UNNATURAL CONSTRUCTIONS - Making Sense of Nature - page 142

SUMMARY
In this chapter, I've shown that what we call 'nature' is shot through with
the interests, aims and presuppositions of what we usually take to be its
opposites. This means that claims that nature is not socially constituted,
in significant measure, are part of the war of persuasion (if that's not too
dramatic a metaphor) that Making sense of nature is itself explicitly participat-
ing in. Representing aspects of the world as 'natural' is a process involving
myriad epistemic communities operating within and between the entire
range of communicative genres known to us. The representations refer to
biophysical phenomena large and small, fascinating and repulsive, cuddly
and threatening. These phenomena are understood to be more-or-less 'nat-
ural' in one or more of the four principal senses identified in Chapter 1 .
This quartet of meanings can be communicated via one or more of nature's
many collateral concepts, such as 'race', even as these concepts partake of
other meanings too. The four meanings can also be evoked when any con-
crete instance of 'nature', 'genes', 'wildlife', etc. is highlighted because each
instance is just one of many to which the meanings are conventionally
attached. These meanings can be taken by their recipients at face value or
with a high degree of awareness and reflexivity. Some modes and genres of
representation actively encourage the latter, such as those Making sense of
nature both instantiates and is itself an example of. I'm an epistemic worker
whose discourse, fashioned from the analyses of a very particular epistemic
community and concretised in these pages, is intended to make you think
differently to the way other discourses about nature encourage you to think.
Clearly, I'm trying to get us away from asking questions about the 'true
nature of nature' - its real character or location in space and time. Is
Clayoquot Sound a rare and unique ecosystem? Is there a single human
genome that's distinct from other genomes and do non-trivial group-level
differences in the genome exist? Are Fraser Island dingoes wild animals
and were those that killed Clinton Gage departing from their 'natural
behaviour'? To my mind there's no answer to these questions that can use
'nature' as an asocial reference point, court of appeal or test bed. It's better,
I would argue, to focus our attention elsewhere. Try as we might, we cannot
respond to questions like these without significant reference to ourselves:
why do we ask such questions in the first place, and what purposes might
our answers be intended to serve?
Though I didn't announce it earlier in the topic (it's been somewhat
implicit thus far), I take some inspiration from the philosophical move-
ment known as pragmatism - a movement that connects founding figures
like John Dewey with more recent influential writers like Richard Rorty. 26
Pragmatism's central insight is easily stated, even though many have been
reluctant to accept its implications: there is, it maintains, no fool-proof way,
no absolute standard, that will allow us to determine whether any given rep-
resentation, discourse, idea, proposition or piece of information is 'true' or