this vast governmental activity, how to best estimate its ultimate utility and profitability (real and potential), how to best increase efficiency of innovation and production, how to best estimate the worth of new discoveries and innovations, how to properly fund R&D of new concepts and innovations, and how to correctly estimate their results, how to improve a patenting all these macro-problems are important for successful planning of scientific research, new systems-these are all complex and pressing questions that require answers if further industrial progress and scientific improvements are ever to be! The authors consider these some major-system problems and offer many remarkable innovations in organization, estimation, suggestions for entirely new research efficiency criteria, development, new methods for assessments of new ideas, innovations in science and industry, and new methods in patenting technology. Index Terms-Organizing scientific research, planning of research, funding research, funding new ideas (concepts), funding inventions and innovations, estimating research cost, assessment of research results, research efficiency criteria, innovation in organizing of scientific R&D, patenting

Soal Ekonomi Manajerial, 2023