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'false', 'right' or 'wrong', 'fact' or 'fiction'. Instead, these scare-quoted terms
are ones we attribute to various epistemological products, depending on their
intended and actual effects in the world .
Thus, a pragmatist would say that what we call scientific knowledge is
deemed 'truthful' and 'objective' not because it actually is but because it
precipitates actions, events and outcomes that many people consider to be
beneficial or useful. Equally, a pragmatist might argue that nature poetry is
not 'useless' by virtue of its intrinsic fictionality but because (1) nature poets
are unable, for a variety of reasons, to capture the attention and affect the
conduct of more than a minority of any national population; and (2) nature
poetry is 'useful' in ways radically different from conventional understand-
ings of utility (as, for example, associated with a washing machine or a pair
of shoes).
So pragmatists understand all language, symbolism, denotation and the
like in practical terms: to what extent are they able to alter human thought
and action? In what ways, and to what extent, do they produce outcomes
that satisfy people's 'needs' and 'wants' (as currently defined). What, in the
end, do they do ? In respect of this topic's subject matter, pragmatists ask
not what 'nature', 'sex', 'biology', etc. are but rather what follows for human
in/action from understanding the world in these terms. Pragmatism is usu-
ally regarded as anti-representational and so, in one sense, it is. As Rorty
once put it, 'Language cannot fail to represent accurately, for it never repre-
sents at all' (Rorty, 1999: 50). Rorty (1979) was famously critical of the idea
that some knowledges possess the 'special' quality of 'corresponding' point-
for-point with nature or 'revealing' timeless and elemental truths; however,
he recognised that this claim to epistemic realism was, despite his criticism
of it, highly efficacious in the modern world: millions of people happen to
believe it, in part because things done in its name 'work' in a practical sense.
He also, I would suggest, endorsed the less conventional understanding
of 'representation' I argued for in Chapter 2 and reiterated in the previous
section of this chapter.
From a pragmatist perspective, readers should not judge this topic in
terms of whether its contentions and claims are ultimately 'correct'. Instead,
mine is an attempt to affect you and thereby the wider world, using all
the conventions of academic writing to my advantage (a non-polemic prose
style, citations, a large bibliography, etc.) and the high social status that
this genre of communication still enjoys. Despite this high status, Making
sense of nature has its work cut out because it's challenging powerful habits
of thought and action. As with so much social science discourse, my own,
and that of the multi-disciplinary epistemic community to which I'm affil-
iating myself, does not have a large or ready audience. It thus participates
at the margins in the drama of nature's representation and uses that it aims
to describe and explain. This illustrates why pragmatists don't worry about
'relativism'. Critics of relativism fear that it treats all perspectives and prac-
tices equally (i.e. as of equivalent worth), including iconoclastic, subversive,
 
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