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power over us (my focus in Chapter 6 ). It also means that we may ignore,
or even fail to recognise, certain epistemic communities and their prod-
ucts, never knowing what effects paying (more) attention to them may have
had on us. The other side of the coin is this: our dependence means that
we may be exposed to new ideas, evidence, values and experiences that we
couldn't possibly have achieved on our own, and which - in our own view,
or perhaps that of those who know us well - change us for the better (or, for
that matter, worse!). Though some social scientists are wont to see relations
of 'power' everywhere in modern life, people are nonetheless able to change
themselves and their circumstances in ways both large and small. In short,
epistemic dependence cuts two ways when it comes to representations of
nature, and of much more besides. 13
Yet, unlike the governments we elect, we don't cast a vote to authorise
an epistemic worker or community to represent the natural world to us.
Instead, our democratic 'choice' is exercised in different ways in different
arenas. For instance, we can decide to read a book by Richard Dawkins
(or not); we can decide to watch Al Gore's docufilm An inconvenient truth
(or not); we can decide to go on a guided wilderness tour in Patagonia
(or not); we can believe the latest news reports about glacial melting (or not),
and so on. Though our choices are ultimately constrained, they are never
predetermined. Many of them are made in the market, through us spend-
ing money on various physical and symbolic commodities. But many are
not. And once we've made our choice, we have a certain freedom to make
of them what we will, albeit within the wider discursive constraints of our
linguistic universe.
There's no question of us eliminating or even reducing our epistemic
dependence - that would be as idealistic as it is practically impossible. It
also wrongly assumes that this dependence is, ipso facto , a bad thing. Equally,
we cannot vote for a set of new epistemic workers every few years in order
to keep existing epistemic communities on their toes. Aside from the prac-
tical absurdity of this idea, it wrongly presumes that elections are the only
(or best) way to determine who should represent the world to us and how.
Though I've argued that references to nature are politics by other means, this
is not to say that all those who, in effect, represent nature 'on our behalf '
should be subject to a periodic plebiscite. What, then, are the options? In
general terms, there seem to me to be three.
First, if epistemic dependence usually implies an asymmetrical relation-
ship between epistemic communities and their audiences, then a key issue
is how intelligently the latter interpret the representations of the former. An
audience that is unthinking, incurious and uncritical can be far more readily
influenced than one that dissects what it reads, hears or sees. 14 This is partly
a question of education. A public, most of whose members are trained to be
sceptical, can make more considered choices about how it receives the fruits
of any epistemic community's labours. By 'sceptical' I don't mean endlessly
disbelieving. That would be more akin to cynicism or what we might call
 
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