Scientists sometimes deceive themselves into thinking that philosophical ideas are only, at best, de

1
Scientists sometimes deceive themselves into
thinking that philosophical ideas are only, at
best, decorations or parasitic commentaries on
the hard, objective triumphs of science, and that
they themselves are immune to the confusions that
philosophers devote their lives to dissolving.
2
But there is no such thing as philosophy-free
science, there is only science whose
philosophical baggage is taken on board without
examination. Daniel Dennett
3
Bryan Norton has just given us all due cause why
the examination of that philosophical baggage
needs to be comprehensively and urgently done, if
sustainability and sustainable development are to
be concepts-in-action that are useful.
4
Bryan turns out to be an epistemic wolf in the
clothes of an ethics sheep.
5
His Ethics and Sustainable Development demands
of us not just an examination of our ethical
baggage, but of a whole constellation of
philosophical concerns Ethical Epistemological
Ontological Methodological
6
Among the ethical challenges he poses, is how we
decide what is valuable about nature.
And what it means to accept a plurality of values
from the purely selfish through to the
spiritual.
7
QUESTION How do we, as citizens, do that when,
as Larry Busch and others have argued, we have
lost the art of moral discourse through
abdicating our moral judgments to one or more of
the great leviathans of the State, the Market,
and indeed to Science itself? Or as Jurgens
Habermas would have it, our life-worlds have been
colonized by instrumental rationality?
8
Among the epistemological challenges that Bryan
presents is his call for the integration of
fact-discourse with value-discourse in the policy
process, reflecting their inseparability in the
ordinary discourse in which citizens discuss and
evaluate their environments.
And following the tradition of the pragmatists he
advocates a pragmatic epistemology for
environmental science and policy discourse, a
discourse conducted so as to maximize social
learning among participants.
9
QUESTION How do we, as citizens, adopt a fresh
epistemology when, as Gregory Bateson claimed a
while ago now, most of us do not even know that
we have an epistemology, let alone know what it
is.
10
QUESTION
And how do we learn how to learn socially when,
as Carl Rogers claimed we have lost the freedom
to learn or as Edgar Dunn suggested, we do not
know how to learn socially? Or as our
institutions of higher education insist, learning
is an individual competency, and the purpose of
education is passive knowledge acquisition and
not intellectual, moral, or epistemic
development?
11
Thirdly there are shades of a radical ontological
challenge in Bryans example, paraphrasing Aldo
Leopold, of the power of thinking (being?) like
a watershed and of the notion, from hierarchy
and systems theorists and from the second order
cyberneticians, that all observations and
evaluation of systems are taken from a particular
perspective within the physical hierarchy the
systems of embedded systems in which we ourselves
are embedded .
12
QUESTION
How can we learn to think holistically, like a
mountain or a watershed effectively learn to
be as a system in a culture which privileges
reductionism and postivism, eschews deliberative
judgment, celebrates conquest, and lionizes
individualism?
13
There are shades here too of the holistic mode
of consciousness promoted by the polymath Johann
von Goethe who called for a science of the
wholeness of nature that can only be understood
by experiencing it from the inside as
participants in the way of seeing instead of mere
onlookers.
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Supra system
System
Sub system
15
Epistemic
Supra system
Cognition
Meta
System
Cognition
Sub system
Cognition
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By recognizing that we can learn from
experience, and by developing multiple criteria
associated with different scales, it is possible
for a community.to learn itself into a new set
of indicators, a new set of concerns, and a whole
new understanding of their place and the space
around that place.
Bryan Norton