HI 100 / WR 100 R. S. Deese Boston University Fall, 2009

Cast your vote NOW in BEST PARAGRAPH SMACKDOWN!!!

Monday, November 2, 2009

Rough Draft of Paper 3

Josh Kraskin

Carolyn Merchant once wrote “science is an ongoing negotiation with nonhuman nature for what counts as reality. Scientists socially construct nature, representing it differently in different historical epochs.” (Merchant, p. 4) Throughout history, there have been varying views about the relationship between humans and the environment. Myths, religion, pseudoscience, and empirical science have all been used to explain how man should interact with nature. In Ecological Revolutions, Merchant provides a valid argument that man has constructed various views of nature throughout ancient, colonial, and modern times.

Merchant begins her argument by discussing the views of ancient civilizations. She explains that nature “was an actress on the stage of history” and “the bringer of life, fertility, famine, and death.” (Merchant, p. 5-7) Merchant is trying to convey that through this pagan and animistic perspective, ancient peoples had a spiritual view of nature, seeing it as something to be both worshipped and feared. They believed nature to be something eternal; they knew it had existed long before they had, and would continue to do so after they were gone.’

The dawn of the seventeenth century marked the beginning of the Scientific Revolution. From this point forward, views about nature had changed quite drastically; Merchant states that they believed that they “world itself is a clock, adjustable by human clockmakers. Nature is passive and manipulabe.” (Merchant, p. 7) This perspective asserts that man is above nature and has every right to manipulate his environment to his benefit. It is this mindset that fueled many of the actions taken by Western nations during the ages of colonialism, imperialism and industrialization. These views differ greatly from those of their pagan ancestors who saw nature as alive and active as opposed to “dead” and “inert.” (Merchant, p. 7)

Modern perspectives on nature have integrated both mechanistic and primitive views about the environment. While man still utilizes natural resources for his own gain, it is done with respect and the knowledge that humans are a part of nature; our own survival is very much dependant on the well being of our environment. Merchant recognizes this fact when citing Marx: “man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.” (Merchant, p. 10) Marx specifically mentions the word “interchange”, which is defined as “to give and receive reciprocally.” This means that if man is to take from nature, he must also give back; for example, if one cuts down a tree in a forest, one must plant another in its place. Another change in the views on nature in the modern era is the way that nature is seen as a synergistic system or “network” in which “economic metaphors such as producers, consumers, productivity, yields, and efficiency” are used to explain how the different element of ecology interact. (Merchant, p. 9) Merchant further explains that “nature is cast as a computerized network of energy inputs and information bits that can be extracted from the environmental context and manipulated according to a set of thermodynamic equations.” (Merchant, p. 9) This trend of breaking down individual parts of a large system to try and analyze and understand the bigger picture seems to be a growing trend in the twenty-first century.

Merchant’s recurring thesis is that science is socially constructed. She believes that man does not actually know what reality is; therefore he creates his own definitions of what is real and what isn’t, based on the culture and beliefs of society at the time. For example, throughout the Middle Ages, Western civilization was dominated by the views of the Church. The geocentric model of the universe, where the universe revolved around the Earth, was proclaimed to be true by the Church, and therefore accepted as a scientific fact, despite being proven to be false several centuries later. Merchant explains how even modern empirical sciences, like ecology, are socially constructed. She writes: “ the ecological paradigm is a socially constructed theory. Although it differs from mechanism by taking relations, context, and networks into consideration, it has no greater or lesser claim to some ultimate truth status than do other scientific paradigms.” (Merchant, p. 8) She continues by explaining how “both mechanism and ecology construct their theories through a socially sanctioned process of problem identification, selection and deselection of particular ‘facts,’ inscription of the selected facts into texts, and the acceptance of a constructed order of nature by the scientific community.” (Merchant, p. 8-9) In both of these statements Merchant stresses that even the scientific method, which is considered to be an acceptable way of ascertaining the truth, is socially constructed.

Truth and reality are intangible, ambiguous objects that philosophers, scientists, and various other academics have attempted to contemplate for millennia. It is incredibly difficult to distinguish what actually is from what we perceive. What if everything we believed to be real was nothing more than a fabrication, as depicted in The Matrix? While it seems safe to assume that we are not living inside of a virtual reality created by machines, what can we really know for sure? Descartes believed that he discovered the one, sure truth when he stated: “I think, therefore I am.” While Carolyn Merchant would most likely not argue that thinking is socially constructed, she is quite sure that the majority of science is. While this may have been true in the past, and may still be true to some extent today, I believe that humans have progressed enough both technologically and socially to be sure of at least several scientific facts. We can be sure that the Earth will always orbit around the sun; we can be sure that a living person’s heart will always be beating; we can be sure that an object dropped from a high place will always fall to the ground. These ideas are not socially constructed; they have been true before humans were around to observe them, and will continue to be true after we are gone.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Search This Blog

Followers

By 2050, the world will:

"Science is not a process of discovering the ultimate truths of nature, but a social construction that changes over time." Carolyn Merchant. Radical Ecology (Routledge, 1992) pg. 236

"Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses." Emerson

RATE IT: "Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. . ." Henry David Thoreau

RATE IT: “Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.” Stewart Brand

Blog Archive