HOW WE MAKE SENSE OF (WHAT WE CALL) NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 22

(or 'rhetoric'). Typically, they are created by a relative minority of people. I'll
call them epistemic workers . Through face-to-face and virtual interaction,
these workers form epistemic communities with more or less distinctive
languages. As the semiologist Robert Scholes once said, 'Both the son-
net and the medical prescription can be regarded as forms of discourse
that are bound by rules which cover not only their verbal procedures but
their social production and exchange' (Scholes, 1982: 144). The boundaries
between them and lay audiences are often permeable, such that 'translation'
routinely occurs - for instance, the specialised vocabulary of professional
meteorologists is daily simplified into short weather reports for public
consumption.

Study Task: Select two of the following professionals who produce dis-
tinctive discourses about nature: human biologists, physicists, geologists,
atmospheric scientists, wildlife conservationists, fisheries managers or envi-
ronmental economists. Their discourses reflect not only what elements of
nature they are interested in, but also what it is about those elements that
interests them and how those elements are investigated. Do some Internet
or library-based research. For each group, list up to ten specialist terms that
illustrate the specificity of their discourses. Despite their differences, what
assumptions or terms are shared between the two discourses? These assump-
tions or terms are likely to be general ones pertaining to epistemology and
ontology.

Clearly, my definition of discourse in the first of the two senses is rather at
odds with those who, like world-famous Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker,
argue that language possesses universal properties hardwired into our highly
evolved human brains. For instance, in The stuff of thought: language as a win-
dow into human nature (one of several of his bestsellers), Pinker says that 'the
mind categorizes matter into discrete things (like a sausage ) and continuous
stuff (like meat )

...

' and thus acts as a 'language engine' (2007: 5, 117).
Note that Pinker talks about the mind, in the universal singular, and (in
his topic's subtitle) language as a window on to another (putative) univer-
sal singular ('human nature'). In the same spirit, the cognitive philosopher
Jerry Fodor suggests that people across the world possess a finite inventory
of 'innate concepts', which they apply routinely, regardless of culture or
location. Pinker and Fodor may well be correct (so too their famous fore-
bear Noam Chomsky), but the fact remains that an awful lot of discursive
diversity has existed in the world and still does. This much is evident from
linguistics, comparative anthropology and the history of human thought.
Whether the diversity is sui generis - a product of 'culture' in its various
forms as many ethnologists would argue - or a direct result of the latitude
built in to the 'universal grammar' discerned by Pinker and Fodor is a moot
point.