Table Of ContentWho Speaks for Nature?
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WHO SPEAKS FOR
NATURE?
On the Politics of Science
Laura Ephraim
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used
for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this
book may be reproduced in any form by any means without
written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104 - 4112
www . upenn . edu / pennpress
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Ephraim, Laura, author.
Title: Who speaks for nature? : on the politics of science / Laura Ephraim.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press,
[2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017026854 | ISBN 9780812249811 (hardcover :
alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Science— Political aspects. | Science— Philosophy. |
Pol iti cal science— Philosophy. | Natu ral history— Philosophy. |
Nature— Political aspects.
Classification: LCC Q175.5 .E64 2018 | DDC 303.48/3— dc23
LC reco rd available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2017026854
CONTENTS
Introduction. The Science Question in Po liti cal Theory 1
Chapter 1. Earth to Arendt 34
Chapter 2. Vico’s World of Nature 68
Chapter 3. Descartes and Democracy 92
Chapter 4. Hobbes’s Worldly Geometry of Politics 116
Epilogue. Science and Politics at the End of the World 141
Notes 151
Bibliography 171
Index 181
Acknowl edgments 187
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Introduction: The Science Question
in Po liti cal Theory
When scientists speak publicly about things they have observed, mea sured,
and analyzed in the lab or the field, their words carry special weight. Unlike
more casual observers of the physical milieu— patients, m others, poets, gar-
deners, laborers, cloud watchers— natu ral scientists are regarded as authori-
ties when it comes to their objects of study. To acknowledge this much is not
to deny that the authority of science and scientists can be challenged— for
example, when citizens from Woburn, Mas sa chu setts, created a “leukemia
map” to refute experts’ repeated claims that the toxic waste in their commu-
nity was benign, or when members of ACT UP chanted “W e’re here to show
defiance for what Harvard calls good science” while protesting the protocols
and priorities of AIDS researchers.1 But as such activists understand better
than anyone, citizen movements face an uphill battle when they contest a
scientific consensus. Today, the authority of the natu ral sciences— and the
stakes of movements to support, co- opt, or erode that authority— are all the
more vis i ble in light of the twin dangers of climate change and climate de-
nial. Global movements for environmental justice and sustainability seek to
buttress the authority of the natu ral sciences, recognizing that this author-
ity may be the last best hope in the strug gle for earth’s future against mon-
eyed fossil- fuel interests.2 Meanwhile, these interests spend lavishly to sow
doubt about the climate science consensus, suggesting that they, too, recog-
nize the authority of science as a formidable obstacle to their agenda.3 If the
question that frames this book, Who Speaks for Nature?, is seldom asked di-
rectly in t hese strug gles, or in academic and po liti cal debates more gener-
ally, perhaps this is because the answer is obvious: scientists do.
But if scientists’ capacity to speak authoritatively on behalf of the mate-
rial environment seems almost self- evident, it is far less apparent how
this authority comes to be established, sustained, and eroded, and under
2 Introduction
what conditions it is successfully vested in or wrested from the natu ral sci-
ences. From where do scientific experts derive their enduring— though
contestable— capacity to give voice to nature? How do communities come to
be configured around the acknowl edgment that (some) po liti cal actors (and
not others) speak for the ele ments and energies of the material milieu and
the flesh of h uman and nonhuman bodies? What practices on the parts of
scientists and nonscientists establish and erode the bound aries circum-
scribing who counts as a legitimate spokesperson for which t hings, and
whose speech is heard as idle chatter, “mere” opinion, or noise? This book
sets out to dispel the aura of inevitability surrounding the authority of the
natu ral sciences by interrogating the po liti cal origins, sources, and limits of
that authority. In t hese pages, I elaborate a novel account of the po liti cal
conditions of possibility that render certain natu ral phenomena speakable
and that decide who may and may not speak on their behalf. By uncovering
the po liti cal constitution of scientific authority, I aim to foster a deeper un-
derstanding of the contingency and the resiliency of that authority and,
thereby, to inform and inspire ongoing movements to bolster, contest, or
reshape it for demo cratic and ecological ends.
One obstacle to posing “the science question” in po liti cal theory in terms
of the po liti cal constitution of scientific authority is the widespread assump-
tion that scientists— unlike most po liti cal actors— primarily derive their au-
thority from the truth of the things they say.4 Within this epistemological
framing, scientific authority is understood to be founded, in princi ple, on
validity. In practice, this is usually taken to mean that scientists earn special
trust from the public insofar as they restrict themselves to making claims
about nature that have been verified to a high degree of certainty using a sci-
entific method, that is, systematically testing hypotheses against carefully
gathered evidence. We can see this epistemological interpretation of scien-
tific authority at work, for example, when environmentalists cast their alle-
giance to science as an almost compulsory form of deference to overwhelming
quantities of evidence; we even see it when climate deniers cast their reluc-
tance to defer as a way of conforming with the scientific method’s injunc-
tion to doubt and retest seeming certainties.5 The tendency to conflate natu ral
scientific authority with epistemological validity has also shaped genera-
tions of critical scholarship on the natu ral sciences in the humanities and
the social sciences: Post- positivist philosophies of science have deflated con-
fidence in the capacity of method to guarantee correspondence between sci-
entists’ linguistic claims and the real ity to which they are supposed to
Introduction 3
correspond.6 And in history, sociology, anthropology, and the interdisci-
plinary field of science and technology studies (STS), scholars have unveiled
unseemly discrepancies between the ascetic prescriptions of the scientific
method and the messy imbrications of a ctual natu ral scientists in patriar-
chal, racist, colonial, heteronormative, and other wise troubling social and
pol iti cal relations.7 The prevalence of these “debunking strategies,” as Lor-
raine Daston calls them, reflects the widespread expectation that to debunk
is to deauthorize—in other words, that the best way to defuse abusive ver-
sions of scientific authority is to reveal the irreducible, invalidating influence
of interests, norms, and power upon scientific practices and discourses.8
Yet the authority of the natu ral sciences has largely survived t hese de-
bunking gestures, suggesting that this authority cannot be adequately ex-
plained by epistemological considerations alone. Indeed, many of the very
same scholars who embrace the post- positivist view that e very scientific fact
comes laden with values are also convinced of the importance of heeding and
amplifying the voices of scientists when it comes to climate change. Th ese
positions only seem incongruous with one another if we assume that the au-
thority of science stands or falls on the strength of its validity.9 By moving
beyond a narrow epistemological framing of this authority, we can better
understand why the belief that all science is socially constructed usually does
not— and should not— move believers to remove the Darwin fish decals
(ubiquitous emblems of deference to science) from their fuel- efficient
cars. Neither the healthy skepticism of post- positivism nor the cynical skep-
ticism of climate denial has succeeded in eradicating natu ral science’s
authority, because this authority also draws from nonepistemological wells.
These are the wells that interest me in this book.
Accordingly, I largely leave to one side questions about whether and how
scientists know what they (claim to) know. These are impor tant and engross-
ing questions, but they already take up too much oxygen in discussions of
science and politics, and their prevalence unfortunately tends to incline even
astute questioners to treat politics as little more than an invalidating dalli-
ance. In place of the familiar epistemological questions, I open neglected
lines of inquiry into whether and how po liti cal activity serves as an enabling
condition for scientists to do what they do when they speak for nature. Be-
yond the methodological rigor of scientists’ research, what habits, practices,
disciplines, or comportments—on the part of t hose who do and do not
have keys to the lab— render some efforts to give voice to nature more felici-
tous or legible than others? Though the question of whether scientists are
