How Ecological Should Epistemology Be?

Ecology studies the dynamic interdependence of living systems. Ecological epistemology does the same, focusing on the living systems that generate knowledge. Epistemology, of course, should be ecological, since knowledge is almost always generated in the living systems comprising shared forms of life and we cannot sensibly study such systems apart from their dynamic interdependence. In short, I accept Lorraine Code's premise that knowledge is embodied in interdependent living systems and the obvious inference that epistemology should be ecological. The alternative view that we can understand how we know what we know by reasoning a priori faces insuperable problems, as W. V. Quine among others has made abundantly clear, and fails to explain our ordinary experience of coming to know something. So, let me say at the outset that I fully endorse her new and arresting vision of epistemology. Epistemic ecology is a rich and evocative metaphor that Code uses subtly and creatively to alter our thinking about knowledge. From her perspective, and now mine as well, there are no limits on how ecological epistemology can and should be.

Unless we can be much more specific, however, this splendid metaphor may not have the transforming effect it should have. Let us then be more specific. Here are five central ways in which epistemology, in her vision of it, is ecological: (1) Our best knowledge of living systems is not reductive in the sense of knowledge arising purely from knowing their parts. Living systems cannot be fully known independent of their natural environment, and the same for those living systems that generate knowledge. (2) Living systems cannot be fully understood by applying universal laws of nature, as required by the nomological-deductive model of scientific knowledge, thereby ignoring the ways in which the living systems may display patterns of behavior unique to their environment. The same can be said at the epistemic level for systems that generate knowledge. (3) The primary sites of knowledge generation are not individual organisms, as is usually assumed. (4) Knowledge generation almost always depends on an evaluative environment that contains nonepistemic values. (5) Epistemology must be reflexive and treat the activity of explaining knowledge as itself worthy of study as an embodied, living activity interdependent with nonepistemic activities.

Code endorses all five claims in myriad different ways—though, I hasten to add, in ways more expressive and nuanced and contextualized to specific literatures and debates than these statements suggest. Nevertheless, there is some merit, I hope, in setting the claims forth here more simply than she has in order to assess how ecological her thinking about knowledge is. Each of the five claims is by my lights true and at least approximates a key part of her new vision of epistemology that I endorse. That said, I find each of them in tension with her general dismissal of mainstream epistemology and philosophy of science. We need, I think, to examine the ecological niche into which her theory fits. Though Code's overall vision is new and important, she tends, especially in her early chapters, to treat the "epistemologies of mastery," as she calls them (2006, 129), as forming a monolithic opposing frame of reference (for example, 11, 29–30, 41, 47, 69, 81, 97–98, 102, 129–30), whereas in truth an ecological approach to epistemology contains within it common ground with its mainstream predecessors at all five of these key points.

I do not want to overstate the case. Code does acknowledge connections, most notably similarities with Quine's naturalized epistemology in which knowledge is treated as thoroughly embodied and epistemology itself treated as part of the natural world and worthy of investigation as such. Moreover, I do not wish to suggest that those who revel in "hegemonic practices of mastery" (29) would be keen to dwell on the similarities to which I now want to call attention. Nevertheless, she has some tendency to treat epistemology in the mainstream as, for the most part, fundamentally mistaken in its understanding of how knowledge is possible and as having little insight to offer emancipatory, postcolonial theory of knowledge. Granted, it is typical of proponents of mainstream...