HOW WE MAKE SENSE OF (WHAT WE CALL) NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 7

Jennifer Price has observed, somewhat sardonically, we tend to think that
'Nature is where Reality lives' (1999: 210) - as exemplified by the telling
phrase 'the nature of reality', one used frequently by scientists and philoso-
phers . 5 Indeed, it's surely significant that one of the world's premier science
periodicals is called, simply and unapologetically, Nature .
Yet, while our various representations are assuredly about something we
call 'nature', they are not the same as the things to which they refer and
nor are they reducible to them. To suppose otherwise is to commit what
philosopher Roy Bhaskar once termed the 'ontic fallacy' (1993: 430). This is
the belief that most of our information and knowledge is a mirror image of
the physical world - except when intended to be fictional or speculative. The
challenge, then, is to understand what one writer calls 'the conceptuality of
real objects' (Fuller, 2005: 1). Words are also things - not simply statements
about things. But, equally, the things referred to are only comprehensible in
terms of the words we choose.

Denaturalising nature
Over the past 30-plus years, claims like these have become axiomatic for a
generation of researchers and teachers in a wide range of social science and
humanities subjects. For decades, the subject of 'nature' was left to those
on the other side of university campuses: the chemists, astronomers, neu-
roscientists and zoologists, for instance. But since the mid-1970s, a growing
number of anthropologists, sociologists, historians, philosophers, cultural
critics and others have had something to say about the matter. The initial
impetus for this was arguably two-fold.
First, 40 years ago there was widespread concern about both global
'over-population' and increasing scarcity of biophysical resources like oil.
Emblematic of this was the well-known topic The limits to growth (Meadows
et al ., 1972). There was even concern about abrupt environmental change,
well before the current worries about greenhouse warming. For instance,
the distinguished American scientist Steve Schneider co-authored The Gen-
esis strategy: climate and global survival as far back as 1976. As a reaction
to this, writers on the left of the political spectrum made the following
argument: attempts to control population numbers or limit resource use,
they maintained, were founded on the dubious claim that 'natural limits'
to economic growth could be specified without reference to the varied,
power-saturated and malleable social organisation of economies and polities
(see, for instance, Harvey, 1974). They thus challenged the view that some-
thing called 'nature' imposes non-negotiable restrictions that we ignore at
our peril.
Second, in the human sciences the florescence of what was perceived as
a resurgent biological determinism (exemplified in the writings of Arthur
Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton) led to a set of strong counter-arguments.
For instance, consider The use and abuse of biology by anthropologist