Manufactured Uncertainty

Lorraine Code

Description

In this provocative work, Lorraine Code returns to the idea of "epistemic responsibility," as developed in her influential 1987 book of the same name, to confront the telling new challenges we now face to know the world with some sense of responsibility to other "knowers" and to the sustaining, nonhuman world. Manufactured Uncertainty focuses centrally on the environmental and cultural crises arising from postindustrial, man-made climate change, which have spawned new forms of passionately partisan social media that directly challenge all efforts to know with a sense of collective responsibility. How can we agree to act together, Code asks, even in the face of inevitable uncertainty, given the truly life-threatening stakes of today's social and political challenges? How can we engage responsibly with those who take every argument for an environmentally grounded epistemology as an unacceptable challenge to their assumed freedoms, comforts, and "rights?" Through searching critical dialogue with leading epistemologists, cultural theorists, and feminist scholars, this book poses a timely challenge to all thoughtful knowers who seek to articulate an expanded and deepened sense of epistemic responsibility—to a human society and a natural world embraced, together, in the most inclusive spirit.
Foreword
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Epistemic Responsibility, Now

2. Doubt and Denial: Epistemic Responsibility Meets Climate Change Skepticism

3. Care, Concern, and Advocacy: Is There a Place for Epistemic Responsibility?

4. Particularity, Epistemic Responsibility, and the Ecological Imaginary

5. How to Think Globally, Revisited: Or, A Plea for Ignorance

Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Human geography

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438480558
• Langue: English

Extrait

Manufactured
Uncertainty
Manufactured
Uncertainty
Implications for Climate Change Skepticism
Lorraine Code
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Code, Lorraine, author.
Title: Manufactured uncertainty : implications for climate change skepticism / Lorraine Code.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020018292 | ISBN 9781438480534 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438480541 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438480558 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Climatic changes—Philosophy. | Environmental responsibility. | Knowledge, Sociology of.
Classification: LCC QC903 .C59 2020 | DDC 363.738/7401—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018292
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For the next generation:
Michaela Code
Graeme Playfair
Sophia Code
Iain Playfair
Aubrey McCance
… in their quests for the pleasures and promises of certainty in uncertain times
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 Epistemic Responsibility, Now
Chapter 2 Doubt and Denial: Epistemic Responsibility Meets Climate Change Skepticism
Chapter 3 Care, Concern, and Advocacy: Is There a Place for Epistemic Responsibility?
Chapter 4 Particularity, Epistemic Responsibility, and the Ecological Imaginary
Chapter 5 How to Think Globally, Revisited: Or, A Plea for Ignorance
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
The essays collected here address a cluster of puzzles, possibilities, and conundrums that emerge in and from current Anglo-American epistemological practices.
They derive from thinking about responsible epistemic conduct in the twenty-first century Western/Northern urban world, where questions about objectivity and abstraction are claiming less attention than they once did and where more concrete epistemic practices—the local specificities of knowing in and about the world—claim a new salience. Matters of objectivity, separated from quotidian practices of knowing and understanding well, are less central to the issues addressed in these essays than are questions about how to reconceive the ancient idea of “virtuous knowledge” for lives diversely situated within the contested social-political orders of the Anglo-American urban world as we now find it. In such inquiry, the irreducible particularities of human lives and situations demand empathetic attention as the traditionally abstract epistemic agent recedes from view, and diverse, hitherto marginalized ways of knowing urgently claim a key role in contemporary debate.
—Lorraine Code
Acknowledgments
I owe thanks and gratitude to so many who have participated in bringing this book to completion.
I am indebted to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) for the research grant that supported my work throughout the book.
Jamie Robertson’s intelligent and capable participation as a research assistant throughout its writing and production contributed immeasurably to its completion. Without her assistance it would not have emerged in its present form.
Paula Butler prepared the index for this volume.
My son David Code has provided invaluable editorial assistance and thoughtful advice from beginning to end, and Jacqueline Code’s moral support has seen me through moments of doubt.
Murray Code, as always, has made its final emergence possible.
Introduction
T he purpose of this book is to engage with some of the most urgent epistemological and ontological effects of public skepticism and doubt in relation to climate change, in the twenty-first-century Western-Northern world and beyond, viewing these effects through a lens focused on entrenched but often misguided assumptions about how such matters can responsibly be known, lived, engaged. Harms across a broad social, political, demographic, and geographic spectrum consequent upon industrial pollution, tobacco smoking, global warming, ecological devastation, and a vast range of interconnected private and public practices encouraged and condoned by such doubts, are much in the public eye in the twenty-first century. They are impressively analyzed and debated in Naomi Oreskes’s and Eric Conway’s 2010 book Merchants of Doubt : a text that figures centrally among the catalysts for this engagement with such practices. 1 It is the source of the title: “Manufactured Uncertainty,” which is intended as a challenge to socially embedded assumptions about the taken for granted “certainty”—the rarely contested “reliability”—of publicly announced and analysed scientific findings related to “environmental”/ecological matters in many twenty-first-century Western-Northern societies and academic institutions.
The term “environmental” is itself contestable in that it centers “us”—we human beings—who are the very people who invoke it: hence the reflections to follow favor a language of ecology/ “ecological,” wherever it is feasible/plausible. 2 Most significantly, I intend to show, such ongoing harms attest to deep-seated social-political-ontological assumptions about who we are—we who pose such questions—and about how we understand and enact our place(s) in the world. Their significance for feminist-, race-, place-, class-specific and other interconnected areas of twenty-first-century theory and practice remains underexamined: it is here that many of these interventions will focus. When skeptics appeal to a margin of uncertainty in climate change science, with the aim of generating and fueling incredulity and justifying resistance to regulating social and individual behaviors, they commonly defend a conception of freedom—of Liberty—assumed uncontestably to be theirs, to pertain universally, and to be unjustly threatened by contentions that they cannot/should neither consume nor pollute as they will. Hence this text engages with some of the damaging effects of lived assumptions about freedom and entitlement in the twenty-first-century Western world: assumptions which vary across human and situational-circumstantial diversity, yet whose cumulative effects are reciprocally reinforcing. These engagements invoke ethical-political questions about epistemic responsibility (a responsibility to know carefully and well): they prompt fundamental yet diverse ontological questions about who “we” are and how “we” can live responsibly, together and separately, in the human, natural, and social-political world. A principal goal of this project, then, is to generate a rethinking of (often tacit) socially and philosophically entrenched convictions about universal human sameness, about “our” entitlement to consume and pollute as “we” will, and about responsibilities—epistemic responsibilities—to know carefully and well. A guiding hope is that it will prompt educators and activists to engage in deliberations/disputations that could animate radical shifts in the sedimented policies and practices that govern quotidian and public-political action in the affluent white Western world, especially where (contestable) assumptions about human “sameness” prevail, too often with coercive consequences.
In short, these thoughts generate probing questions about who “we” think we are : we who write, and think, and speak as diversely educated and multiply privileged members of affluent twenty-first-century societies: we who, across a wide range of significant senses, have made the world for which we are now accountable. “We” need urgently to find/discover/craft ways of restoring and preserving that world for people who are not so fortunate: for the ignored and oppressed; for future people, species, and less affluent, neither secure nor privileged populations who must live with the effects—the consequences—be they positive or negative, of “our” ways of living. Here, social justice is an overarching issue. Thus, the framing of this inquiry is ethical-epistemological-ontological-political. It is articulated from a position shaped by feminist and postcolonial engagements in recognizing that knowing responsibly and well, singly or collectively, is sine qua non for responsible social action now —where “responsible” incorporates responsiveness and recognition in engaging with people, places, practices, theories, things, and situations “on their own terms,” so far as this is possible. A central contrast is with practices of superimposing categories and explanations that subsume differences under preformed classifications, with inadequate attention to how an appropriate “fit” could or should be achieved. In its commitments to thinking communally, socially, collaboratively, cooperatively— even contrarily —across human, other than human, and situational differences, the position I will articulate eschews the radical individualism of Western philosophy and social theory to focus on knowing/knowledge making as a cluster of socially enacted practices.
Rethinking and reenacting who we are in ways sufficiently powerful to dislodge these sedimented convictions is the hardest yet the most urgent task for this inquiry, as it is, if perhaps tacitly, throughout the wor