Making causal claims to inform policy

1. Making causal claims to inform policy • How do we create knowledge? • What exists in the human world that we can acquire knowledge about? • What are the philosophical orientations of researchers that guide their production of knowledge? • What is science?

2. How do we create knowledge: epistemology • An epistemology: • Is a group or individual’s knowledge system • Reflects what one can claim is knowable • Determines the type of knowledge claims we can make. • Two poles of epistemologies: • Mechanistic, scientific epistemologies • Contextual relationship-based epistemologies • Distinct contributions can be made by each

3. Mechanistic epistemology: what I can know is simply a matter of being objective. There are very few limits to what I can know using the scientific method. Prediction is a highly desired goal. Relational, contextual epistemology: what I can know is individual, but can be shared and transmitted socially. Prediction or generalization is not necessarily a goal or even desired. Context is more important.

4. Mechanistic epistemology: what I can know is simply a matter of being objective. There are very few limits to what I can know using the scientific method. Prediction is a highly desired goal.

5. Relational, contextual epistemology: what I can know is a consequence of context. Prediction is not always going to be possible. The here and now rather than universal rules determine what can be known.

8. What exists in the human world: ontology • An ontology is a specification of a conceptualization. • An ontology is a scheme for labeling entities and relating them to one another • How we label and relate things to each other influences how we know and understand them

9. Ontology • Scientific versus folk classification • Lagodon rhomboids (scientific name) • “Chopa espina” (common name in Mexico and Cuba) • “Chofer” (common name for old timers in Florida panhandle) • “Pinfish” (common name for wealthier newcomers in Florida panhandle)

10. Ontology • Categories and specifications are culturally specific • “Likelihood” • As in the likelihood of sea level rises or temperatures increase • Would these divisions in likelihood (top) above be equally relevant to everyone?

11. Ontology • Native versus non-native • Designation can be highly subjective • But which specification you take impacts future decisions about conservation

12. Philosophical orientations of scientists: explanatory reductionism • The position that the best scientific strategy is to attempt to reduce explanations to the smallest possible entities • Goal is to isolate mechanism and explain the whole in terms of its constituent parts

14. In explanatory reductionism, ecological methods are experimental. They attempt to reveal the properties of nature by separating the components from their wholeness to simplify the study and to facilitate the interpretation of results.

15. Philosophical orientations of scientists: explanatory holism • The philosophical perspective that parts of a whole are in intimate interconnection, such that they cannot exist independently of the whole, which is regarded as greater than the sum of its parts • Emphasis is on integration rather than reduction – thus experimental approaches are not as feasible

16. Explanatory holism • The economy, ecosystems, ant colonies, the brain, our immune systems - collections of living organisms or highly dynamic biological system can exhibit properties that do not reduce down to their individual parts

17. The Anthropocene

18. The ‘Good’ Anthropocene

19. The ‘Bad’ Anthropocene

20. Are you a technological optimist or a technological skeptic? • How you think about science and technology shapes what kind of Anthropocene we might have • But what is science, really?

21. The Science Wars • Series of intellectual exchanges, between scientific realists and postmodernists, about the nature of scientific theory and intellectual inquiry. • They took place principally in the United States in the 1990s in the academic and mainstream press

22. The Science Wars: statements to start fights • Our brains, with the abstract tools of mathematics, will be able to explain the full complexity of nature. • Rational knowledge of reality is not possible. • The natural world is a human artifact that takes shape only through the lens of culture. • We and our world may be real, but intelligible access to that reality is constructed and ultimately incomplete

25. The Science Wars Are (Mostly) Over

26. There is no one kind of ‘science’ • Science is not a singular discipline unified by common methods and concepts • Science involves many different practices and is not value free • Postmodernists need to work out what is right about science, not just what is wrong

27. Compromise position: post-positivism • Most ecologists and environmental scientists today would consider themselves post-positivist • They have embraced the idea that the social, the cultural, and the political is embedded, to various degrees, in the scientific enterprise.

28. Compromise position: post-positivism • Environmental science is “an engine, not a camera”. It does not merely register and represent the world, but also actively reshapes it by reconfiguring humans’ understanding of their place in “nature,”as well as informing policies, regulations, and legal decisions

29. Compromise position: post-positivism

30. Compromise positions: post-positivism • Restoration goals defined in terms of scientific concepts also inherently reflect cultural values

31. Allowed to restore spontaneously thru succession Restored with soil that was trucked in and planting of new vegetation

32. Compromise positions: post-positivism or post-normal science • How we define wilderness invokes cultural values, not just objective, universal scientific standards

34. The unfortunate legacy of the Science Wars • Postmodern skepticism has morphed into the political issue of alternative facts • No truth claims are possible • Scientific claims of merit dismissed