REPRESENTING NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 41

the world has been organised such that you've depended, and continue to
depend, on a plethora of complete strangers to enlighten you. In your view,
why is there little or no alternative to this 'epistemic dependence'?
The answers to my study question are, I believe, not hard to seek. First,
we live in an age of specialists. A highly elaborate division of mental (and
manual) labour is a hallmark of 'developed' societies worldwide. This means
that each of us can only lay claim to competence, let alone 'expertise', in
relatively limited areas of knowledge and action. Pick up a Yellow Pages in
any town or city and one is quickly reminded of this fact. The totality of
information, understanding and experience that we as individuals want (or
are encouraged to want) far exceeds that which we could accumulate if left
purely to our own devices. As Nora Jacobson so nicely put it, today 'it's
impossible for any one person to know everything - or even to know what
it is that he or she doesn't know!' (Jacobson, 2007: 122).
Second, and relatedly, we live in an era where 'credentials' count for a
lot. While complex divisions of labour are hardly new, the very idea of a
'knowledge society' (see Box 2.1 ) demands that citizens and workers not
only become more knowledgeable than their forebears over a lifetime but
certifiably so. In order to instruct, offer specialist knowledge to, or do par-
ticular things for other people, one is increasingly expected to possess the
'right' training and to have sufficient 'hands on' experience as a practitioner.
This expectation, notwithstanding its very obvious benefits, creates barriers
to thought and action. It defines 'insiders' and 'outsiders' and renders the
latter 'amateurs', 'autodidacts' or even 'incompetents'.
Third, even if these barriers did not exist, it takes a lot of time and energy
for any of us to become polymaths. The time and energy required increases
in proportion to how detailed the division of mental and manual labour
in any society becomes. It's far easier to be the recipients of others' knowl-
edge, ideas, inventions or wisdom - though it helps a lot if we have reasons
to trust those others implicitly, or to regard them as otherwise credible,
admirable, likeable or talented. Of course, we do not have to be passive recip-
ients, but the point is that we are not authors of that which we receive from
myriad 'epistemic workers'. To summarise, in the early twenty-first-century
world, we have organised the production and consumption of information,
knowledge and experience so as to render 'epistemic dependence' a signature
characteristic of our lives . 2
I borrow this term from the American philosopher John Hardwig (1985),
who published an essay of this name in 1985. In this context, there's some-
thing touchingly naïve about science historian John Dupré's insistence that
'our belief in . . . things should be grounded, ultimately, on experience'
(Dupré, 1993: 42). Dupré is searching for a foundation upon which our
knowledge or belief may rest secure, however temporarily. His empiricism
recalls an 1877 essay by mathematician William Clifford, well known to