GLOSSARY - Making Sense of Nature - page 289

symbols and so on. The majority of people are consumers of the latter rather
than their creators.
Epistemic identities The particular sense of self created by membership
of any given epistemic community. It entails socialisation over a period
of time into the norms and practices of the community in question. This
socialisation invites epistemic workers to play one or more roles recognised
by their peers.
Epistemic workers Those who are employed by others or of their
own volition to create and disseminate various kinds of knowledge, infor-
mation or imagery. Epistemic workers range from natural scientists to
environmental campaigners.
Epistemology In philosophy, the study of how we know the world and
what counts as 'knowledge'. For instance, if I insist that the existence of
something can only be demonstrated by repeated observations of that some-
thing that others could replicate, I'm making an epistemological claim. For
decades, philosophers searched for a foolproof way to guarantee the accu-
racy of knowledge. In so doing, they distinguished knowledge from opinion,
speculation, metaphysics, fiction and so on. However, in this topic I use
the term in a wider sense to encompass all forms in which we make refer-
ence to what we call nature. So my interest is in nature poetry as much as
biology, wildlife documentaries as much as environmental news reporting.
All these media are social in the sense that the things they communicate
are the result of work performed by various epistemic communities. The
term 'social epistemology' was first used by the library scientists Margaret
Egan and Jesse Shera in the 1950s but, in more recent times, the soci-
ologist and philosopher of science Steve Fuller (1988) has fleshed out a
research programme based upon it in great detail. Working with a repub-
lican, democratic political theory, Fuller's principal interest is in how the
production and dissemination of knowledge should be organised in a world
where most people are not authors of their own beliefs, values or goals. Like
Fuller, in this topic I take very seriously the fact that knowing, believing,
valuing, feeling and acting all occur in a world structured by highly unequal
access to knowledge, resources and practical opportunities for action. See also
ontology.
Essentialism The practice of characterising a person or thing in terms
of a single, supposedly 'defining' characteristic. When essentialism involves
reference to nature or its collateral terms, it is often designed to suggest
fixed or intractable characteristics. Naturalisation or re-naturalisation often
involves making essentialist claims.
External nature All those phenomena taken to be natural, in degree or
kind, that are seen to exist 'out there' in the world beyond our doorsteps.
To talk of nature as external is to presuppose an ontological dualism that