REPRESENTING NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 42

philosophy students. Entitled The ethics of belief , the essay advanced the
Humean argument that 'It is wrong, always, everywhere and for anyone,
to believe anything on insufficient evidence' (Clifford, 1877/1879: 5). But
because we routinely rely on others to have direct experience on our behalf,
or to give it to us in some organised form (e.g. via a television programme),
what Dupré really means to say is that we ground our beliefs in the experi-
ence of people who ( pace Clifford) assemble 'sufficient evidence' for us. In
effect, these people become our proxies or stand ins without us nominating
them to be our representative s. 3 As I'll argue later in this chapter and later in
the topic (see Chapter 4 ), this even applies to what appears to be 'first-hand'
experience, where we apprehend the world in a seemingly 'unmediated' way
with our own bodily senses.
Why do I favour the term 'epistemic communities' to describe those
upon which we are all so dependent, and what does it mean? It was coined
by policy analyst Peter Haas (1992). Despite its cerebral overtones, it was
not intended to apply exclusively to groups of professional philosophers
or university academics more generally. Though Haas was interested in
how 'expert' communities of government advisers - possessed of special-
ist (and thus scarce) knowledge - shape international political agreements,
his definition of epistemic communities was somewhat ecumenical:

Although an epistemic community may consist of professionals from a variety
of disciplines and backgrounds, they have (1) a shared set of normative and
principled beliefs, which provide a value-based rationale for the social action
of community members; (2) shared causal beliefs, which are derived from their
analysis of practices leading or contributing to a central set of problems in their
domain

...

; (3) shared notions of validity - that is, inter-subjective, internally-
defined criteria for weighing and validating knowledge in the domain of their
expertise.

(Haas, 1992: 3)

Glossing, Haas's key point is that different epistemic communities gain
their distinctiveness, and sense of self-identity, through a mixture of their
value-set, ontological beliefs, questions of interest, objects/domains of con-
cern, methods of inquiry, the criteria favoured for determining worthy ideas,
knowledge or information, and their chosen genre of communication. This
mixture determines both 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'. As I suggested in Chapter 1 , most
epistemic communities also discourse with each other, and the rest of us, in
distinctive languages.
Haas's epistemic communities don't do what they do only for themselves.
Instead, other groups need, or feel they need, to utilise and rely on their
insights or incitements. If we extend the reach of Haas's definition away
from exclusively 'expert' communities of 'professionals' in the arena of policy
and politics, we can usefully encompass all those groups whose information,