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Futures 35 (2003) 689–701
www.elsevier.com/locate/futures
Epistemological pluralism and the ‘politics of
choice’
S. Healy
∗
School of History and Philosophy of Science, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052,
Australia
Abstract
This paper argues that the destructive effects of the hegemony of scientific rationality on
society, culture and politics can be countered by an approach of ‘epistemological pluralism’
that legitimises and deploys other ways of knowing. Originally proposed as a matter of prag-
matic theory choice in the context of risk decisions (S.A. Healy, Journal of Risk Research, in
press) this paper discusses the ramifications of ‘epistemological pluralism’ for wider ‘knowl-
edge politics’ emphasising how it facilitates choice over the futures available to us. ‘Epistemo-
logical pluralism’ rests on the contention that epistemology is a matter of practice in which
issues of context, process and procedure and not metaphysical or ontological abstractions take
precedent. The focus on practice centres attention on the means by which knowledge is gener-
ated, disseminated and applied, and due process is then readily characterised in terms such as
those of openness, transparency and participation. The concluding discussion explores the
political implications of the legitimation of difference involved in a politics of knowledge
conceived along these lines.
“I would be tempted to say that we might be shifting slowly from an ideal of calculability
to a new ideal of descriptibility. Calculations allowed [us] to shortcut politics by ignoring
all of the externalities that were shed outside of the realm of what is to be calculated.
Capitalism itself, in this view, is one among many of the powerful ways of distributing
what is to be calculated—internalities—and what is not to be calculated—externalities. The
limits of capitalism as a mode of calculation—not as a mode of production—is that it
renders itself voluntarily very inefficient at calculating what it has left aside: unintended
consequences, entanglement, due process, externalities.” (B. Latour, Concepts and Trans-
formation 3 (112) (1998) 97–112).
2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
∗
Tel.: + 61-2-9385-1597; fax: + 61-2-9385-8003.
E-mail address:
s.healy@unsw.edu.au (S. Healy).
0016-3287/03/$ - see front matter
2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/S0016-3287(03)00022-3
690
S. Healy / Futures 35 (2003) 689–701
1. Introduction
Critical perspectives on science and of the impact of scientific rationality on
society, culture and politics are increasingly common and incisive. While such per-
spectives were a constant of post-enlightenment thought (e.g. Romanticism,
Nietzsche) and a significant factor in 20th century intellectual life (e.g. Weber, Heid-
egger, Habermas), the rapid post-WWII growth of humankind, human-made entities
and the accompanying deluge of impacts and ideas has generated quite distinctive
explanations of the contribution of science and scientific rationality to contemporary
problems. One set of these understandings, the environmental critique of industrial-
ism, provides a key motivation for this study. Another significant element in them,
the poststructuralist critique of the universalist and totalising claims of enlightenment
thought, provides another. While both these critiques share a common understanding
of the challenge created by the western intellectual tradition’s insistence on strictly
demarcating nature from culture (and more notably in the postructuralist tradition
fact from value, subject from object, male from female, etc.), much work remains
to be done in exploring the significance of the common ground they share [2]. In
particular, I adopt environmentalism’s commitment to fundamental structural change,
while from poststructuralism I take an emphasis on the significance of difference.
In this paper I aim to develop a perspective promoting positive structural change
that not only accommodates but positively encourages difference.
Encouraging difference, however, means far more than simply ‘freeing the voices’
in the sense of liberating the perspectives and interests currently stifled or repressed
by the status quo. Frameworks as diverse as post-normal science [3,4] and the risk
society [5] emphasise this necessity for a democratic approach to the generation
and application of knowledge. However they do this by uncritically reproducing
enlightenment inspired notions of knowledge that implicitly constrain and inhibit
pluralism. Among the most significant of these notions is the idea that knowledge
is representational in character. This gives substance to two key problematical fea-
tures of these frameworks. First it reinforces the notion that ‘democratic knowledge’
involves little more than the addition of democratic oversight and input to current
practices, and secondly that the application of the resultant knowledge is primarily
an instrumental matter. The challenge then becomes to optimally ensure desired out-
comes within democratic constraints. To this end we have ‘extended peer communi-
ties’ [3,4] and ‘reflexive scientisation’ [5]. Missing from these formulations, however,
is an appreciation of how knowledge doesn’t so much reflect a state of the world
but acts to shape it in ways that both facilitate and constrain action. Yes, “science
is indeed politics pursued by other means” [6, p. 111], but not so much, or only,
because of how it embodies particular, narrow social interests but because of how
it facilitates the exercise of power. Power, in this Foucauldian view, is not simply
something imposed from above by the powerful—to be readily dispersed by sharing
it among societal interests—but an effect of relations, which under contemporary
conditions are critically shaped by knowledge. The contemporary relations of sig-
nificance are rarely, however, merely inter-human but also crucially, and in addition,
embrace non-humans. This is not, although I support the notion, to simply promote
S. Healy / Futures 35 (2003) 689–701
691
inter-species solidarity but to indicate how many of our most pressing matters of
concern centre on complexes of people, politics, technologies and other ‘things’.
Whether these ‘things’ are prions, greenhouse gases or genetically manipulated
organisms, our world is shaped, and rapidly being shaped, by the decisions and
actions we take involving them. Crucial among the choices to be made about knowl-
edge then—if only we can bring ourselves to engage with them—are those about
which of these constellations of people and things, reflecting which relations of
power, we should bring into being.
While representational conceptions of knowledge are a constant of intellectual
history, it is with the development of modern science that they attained dominance.
From this time scientific knowledge was understood to reflect, and its content to
represent, an enduring, external material reality. Analogously, following this exemp-
lar, other knowledge has been similarly interpreted with the social sciences and
humanities, for example, widely conceived to reflect a social or cognitive reality.
The veracity of knowledge is then reduced to a simplistic and misleading notion—
that of truth. Either our knowledge accurately reflects reality—and is thus true—or
it doesn’t, and is thus rejected. Further if true, the reflection of an enduring, underly-
ing reality becomes proof of universality, such that our knowledge can be taken to be
applicable, perhaps with a little tinkering to account for context, just about anywhere,
anytime. Encouraging difference then becomes simply a matter of facilitating the
involvement of all legitimate stakeholders in existing processes for the production
and application of knowledge. However, if we grant that our knowledge doesn’tso
much reflect our world but acts to make it the way we take it to be, encouraging
difference becomes far more complex and challenging. Encouraging difference then
becomes not only a matter of involving all with a legitimate interest, but also cru-
cially of facilitating processes in which all relevant perspectives and insights, whether
conceived representationally or not, are accounted for. Before exploring the ‘knowl-
edge politics’ this might involve a Foucauldian account of scientific knowledge and
a related account of the interdependence of people and ‘things’ are briefly out-
lined below.
The philosopher of science Joseph Rouse has elaborated Foucault to describe how
the practical success and apparent universal validity of science result from an exten-
sion of the form and content of laboratory micro-worlds to the macro-world [7, ch
7].
1
In this account the veracity of science results not from its privileged access to
an enduring external reality but rather from its success in extending, and in effect
universalising, local constraints. Rouse graphically describes the way the imposition
of scientific discipline upon our macro-world structures and constrains the practical
choices available to us. Much of this discipline centres on taken for granted matters
such as the imposition of universal quantification via standardised measures and the
pervasive use of artificial and purified substances, never previously found in ‘nature’.
Rouse explains how this results in increasingly complex technical constructions
1
There is an interesting parallel in Beck’s [5] discussion of the contemporary proliferation of risk
arising from how the world has now become a laboratory.
692
S. Healy / Futures 35 (2003) 689–701
transplanted into simplified and controlled external environments with a constraint
of ‘natural buffering and self-regulation’ as a key consequence. This analysis illumi-
nates many of the challenges that confront us. The maintenance of both these techni-
cal constructions and simplified external environments requires human actions tied
closely to their demands and these ‘complex organised actions’ must be sustained
within narrow bounds. In some cases, such as with nuclear power, error or non-
compliance with these demands can have catastrophic consequences. This helps clar-
ify Beck’s paradox that ever more stringent scientific efforts at risk management act
to compound and proliferate risk rather than lessen it. While the systemic effects
Rouse describes remain largely opaque to representative understandings, and our
institutions that rely upon them, they produce a multiple intensification of risk. Risk
is compounded by: the increased instability of simplified environments and the tech-
nical constructions they contain; from non-compliance with their need for ‘complex
organised actions’; and in the necessity for ‘tight coupling’ [8] between them. How-
ever, while the status quo remains blind to the ‘normal accidents’ [8] to which this
all gives rise they not only persist but with ever greater consequence (e.g. Challenger,
Chernobyl,
2
BSE).
While this Foucauldian perspective usefully elucidates the dynamic and relational
nature of knowledge Actor Network Theory (ANT) goes further in clarifying the
ways in which people and things structure our world. In ANT entities both “..take
their form and acquire their attributes as a result of their relations with other entities”
[10, p. 3]. So distinctions, such as those of nature/culture and fact/value, that rep-
resentational perspectives take to reflect the order of things are understood in ANT
to result from the operation of relationships. Following Law [10, p. 3], we can dis-
tinguish two major features of ANT: ‘relational materiality’, which refers to the
notion that entities of all forms are maintained through their relations with other
entities, and ‘performativity’ that refers to how entities are “performed in, by, and
through those relations” [10, p. 4]. Reality then is constituted by the performance
of the relationships maintaining the entities that go to make it up. So, reinforcing a
correlating insight of Rouse [12,25], it is the practices constituting these relationships
that demand our attention rather than the entities themselves. Intrinsically partial
perspectives, such as those guided by traditional representational perspectives that
affirm either natural/material or human/social entities, engage only partially with
reality highlighting some aspects and downplaying or ignoring others. The ANT
theorist Bruno Latour [6] has argued that problems such as Ozone Depletion and
BSE proliferate today because the complex mixing and interplay of human and non-
human entities that constitute them are opaque to traditional perspectives. These
perspectives explain such problems by reference to either an underlying material
reality or the interests, political or otherwise, of those involved. However the most
noteworthy features of such problems centre upon complex mixtures of people and
‘things’. No wonder then, as Latour argues [6], that problems whose very essence
involves combinations we systematically deny continue to compound and proliferate.
2
Anticipated by Funtowicz and Ravetz [9] in their discussion of the Ch-Ch Syndrome.
S. Healy / Futures 35 (2003) 689–701
693
We should also not be surprised that, as Beck points out [5], their continued misdiag-
nosis as technical problems resolvable by narrow technical means results in further
‘unintended consequences’.
Facilitating informed involvement, choice and consent in the generation, dissemi-
nation and utilisation of knowledge is thus far more challenging than it is commonly
conceived to be. Recognition of the ways in which knowledge acts to shape our
world, culture, institutions and actions, and embroil us in complexes of both people
and things paints a complexity remote from the certainties conveyed by represen-
tational understandings. A key question then is if we do not have the guarantee of
a correlation to an underlying reality, that representational insights were intended to
deliver, how best can outcomes meeting the requirement for both functional effec-
tiveness and democratic legitimacy be delivered? This question provides the focus
of the following discussion. The following section explores the notion of ‘epistemo-
logical pluralism’, which was conceived to meet this challenge, while the choices
that its exercise might facilitate are taken up in the ensuing section.
2. Epistemological pluralism
The notion of ‘epistemological pluralism’ [11] was inspired as a counter to the
stance of ‘epistemic sovereignty’ advanced by Rouse [12,25] to describe the way
representational perspectives both maintain their authority and deny legitimacy to
rival perspectives. The thoroughly entrenched nature of ‘epistemic sovereignty’ is
graphically illustrated by how Beck in his prescriptions to counter some of ‘epistemic
sovereignty’s’ worst excesses in effect embodies and reflects it:
“Only when medicine opposes medicine, nuclear physics opposes nuclear physics,
human genetics opposes human genetics or information technology opposes infor-
mation technology can the future that is being brewed in the test tube become
intelligible and evaluable for the outside world” [5, p. 234]
3
‘Epistemic sovereignty’ not only depicts the prevalent contemporary culture of
expertise but also the way it lends itself to political purposes. Political decisions
legitimating the agri-industrial practices that resulted in BSE/vCJD, Nuclear Power,
and Genetically Manipulated Crops and Foods all depend upon a validation by
expertise. The continuing pervasiveness of ‘epistemic sovereignty’ thwarts attempts
to democratise knowledge and decision-making because the presumption of ‘sover-
eignty’ unavoidably marginalises other perspectives and views, embedding the power
relations underpinning the status quo. ‘Epistemological pluralism’ is intended as a
step in the direction of reconceptualising knowledge and, consequently, reconfiguring
3
Beck has since altered his position most notably with his espousal of pragmatic theory choice (which
has some correlations with ‘epistemological pluralism’) [13].
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