GLOSSARY - Making Sense of Nature - page 288

verb and noun senses through time. Humans are thoroughly discursive: we
communicate through language day-in, day-out. Some claim that the vari-
ous languages humans have created have a common structure, while others
point to their differences. Regardless, any particular discourse (in the count
noun sense) must be tethered to the conventions of the language of which it
is a part. For example, in Anglophone societies, the specialist discourses of
meteorologists or environmental economists cannot circumvent the 'seman-
tic rule book' of the English language. This rule book says, among many
other things, that nature and culture are antonyms, so too reality and fic-
tion, truth and opinion. Discourses in the plural thus exist within any single
major language (discourse in the singular or mass noun sense).
Environmental myth A set of beliefs about environmental change in
a particular place or region that lack a strong evidential base and yet which
are widely held. Proper scrutiny of large-scale environmental change requires
large amounts of evidence that is regularly updated. Environmental myths
typically arise when small amounts of evidence are used to make generalisa-
tions, as if it's reasonable to infer from a few local cases to the wider regional
or national scale.
Epistemic boundaries The barriers to entry created and enforced by
epistemic communities in order to both identify and exclude 'outsiders'.
These barriers take many forms. For instance, in science, credentialisation
is very important. People without a PhD in the 'right' subject are typically
accorded far less legitimacy as knowledge creators or challengers than people
with one.
Epistemic community A group of epistemic workers who share a partic-
ular specialism. Different epistemic communities gain their distinctiveness,
and sense of self-identity, through a mixture of their value-set, ontologi-
cal beliefs, questions of interest, objects/domains of concern, methods of
inquiry, the criteria favoured for determining worthy ideas, knowledge or
information, and their chosen genre of communication. This mixture deter-
mines how specialised a given epistemic community is, how tight-knit it
considers itself to be and how distinct it is from both other communities
and the 'lay public'. Some epistemic communities are highly credentialised,
others much less so. Typically, each of them speaks to the rest of us using
specific media and rhetorical tools. See also genres of communication and
mode of representation.
Epistemic dependence A situation in which the majority of people are
reliant on a minority to provide representations of the world, including ones
of their own minds and bodies. The doctor-patient relationship is one of
many examples of epistemic dependence. It arises because of specialisation.
There's now a large and diverse cadre of epistemic workers whose job is
to produce and disseminate knowledge, information, arguments, pictures,