the social construction of nature: relativist accusations

The Social Construction of Nature:Relativist Accusations, Pragmatist and

Critical Realist ResponsesJames D. Proctor

Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara

Social constructivists argue that what we call “nature” is far less universal and extrahuman thangenerally assumed. Yet this argument has been vigorously attacked by some natural scientists andother scholars due to what they perceive as its dangerous flirtation with relativism. I introduce thisdebate by reference to a recent controversy over the concept of wilderness, an important icon ofnature in North America. I then define several forms of relativism, and compare two contemporarybodies of thought that are in broad agreement with social constructivism, yet do not promote strongforms of relativism: critical realism and pragmatism. For its part, critical realism is marked by aqualified, though vigorous, rejection of strong forms of relativism in understanding nature, whereaspragmatism involves more of an agnostic response, a sense that the so-called problem of relativismis not as serious as critics of the social-construction-of-nature argument would believe. Takentogether, the two approaches offer more than either one alone, as they both suggest important truthsabout nature, albeit generally at different scales. Ultimately, pragmatists and critical realists alikeadmit that all knowledges are partial and a certain degree of relativism is thus unavoidable; yet theyboth, in a sort of tense complementarity, point to ways that geographers and others whose businessand concern it is to represent nature can indeed have something to say. Key Words: nature, wilder-ness, social constructivism, relativism, critical realism, pragmatism.

Nature is nothing if it is not social (Smith 1990:30).

What is beyond our own skin actually exists. But this“environment” is largely what we make of it, with allthe ambiguities inherent in the word “make” (Sim-mons 1993:3).

What happens to environmentalist concerns whenthe object of those concerns, the thing for the sakeof which one speaks—nature, wild lands, ani-mals—begins to lose its status as an object, a given,already set thing to which we can refer as if we werenot involved in its construction? (Bennett and Cha-loupka 1993b:xvi).

Anew environmental villain has arisen inrecent times. This villain is not of theusual sort—the noxious factory belching

smoke onto a despoiled landscape, the greedyresource-extractive industry laying bare themountainside. The newest enemy of the naturalworld is far different in form, yet apparently equalin threat, at least as judged by the tone of itsdetractors. Consider—as but one noteworthy ex-ample—the 1995 publication, Reinventing Na-

ture? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction,whose editors, conservation biologist MichaelSoulé and historian Gary Lease, summarize theirproject as follows:

This multidisciplinary volume is a response tocertain radical forms of “postmodern decon-structionism” [sic] that question the conceptsof nature and wilderness, sometimes in order tojustify further exploitative tinkering with whatlittle remains of wildness. . . . We feel the threatsto nature are now so grave that the prudentcourse is to directly challenge some of the rheto-ric. . . . The so-called deconstructionist view . . .asserts that all we can ever perceive about theworld are shadows, and that we can never escapeour particular biases and fixed historical-culturalpositions. . . . The opposing view . . . assumes thatthe world, including its living components, reallydoes exist apart from humanity’s perceptions andbeliefs about it. [The contributors] agree1 thatcertain contemporary forms of intellectual andsocial relativism can be just as destructive tonature as bulldozers and chain saws (Soulé andLease 1995:xv-xvi).

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 88(3), 1998, pp. 352–376©1998 by Association of American GeographersPublished by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.

I will refer to this villain by a slightly differentname: social constructivism. Though socialconstructivism includes a variety of arguments(Demeritt 1996; Entrikin 1996:216), of particularinterest here is an epistemological argumentabout the social construction of nature2: thatwhat biophysical science reveals is less a glimpseinto the workings of the natural world than theculture and politics of scientific knowledge; or,conversely, that nature is not simply somethingout there that scientific knowledge more or lessfaithfully mirrors (Rorty 1979).3 As Elizabeth Birdhas argued, “Scientific knowledge should not beregarded as a representation of nature, but ratheras a socially constructed interpretation with analready socially constructed natural-technical ob-ject of inquiry” (Bird 1987:255). Whatever thevalidity of the fact-value distinction much toutedby moral philosophers, environmentalist dis-course generally justifies its “oughts” based onscientifically founded assertions of truth concern-ing the imperiled state of nature. The social con-struction of nature argument, then, strikes to theepistemological core of environmentalism’smoral and political campaign.

The editors’ preface to Reinventing Nature? tar-gets social constructivism (termed “postmoderndeconstructionism” to make it sound appropri-ately bizarre) in a manner that strikes to one ofthe core issues at stake: the problem of relativism,a perennial issue dating back at least to Plato’sDialogues,4 which nonetheless refuses to go awayprecisely because the epistemological questions itraises are so fundamental. Anticonstructivistshave commonly charged that constructivists’ no-tion of truth is thoroughly relativistic, while so-called constructivists have typically counteredthat anticonstructivists are simply worried aboutlosing their hegemonic role over what countsas “truth.” Indeed, relativism has such a nega-tive valence that few avowed constructivistsopenly embrace it (e.g., Bird 1987:258ff.; cf.Gandy 1996:32); yet the differences betweenconstructivists and anticonstructivists on truth-statements concerning nature are too great todeny.

I enter this discussion as one who is sympa-thetic to social constructivism though concernedthat constructivists have not yet adequately clari-fied its epistemological complexities as suggestedin the charge of relativism raised by their oppo-nents. I also worry that the abyss between con-structivists and anticonstructivists is simply toolarge to be productive, as it fuels little more than

misinterpretation and intellectual hostilityamong scholars of nature. This is not a newfeeling to geographers, of course, having manysimilarities to the divide between positivists andpostpositivists among us (Gregory 1979; Johnston1986; Cloke et al. 1991; Unwin 1992; cf. Demeritt1996). It also resembles in many ways the recentdebate over science’s epistemological privilege,launched in large part by that notorious book,Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and ItsQuarrels with Science (Gross and Levitt 1994).Gross and Levitt took it upon themselves to dis-miss a whole host of charges reputedly heaped upby critics of science. The huge chord of sympathytheir book struck among reviewers5 suggests thebroad resonance of anticonstructivism among thescholarly community, as does the fact that apointed constructivist rejoinder to Higher Super-stition entitled Science Wars (Ross 1996) has todate received far less publicity.

It is, therefore, easy to dismiss constructivismquite simply because constructivists are the vastminority in much of the academic community,and certainly among scholars of nature. But thatwould be tyranny of the intellectual majority;constructivism needs to be taken seriously. Andso does relativism: it clearly matters whether, forinstance, a certain species is or is not close toextinction, or wastewater discharge from a par-ticular factory is or is not having significant dele-ter ious downstream effects , or currentanthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions will orwill not likely result in unprecedented rates ofclimate change. Truth-claims concerning thestate of nature may not be a sufficient conditionto justify environmental action, but they are inmany cases a necessary condition. My intent hereis to help facilitate communication across thechasm dividing constructivists and anticonstruc-tivists by exploring the possibility of developing athird position that takes social constructivismseriously but does not rob us of our ability tospeak some degree of truth about nature as aconsequence.

Epistemology, the study of knowledge, truth,and justification, is well-covered terrain, yet rela-tively little of this discussion has touched uponthe kinds of debates taking place now over envi-ronmental protection. My argument will buildupon two contemporary philosophical perspec-tives, both of which are in broad agreement withsocial constructivism but do not embrace relativ-ism. These two perspectives are pragmatism andcritical realism. Pragmatism is an American

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philosophical movement developed over thelast century that, in the context of nature, hasprimarily enjoyed popularity among environ-mental philosophers and practitioners, with someinterest expressed among geographers as well;critical realism, a sophisticated descendant of thelongstanding philosophy of realism, has, in thelast decade, found considerable expression in hu-man geography and has also addressed issues ofnature, though its primary base of support is foundon the other side of the Atlantic from that ofpragmatism. Though neither of these approacheshas had a great impact on biophysical science,they can, I believe, speak to this mode of inquiryas well: realism is, in fact, arguably more opera-tionally widespread in the natural sciences thanthe social sciences (Keat and Urry 1982), andelements of pragmatism have been traced in thework of the natural-resource geographer GilbertWhite (Wescoat 1992). I will assume that mostreaders are passingly familiar with both of theseapproaches, so I will forego an in-depth back-ground of realism and pragmatism in favor of amore focused look at their perspective on relativ-ism and implications in terms of constructing anepistemology of nature.

Pragmatism and realism are not necessarilyexclusive approaches: one example is Hilary Put-nam’s attempt to define a “pragmatic realism”(Putnam 1981; 1990).6 In fact, pragmatist andcritical-realist efforts in recent times have beenbroadly similar in their intent to serve as recon-structive epistemological projects, especially intheir response to certain negative excesses ofpostmodernism—the details of which have beenwell-covered elsewhere and will not be treatedhere.7 Yet their positions vis-à-vis relativism havebeen quite distinct. In brief, critical realism ismarked by a qualified, though vigorous, rejectionof stronger forms of relativism, whereas pragma-tism involves more of an agnostic response, asense that the so-called problem of relativism isnot as serious as some make it out to be.

Critical realism and pragmatism are muchmore powerful taken together than when consid-ered separately, as they jointly embody a neces-sary tension at the heart of social constructivism:the dynamic relationship of belief and doubt,confidence and humility, in the social enterpriseof learning about nature. Relativism touches onsome of the more fundamental epistemologicalquestions scholars of nature must ask—questionsthat will never, of course, be resolved once andfor all. Pragmatism and critical realism can

jointly point to the sort of tense epistemologicalalliance, however, that to me represents the mosthonest intellectual response to the question ofrelativism arising from the social-construction-of-nature argument.

Any paper in which the bulk of its nouns are“isms” risks losing the bulk of its readers. That isa real danger here: constructivism, relativism,realism, and pragmatism may collectively soundtoo abstract to be much more than intellectualfroth. Yet the debate over social constructivismreaches beyond abstractions to touch upon a widespectrum of cases involving nature. As suggestedabove, one particular case concerns nature-as-physical-world or external, “pure” nature, in con-trast to biotechnology and other “mixed” formsof nature that have increasingly concerned schol-ars of a social constructivist bent (e.g., Haraway1997). This case is exemplified in the recentconflict over wilderness, pitting those who believethat wilderness is a real entity increasingly undersiege by industrial society worldwide against oth-ers who argue that it is a peculiarly Euro-Ameri-can, male construct of nature that derives itspersuasive force primarily from their hegemonicvoice in environmental discourse. The debateover wilderness—though predominantly NorthAmerican in scope—is especially important inthat wilderness has increasingly been promul-gated by large environmental organizations inrecent decades as a sort of consummate or idealnature. Wilderness, in short, currently lies at theheart of the epistemological conflict over externalnature, and as such offers an excellent groundingfor the ensuing discussion.

The paper will begin with a discussion of recentdebates between defenders and deconstructors ofwilderness, and a clarification of how the problemof relativism necessarily arises in these debates. Iwill then consider in turn the kinds of responsesto relativism and epistemological positions onnature that follow from critical realist and prag-matist perspectives. I conclude by arguing for theinterplay between critical realist and pragmatistapproaches in any adequate response.

Wilderness: The Battle overa Concept

The time has come to rethink wilderness (Cronon1995a:69).

Apparently lacking appreciation for the biologicalsignificance of wilderness, Cronon writes about the

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subject purely in terms of social and cultural valuesand understanding (Willers 1996:60).

What Is Wilderness?

Wilderness is, to many environmentalists, arelatively unproblematic category of nature. Theauthor of Wilderness Preservation: A ReferenceHandbook invokes the oft-cited legal definitionunderlying wilderness legislation in the U.S.:

In general, wilderness is an area unchanged anduninhabited by humans. The U.S. Congress mayhave said it best when they described wilderness inthe Wilderness Act of 1964: “A wilderness, in con-trast with those areas where man and his own worksdominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as anarea where the earth and its community of life areuntrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitorwho does not remain” (Rosenberg 1994:4).

This definition largely squares with that under-lying the profusely illustrated, coffee-table-qual-ity publication, Nature’s Last Strongholds, whoseeditor notes “The naturalist regards wilderness asan area untouched by human hand, still coveredby its original natural vegetation. It is in this . . .sense that the term wilderness is used in thisbook” (Burton 1991:10). Nature’s Last Strongholdsis by no means the only attempt to discuss wilder-ness outside of its legal definition within the U.S.:one recent article entitled “Wilderness aroundthe World” acknowledges cultural differenceswith respect to the concept, yet argues that thereare many similarities as well (Stankey 1993).

Perhaps the greatest scientific stretch of thisspatially uniformitarian notion of global wilder-ness is found in an attempt to quantify the world’sremaining wilderness, defined as “land withoutpermanent human settlements or roads and . . .not regularly cultivated nor heavily and continu-ously grazed” (McCloskey and Spalding1989:222). This study concludes that roughlyone-third of the global land surface is still inwilderness of extent greater than 400,000 hec-tares (the minimum mapping unit used), andremarks:

This inventory represents the first time that man hasbeen able to look at how far it has gone in subjugat-ing the Earth and bending it to its use. Two-thirdsof the land of the planet is now dominated by ourspecies. But with one-third of the land still domi-nated by nature, there is still a chance to maintainsome measure of balance between “man and na-ture.” But this balance will not occur by acci-

dent. . . . It can slip away easily with little notice ofencroachment as billions more are added to thehuman population (p. 227).

As used in these passages above, wilderness isa real place, a compellingly beautiful place free ofhuman imprint, an object of great worth preciselyin having escaped human domination, wherenatural processes reign unimpeded. Wildernessprotection is essential in guarding these processesso fundamental to life on earth from the effects ofcivilization. Wilderness is, quite simply, nature inits fullest.

Wilderness Critique and the Cronon Debate

Does wilderness in this sense really exist? Ar-turo Gómez-Pompa and Andrea Kaus have ar-gued in “Taming the Wilderness Myth” that thisnotion is ignorant of the fact that virtually all ofthe world’s surface has been touched in some wayby humans (1992).8 Yet, clearly, some landscapeshave been less modified by people than others;perhaps the central question is whether or notsuch emphasis should be placed on them. In thiscontext, Michael Pollan has argued that the em-phasis on relatively “untouched” aspects of na-ture offers no guidance on how or whether to carefor the vast majority of the planet’s surface, whichhas been to some extent humanized (1991).

These critiques of wilderness, as important asthey are, are not necessarily constructivist cri-tiques, as they approach wilderness as primarily areality, questioning whether or not “untouched”lands exist, or whether or not we should placesuch emphasis on them. The social-construction-of-nature argument moves from an ontological toan epistemological terrain in scrutinizing not wil-derness per se, but the idea of wilderness, theconception shared by wilderness-protection sup-porters when they speak of wilderness, and all itsattendant cultural and political meanings (e.g.,Willems-Braun 1997).9 As the editors of oneupcoming anthology of related essays, The GreatNew Wilderness Debate, summarize:

The received wilderness idea is currently the subjectof intense attack and impassioned defense on sev-eral fronts at once. The wilderness idea is alleged tobe ethnocentric, androcentric, phallocentric, unsci-entific, unphilosophic, impolitic, outmoded, evengenocidal. Defenders of the wilderness idea insistthat it is none of these things (Callicott and Nelson1998:2).


One example of the constructivist perspectiveon wilderness is a recent essay by the environ-mental historian (and, interestingly, WildernessSociety board member) William Cronon, entitled“The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Backto the Wrong Nature” (1995a). Cronon’s essaytouches upon the ontological critiques notedabove, yet it more deeply examines the ways inwhich wilderness serves as an overridingly pow-erful concept in contemporary environmentalethics and politics. He argues:

Far from being the one place on earth that standsapart from humanity, [wilderness] is quite pro-foundly a human creation—indeed, the creation ofvery particular human cultures at very particularmoments in human history. . . . Wilderness hides itsunnaturalness behind a mask that is all the morebeguiling because it seems so natural (1995a:69).

Cronon speaks of wilderness as a “human crea-tion” not in terms of its ontological properties(“Let me hasten to add that the nonhuman worldwe encounter in wilderness is far from beingmerely our own invention,” p. 70), but rather interms of its epistemological qualities, its particularmeaning as an overridingly powerful concept ofnature in Euro-American culture. Cronon arguesthat the concept of wilderness has changed in thelast several centuries of European history, thoughsome aspects remain largely similar. Until fairlyrecently, for example, wilderness was not under-stood as a particularly friendly place; by the endof the nineteenth century, however, wildernessbegan to take on the positive qualities we attrib-ute to it today. Through this period of conceptualchange, certain qualities have been consistentlyattributed to wilderness, most significantly thesublime (a symbol of God’s presence on earth)and the frontier, the boundary between the civi-lized and the primitive world.

Cronon’s most forceful critical point concernshow the concept of wilderness has long entailedan antagonistic dualism between nature and civi-lization. When wilderness possessed a negativevalence, it was seen as a forlorn, barren, unim-proved place, or as a cruel and savage placelacking any moral code; when, more recently, itwas given a positive valence, it was then seen asa refuge for people from the noise of the city, andfor animals from people. Whether in a negativeor positive sense, then, wilderness and civilizationhave almost always been counterposed. ToCronon, this opposition of wilderness and civili-zation is more a product of the people who pro-

mote this idea than some necessary definitionalquality of wilderness. He writes:

The trouble with wilderness is that it quietly ex-presses and reproduces the very values its devoteesseek to reject. . . . The dream of an unworked natu-ral landscape is very much the fantasy of people whohave never themselves had to work the land to makea living—urban folk for whom food comes from asupermarket or a restaurant instead of a field, andfor whom the wooden houses in which they live andwork apparently have no meaningful connection tothe forests in which trees grow and die. Only peoplewhose relation to the land was already alienatedcould hold up wilderness as a model for human lifein nature, for the romantic ideology of wildernessleaves precisely nowhere for human beings actuallyto make their living from the land (1995a:80).

Cronon summarizes:

This, then, is the central paradox: wilderness em-bodies a dualistic vision in which the human isentirely outside the natural. If we allow ourselves tobelieve that nature, to be true, must also be wild,then our very presence in nature represents itsfall. . . . To the extent that we celebrate wildernessas the measure with which we judge civilization, wereproduce the dualism that sets humanity and na-ture at opposite poles. We thereby leave ourselveslittle hope of discovering what an ethical, sustain-able, honorable human place in nature might actuallylook like (1995a:80–81, emphasis in original).

Cronon’s essay was the subject of criticism onseveral fronts, ranging from personal correspon-dence to academic journals (e.g., EnvironmentalHistory 1[1], 1996). I will focus below on one suchforum over Cronon’s essay, the Winter 1996/97issue of Wild Earth. This publication is affiliatedwith The Wildlands Project (Foreman et al.1992), a group of conservation biologists andenvironmentalists working to develop a wilder-ness recovery strategy for North America. TheWild Earth issue on Cronon was specifically dedi-cated to “Opposing Wilderness Deconstruction,”and was edited by ex-Earth First! leader DaveForeman. In a preface, Foreman writes:

This issue of Wild Earth casts an eye to the dirt clodProfessor William Cronon recently tossed at theWilderness Act and at defenders of Wilderness Ar-eas. . . . Our contributors this issue will show howwrong-headed the good professor is. . . . Cronon’scomplaints are based on ignorance of biology, amisunderstanding of the conservation movement,and a carelessness about the consequences of hiscritique of wilderness. . . . Half a century ago, AldoLeopold warned us that there were those who could

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live without wild things, and those who could not.That still explains it (1996:i, 4).

Contributors to the volume include severalwell-known figures, all of whom hurl anticon-structivist arguments in Cronon’s direction.10

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and bioregionalistGary Snyder, for example, writes of his home innorthern California in “Nature as Seen FromKitkitdizze Is No ‘Social Construction’ ” (1996);philosopher and deep ecologist George Sessionsechoes the Reinventing Nature? volume in attack-ing “postmodern deconstruction . . . a 1960sspinoff from Marxism; a contemporary form ofanthropocentric humanism which espouses cul-tural relativism, an antipathy to science, and apreference for cities” (1996:46).

One of the more strident critiques found in thisissue is that of biologist Bill Willers, entitled “TheTrouble with Cronon” (1996). Willers argues thatCronon’s essay has had an even greater negativeimpact on environmentalism than the work ofAlston Chase, whose critiques of contemporaryenvironmental management (e.g., 1986) havemade him somewhat of a hero in the wise-usemovement. Cronon is apparently “grossly unin-formed” of the “basic truths” of the wildernessmovement: the biological truth that wilderness isa key requirement of organic evolution, and thephilosophical truth that wilderness is “the essenceof a creation possessing inherent rights” (p. 59).These two “truths” ring throughout Willers’s es-say. Of the first, Willers writes, “Apparently lack-ing appreciation for the biological significance ofwilderness, Cronon writes about the subjectpurely in terms of social and cultural values andunderstanding” (p. 60); of the second, he charges“The unstated assumption being made by[Cronon and Chase] is that spiritual connectionwith the natural world in itself constitutes a re-jection of scientific methodology. The assump-tion is absolutely false” (p. 61). Willers concludesby clearly distancing wilderness from our ideas ofit: “Cronon may be correct that ideas of naturedon’t exist outside of cultural understanding, butNature in all of its self-governing complexity mostcertainly does” (p. 61).

Summary: Wilderness and Nature Relativism

Cronon’s critique of wilderness involves botha specific and a general argument about nature.The specific argument Cronon makes concernsthe way in which the concept of wilderness as-

sumes and furthers a problematic dualism be-tween nature and culture. As important as thisargument is, it has been amply discussed else-where, and will not receive further considerationhere.11 The general argument Crononmakes—indeed, in many ways more an axiomaticpoint of departure than an argument—is thatwilderness is more a social construction than areality “out there.” This is the argument to whichhis anticonstructivist detractors respond mostpassionately, and thus is of central importancehere.

The debate over nature-as-social-construc-tion can be clarified in terms of the two necessaryactors in any epistemological scheme: the know-ing subject and the object of knowledge. Theworld of the knowing subject is the world of ideas,of concepts, of values; the world of the object ofknowledge is the world of reality, of existence. Itis “out there,” in contrast to the conceptual spacein which the subject is suspended. In many ways,these two actors have become opposite poles towhich the two sides tenaciously cling.12 The social-constructivist argument is that “wilderness” isconstructed by the knowing subject; it is, asCronon remarks, “quite profoundly a humancreation.” The anticonstructivist argumentpoints in the opposite direction; thus Soulé andLease remark, “The world, including its livingcomponents, really does exist apart from human-ity’s perceptions and beliefs about it,” and Willersintones, “Cronon may be correct that ideas ofnature don’t exist outside of cultural under-standing, but Nature in all of its self-governingcomplexity most certainly does.”

Taken at face value, the anti-wilderness argu-ment sets ideas against reality, subject-emphasisagainst object-emphasis. Yet do social construc-tivists really believe that the world does not existoutside of our heads?13 That would be a ratherpreposterous level of idealism to attribute to thisperspective, and Cronon flatly denies any sympa-thy with it, as noted above. The real difference,the real issue at stake, is epistemological: whetherour ideas speak more of the object of knowledgeor the knowing subject, whether they point mostfundamentally to wilderness “out there” or to thecultural predispositions that accompany our con-cept of wilderness. Social constructivism thus hassome disturbing implications for truth-claimsabout nature. If indeed “wilderness” is a cultur-ally constructed concept, then to some extenttruth-claims about wilderness make sense onlyas viewed from that cultural perspective. This


epistemological position is known by anothername: relativism. To the extent that the social-construction-of-nature argument inevitablycourts relativism, then, anticonstructivists will besure to reject it, no matter what its merits.

Before I move to a discussion of relativism,however, I would like to note an important poten-tial objection to the argument as developed so far:that the concept of wilderness is not of fundamen-tal importance to contemporary environmental-ism, that there exist several “end-runs” aroundthe concept of wilderness that nonetheless wouldsupport the same policy implications. One possi-ble end-run—adopted even by Cronon to someextent at the conclusion of his essay(1995a:90–91)—is to focus value not on wilder-ness but wildness, on a state of being versus a formof nature. Indeed, Thoreau’s famous, thoughoften misquoted, statement reads “In Wildness isthe preservation of the World” (1937:672, myemphasis).

Wildness is regarded highly in many of theessays found in the recent book Wild Ideas(Rothenberg 1995b). As the editor, DavidRothenberg, argues:

The wild is more than a named place, an area todemarcate. It is a quality that beguiles us, a tendencywe both flee and seek. It is the unruly, that whichwon’t be kept down, that crazy love, that path thatno one advises us to take—it’s against the rules, it’stoo far, too fast, beyond order, irreconcilable withwhat we are told is right. Wild Thing. Wild Life. WildOne. Wild Child. Wild Culture. You make my heartsing. But who knows what tomorrow will bring?(1995a:xvii).

The boundary between wildness and wildernessin this book is, however, not always clear. EdwardGrumbine, for example, conflates the two whenhe writes of environmental policy: “How do webegin to move from preserving wilderness to pro-tecting wildness? . . . For the present, the first stepin any such strategy is to continue to focus onincreasing the size and number of the protectedareas we know as wilderness” (1995:21).

Indeed “wildness” is itself in many ways a socialconstruct (Benton 1993:66ff.), with its own bag-gage of abandon. Perhaps this is why many scien-tists prefer rather to focus not on preservation ofwilderness but on conservation of biodiversity,which sounds far more scientific. Yet—perhapsunsurprisingly by now—biodiversity itself is pro-foundly ridden with ideas as well, albeit primarilyfrom the culture of science (Takacs 1996).

Cronon himself anticipated this end-run in hisessay:

Although at first blush an apparently more “scien-tific” concept than wilderness, biological diversity infact invokes many of the same sacred values, whichis why organizations like the Nature Conservancyhave been so quick to employ it as an alternative tothe seemingly fuzzier and more problematic conceptof wilderness (1995a:81).

Wilderness is thus apparently not alone. Thesocial-construction-of-nature argument is that allthe concepts we use to refer to biophysical natureand its attendant qualities—wilderness, wildness,biodiversity—are human concepts, and as suchcarry cultural, political, and other importantmeanings. The power of this argument lies in itsdegree of epistemological sophistication; theweakness lies in its mute embrace of relativism. Iwill first clarify what exactly I mean by relativism,then turn to some contemporary constructivistperspectives on nature that, in their own distinctways, seek to avoid the problem of relativism.

The Domain of Relativism

Conceptual relativism is a heady and exotic doc-trine, or would be if we could make good sense of it.The trouble is, as so often in philosophy, it is hardto improve intelligibility while retaining the excite-ment (Davidson 1984:183).

All the common definitions of . . . relativism areframed by opponents of relativism . . . they areabsolutist definitions (Ladd 1982:161).

. . . But There Aren’t Any Relativists toBe Found!

To call relativism a central problem in thesocial-construction-of-nature debate is, admit-tedly, an imposition: there are scarcely anymore card-carrying relativists to be foundamong constructivists than among anticonstruc-tivists.14 Geographers sympathetic to the social-construction-of-nature argument generally takegreat pains to distance themselves from relativ-ism.15 David Harvey, for instance, expresses gen-eral sympathy for social constructivism in thecontext of nature, yet criticizes the “vulgar” read-ing of the notion of situated knowledges (aninterpretation of Haraway 1988), which “dwellsalmost entirely on the relevance of individual

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biographies” (1996:354), and thus becomeshopelessly relativistic in that no one can purportto speak for, let alone understand, others. DavidDemeritt, likewise, is highly skeptical of the foun-dationalist epistemology underlying much envi-ronmental history (1994a), yet recommendsmetaphors of nature from Bruno Latour (1988,1993) and Donna Haraway (1989, 1991) to arguein part that social constructivism need not implyrelativism (1994b:180). In a similar vein, DavidLivingstone argues:

The sciences of nature and environment never sim-ply represent the objects of their inquiry in a waythat is unadulterated by social, moral, cultural, eco-nomic, or political concerns. Rather, the knowledgesthey deliver are to a considerable degree sociallyconstructed interpretations of the real world. . . . Ofcourse this does not mean that environmental sci-ence presents us with nothing but social fictionsdressed up in scientific jargon: nature certainly setslimits on what we can say about it. Nor does it meanthat we can play fast and loose with the environ-ment, as though all talk of environmental degrada-tion is mere myth-making (1995:371).

The trouble with these denials is twofold. First,there is some unstated assumption that relativismis an unproblematic, generally agreed-upon termrequiring no clarification; I will soon suggest thatthis is not so. The second problem is more basic:all scholars of nature, from arch-constructiviststo arch-anticonstructivists, are brokers in knowl-edge. That is the stuff we produce and trade. Tocall social constructivism “relativist” is to chargethat, according to the epistemological perspectiveof anticonstructivists, constructivism is not a vi-able position from which knowledge can be pro-duced. Relativism, in this sense, is less an extremeposition to be vigorously denied than an episte-mological challenge. I will tackle the first problembelow by offering some clarification as to thespectrum of relativisms, and the second problemin the two latter sections on critical realism andpragmatism.

Toward a Definition

Relativism owes much of its popularity, andresistance, during this century to ethnographicwork. As Clifford Geertz has said:

The realization that news from elsewhere aboutghost marriage, ritual destruction of property, initia-tory fellatio, royal immolation, and . . . nonchalantadolescent sex naturally inclines the mind to an

“other beasts other mores” view of things has led toarguments, outraged, desperate, and exultant byturns, designed to persuade us either to resist thatinclination in the name of reason, or to embrace iton the same grounds (1989:15).

Indeed, what Steven Lukes calls “empirical”relativism is indisputable (1977); but the fact thatdifferent cultures have different truths does notnecessarily imply that truth itself is what oneparticular culture makes of it. Relativism in thismore philosophical sense, however, is not easy todefine. The introduction to one recent anthologyon the subject, for instance, adopts a circulardefinition of relativism as the belief that “cogni-tive, moral, or aesthetic claims involving suchvalues as truth, meaningfulness, rightness, rea-sonableness, appropriateness, aptness, or the likeare relative to the context in which they appear”(Krausz 1989a:1).16 Another way to define rela-tivism is to consider its opposite. Some suggestrationalism as the opposite of relativism (Haines-Young and Petch 1986), though rationalism isbetter understood as the counterpart of empiri-cism: in the former, truth is gained through rea-son, whereas in the latter, truth arises throughobservation.17 It is more common in the literaturefor realism to be offered as the opposite of relativ-ism, though it is not clear whether this argumententails realism’s metaphysical claims, epistemo-logical claims, or both (see below).

In a pure sense, relativism is the opposite ofabsolutism, “the view that truth (value, reality) isobjectively real, final, and eternal” (Angeles1992:1). The problem with positing absolutism asan alternative is that both of these terms arecommonly understood as extreme cases: it seemsjust as impossible to be a little absolutistic orrelativistic as it is to be a bit of a murderer.

Somewhat more clarification arises from pro-ceeding in the other direction. Many philoso-phers prefer to distinguish relativism per se fromextreme versions, typically called radical relativ-ism in the positive sense, or nihilism in the nega-tive sense (Stout 1988). Radical (also calledextreme) relativism states that all truth and re-lated claims are equally correct; nihilism is theview that nothing is knowable. These statementsare different from standard relativism, whichmakes the humbler assertion that our criteria forjudgment are inescapably context-bound. Radi-cal relativism and nihilism are, in other words,God’s-eye views that float over contexts, render-ing them as patently universalistic and nonrela-tivistic statements in their own right. Many


commentators thus consider these extreme ver-sions to be logically self-defeating (Margolis 1986;Krausz 1989a). Indeed, defenders of relativismtake care to distance themselves from these ex-tremes as well; thus Catherine Elgin states, “Thepluralism and relativism I favor do not lead to theconclusion that anything goes. If many things areright, many more remain wrong” (1989:98). Re-lativism is thus a domain of multiple but finitetruths, bounded on one side by absolutism, wheretruth is one, and on the other by its self-contra-dictory extremes, where either all is equally trueor there is accordingly no meaning to truth.

Perhaps it is thus better to consider notwhether, but to what extent, a particular episte-mological position embraces relativism, as somemilder versions appear to be less of a threat totruth-statements than others. Relativism, on thisview, is not limited to its excessive interpretationstypically accorded to it as standard. Many of therejections noted above of relativism by socialconstructivists are, clearly, rejections of strongrelativism, not its milder forms.

Up to now, this discussion has muddled thedifference between epistemological relativism(the focus of this paper), which concerns truth-statements, and moral relativism, which concernsvalue-statements. Epistemological and moral re-lativism are somewhat independent, though it isnot always easy to suggest how.18 As suggested inthe introduction, however, what I find importantis the way in which many normative pronounce-ments by environmentalists are justified by facts;this makes epistemological relativism of funda-mental moral relevance as well.

Critical Realism: Mild Relativism,Deep Nature

The perspective which allows us to reclaim realityfor itself . . . to reclaim it from philosophical ideolo-gies—such as empiricism or idealism—which havetacitly or explicitly defined it in terms of some spe-cific human attribute . . . I call critical realism(Bhaskar 1989:vii).

Realism is not committed to the adulatory reifica-tion of particular existing sciences . . . any more thanto that of particular theories and methods withinthem. Its claim is the weaker but important one thatontological commitments, whether of general epis-temologies or of specific scientific theories, are ines-capable and have to be taken seriously (Outhwaite1987:118–19).

There are real differences between how people con-strue fishes, but this is a wholly different matter fromhow a fish is physically constructed (Dickens1996:73).

Realism: Empiricist and Critical

Epistemological relativism is a central problemtaken up by critical realists; yet the term “realism”itself first requires some clarification. Realismpoints to a constellation of philosophies, all ofwhich posit the existence of something, in distinc-tion to nominalist, idealist, and other antirealistpositions. In its contemporary usage, realism usu-ally refers to the ontological proposition that re-ality exists independent of our ideas of it, and theepistemological proposition that this reality is, tosome significant extent, knowable.19 One wide-spread form of realism is empiricism, the view thatreality is knowable through direct experience.Empiricist realism would assert that our observa-tions of nature, gathered via remote sensing, fieldmeasurements, and everyday experience, ideallyrepresent nature as it “really” is; to determinewhether a concept of wilderness is true or not,then, one seeks some form of empirical verifica-tion. Truth to empiricist realism is therefore amatter of correspondence to reality.

Over the last several decades, however, a moreepistemologically sophisticated form of realismhas been developed—variously termed theoreti-cal, transcendental, scientific, representation/reflection theory, and increasingly, critical real-ism—precisely to distinguish it from empiricistrealism. In fact, as suggested in the first epigraphabove, critical realism arose in large part as anexplicit rejection of positivism and its empiricistphilosophy, especially as applied in the socialsciences.

The central tenets of critical realism also ariselargely from the work of Roy Bhaskar, thoughother scholars, primarily British, have played animportant role as well.20 Bhaskar’s approach hasbeen extended by social scientists, includingRussell Keat and John Urry (1982) and WilliamOuthwaite (1987). Its influence in geography hasbeen substantial (Cloke et al. 1991), attributablein large part to the work of Andrew Sayer (1992).Though Sayer and others are generally quick tonote that critical realism is primarily a philosophi-cal position and does not entail necessary theo-retical commitments or topical foci, its solidfoothold in geography is probably a result of itscongruence with certain critical structuralist

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theories prevalent in human geography such asMarxism (Gregory 1994). Critical realist geogra-phers have often put forth their philosophy as anantidote to postmodernist thought (Sayer 1993)and its “drift toward relativism” (Gandy1996:23).

Critical realist approaches generally share acommon story of their epistemological position.A standard version is presented by Keat and Urry(1982), in which critical realism can be best un-derstood as an attempt to move beyond bothclassic empiricism and the more recent conven-tionalist critique (in which realists include,among other perspectives, postmodernism andcertain forms of pragmatism). The epistemologiesinherent in empiricism, conventionalism, andcritical realism differ in their account of the realmof human knowledge and the nature of truth. Forempiricism, true ideas (e.g., those obtained byscience) are objectively based, whereas for con-ventionalism these ideas are social conventions;“truth” is thus a subjective (or intersubjective)phenomenon to conventionalists. The critical-realist position attempts to include the ontologi-cal assertions of empiricism as well as theepistemological concerns of conventionalism:ideas are social concepts that have an ontologicalbasis but are understood via a particular, sociallypredisposed framework. Knowledge to critical re-alists is neither wholly objective nor subjectivebut is in fact the result of interaction betweensubject and object. For critical realists, the truth-content of different ideas can be compared on arelative basis: some (social) explanations aremore adequate representations of reality thanothers, though all are, by virtue of the dialectic(subject-object) nature of knowledge, always“partial truths.”21

This argument is developed further by therealist philosopher Sean Sayers (1985). Sayersturns the social construction of knowledge on itshead, arguing that it is by virtue of social ideasthat reality is grasped, though their truth-contentmay vary widely: “Truth and falsehood are mat-ters of degree. All ideas reflect reality, but onlymore or less adequately” (p. 176). He cites anoptical example: reality can be either focused orobscured by a lens, but it remains true that thelens is the only way to understand reality. But howdo we know whether a particular lens focuses orobscures reality? Sayers argues “Experience, prac-tice, is the test of truth.” Knowledge, he suggests,is the result of the historical interaction of theoryand experience: the former suggests the relevance

of the so-called “coherence” criterion of truth(“does it make sense?”) espoused in rationalistaccounts, whereas the latter implies the same forthe “correspondence” criterion (“does it matchexperience?”) favored by empiricists.

On these accounts, critical realism squareswith a mild form of relativism. Recognizing thesocial construction of knowledge does not, forcritical realists, entail a necessary capitulation toradical and nihilistic forms of relativism, thoughnaive absolutism is forever dismissed, as knowl-edge is an interaction of subject and object. Criti-cal realism is a sort of acknowledgment that directaccess to a preordered reality is impossible andthat knowledge is always fallible and incomplete,coupled with an optimism that this admissionneed pose no fatal blow to the project of findingbetter explanations for reality.

Critical realism is not, however, an epistemol-ogy alone; it is perhaps even better known for itsontological commitments. Largely followingBhaskar, critical-realist ontology involves a strati-fication model of reality. In Bhaskar’s model,reality consists of the domains of the real, theactual, and the empirical (1975). The latter is theworld we experience; it is, operationally, the limitof reality according to restrictive forms of empiri-cism present in some positivist approaches toscience. The actual domain is the realm of events,not all of which are experienced by people. Thereal domain is that of generative mechanisms orstructures responsible (in conjunction with con-tingent conditions) for events, which themselvesare unobservable. Structures are defined by Sayeras “sets of internally [i.e., necessarily, not contin-gently] related objects or practices” (1992:92).Critical-realist ontology thus involves a denial ofatomism, the notion that events are merelycontingently related. Its focus on underlyingstructural causes of phenomena would also leadto a materialist interpretation of different ideas ofnature. In other words, the epistemological ques-tion, “Which truth-claim is more adequate?”, isjoined by the ontological question: “What kindsof historical/geographical structural relations andcontingent conditions have combined to result inthis diverse set of truth-claims?”

Critical Realism and Nature

Critical realism has been applied to the realmof nature by scholars such as Ted Benton (1993),Peter Dickens (1996), and Kate Soper (1995).


Though wilderness is mentioned somewhat lessin these writings than by pragmatists, as will beseen below (and reasonably so, given critical re-alism’s geographical lineage), critical realists’philosophical interests regarding nature nonethe-less strike to the core of the problems raised bysocial constructivism.

Kate Soper’s account of constructivism mirrorsthe dual critique of empiricism and convention-alism noted above in the context of the epistemo-logical clash between “ecological” andpostmodernist perspectives on nature (1996).Though both are directed toward a critique ofmodernity, they speak of radically different con-cepts of nature implicated in modernity:

The contrast, crudely, is between discourses whichdirect us to the “nature” that we are destroying,wasting and polluting, and discourses that are fo-cused on the ideological functions of the appeal to“nature” and on the ways in which relations to thenonhuman world are always historically mediated,and indeed “constructed,” through specific concep-tions of human identity and difference (1995:3–4).

One important contribution Soper provides isan extension of critical-realist ontology to therealm of nature. Soper adopts a stratificationmodel of reality in distinguishing between threesenses in which “nature” is invoked in ecologicaldiscourse. As a metaphysical concept, nature isimplicitly that which is separate from culture,thus that “through which humanity thinks itsdifference and specificity” (Soper 1995:155). Asa realist or “deep” concept, nature “refers to thestructures, processes and causal powers that areconstantly operative within the physical world”(p. 155). As a “lay” or “surface” concept, naturerefers to “immediate experience and aestheticappreciation” (p. 156). The latter two run parallelto Bhaskar’s distinction of the real and the em-pirical. Soper mentions wilderness in her discus-sion of lay nature, though later notes, “While‘ordinary’ discourse about nature may be less thanprecise, it is also speaking to sentiments that it isas mistaken to overlook as it is to ignore theideologies they generate” (1995:182). Wilder-ness, on this view, is interestingly ambiguous inthat it has the appearance of an empirically obvi-ous thing though in fact capable of rather strongideological tainting.

Peter Dickens specifically tackles the tensionbetween realism and constructivism in ways ofthinking about nature. As with other critical re-alists, he distances himself from empiricist realism

by arguing that, “All concepts have evolved fromhuman societies. Therefore all knowledge mustin some sense be a social construction” (1996:71).Yet this admission does not make Dickens a pureconstructivist. He cites, for instance, the debatein sociology between a constructivist (Tester1991) and a realist (Benton 1993) over whethera fish is really a fish or the term “fish” is a sociallydefined category, defending the realist position assuggested in the epigraph above.

In explaining his position, Dickens differenti-ates, citing Dittmar (1992), between strong andweak social constructivism. Strong constructiv-ism “denies the importance of nature as an objectexternal to human experience” (Dickens1996:73). Weak constructivism “recognises thatall knowledge is socially constructed, but it wouldargue that some abstractions can be extremelyrobust forms of social constructionism, in thesense of standing the test of time” (p. 73). Dickenslinks the latter with critical realism, citing as anexample Darwin, whose ideas clearly arose fromand influenced those of his Victorian capitalistera, yet whose “social construction” of evolutionhas stood the test of time, even though it is todaybeing significantly modified by other social con-structions. Dickens credits strong constructivistswith pointing out the ways in which knowledgeand power coexist and how opposing nature toculture has drastic impacts on women, nonwest-ern cultures, and nonhumans, all of whom havebeen associated with forms of “pure” nature as arefound in the concept of wilderness. Yet what isimportant to him is that ontology should not beburied in epistemology; he closes, for instance, bycritiquing the strong constructivist position ofMacNaghten and Urry (1995), citing again “thedistinction between the real causal powers ofnature and the ways in which academics andother theoretically well-informed people under-stand or interpret nature” (Dickens 1996:82–83).In this respect, Dickens invokes Bhaskar’sepistemic fallacy, a reduction of reality to ourknowledge of it, in criticizing strong forms ofconstructivism.

Some Problems

The influence of critical realism may havepeaked in social science in the later 1980s, whenpostmodernism made more serious inroads. Onepossible reason may be that critical realism wassufficiently general and vague so that everyone

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agreed with it at some level, leading Pratt to askof geographers “Are we all realists now?”(1995:61). Indeed, critical realists are not alonein searching for epistemologies that acknowledgeconstructivism but deny strong relativism. Forinstance, Dickens’s account of weak constructiv-ism in epistemologies of nature is quite similar tothe “constrained constructivism” of KatherineHayles’s account of knowledge (1991) and con-cepts of nature (1995), or the “constrained rela-tivism” that informs one geographic study ofinstitutional and biophysical dynamics in the Hi-malayas (Thompson et al. 1986). This middleground is thus not the exclusive domain of criticalrealism.

One may reasonably ask whether the postmod-ernists and others are right when they accusecritical realists of overconfidence in the ability ofhumans to know reality (e.g., Barnett 1993; Han-nah and Strohmayer 1993). The realist view ofknowledge is castigated by these critics as “anarticle of faith, or at least of optimism,” in contrastto postmodern thought, where “Bound within theworld, yet freed from the arrogance that wouldhave the world equally beholden to us, we canfinally begin to encounter mute materiality”(Hannah and Strohmayer 1993:363–64).

This problem is apparent in Dickens’s argu-ment. He is quick to note the distinction betweenreality and knowledge—between, as quotedabove, “real causal powers of nature” and “waysin which . . . people . . . interpret nature,” thoughthis distinction sounds exactly like that made inanticonstructivist arguments. The question be-comes: what, indeed, is the difference betweencritical realism and the empiricist realism of anti-constructivists? In spite of their differences, criti-cal realists share with empiricists a high degree ofconfidence in the possibility of establishing truth.

Given this proclivity to assert reality over ourideas of it, critical realism is by no means the bestvehicle to interpret divergent truths as viewedfrom the contexts in which they are generated,versus as explained in terms of their generativestructures. Empirical relativism is unavoidable inlight of competing social constructions of nature;understanding contestations over reality,whether from an epistemologically relativist orantirelativist viewpoint, requires interpretivesensitivity as well as analytical depth. Critical-realist analysis stands the danger of reductionismto the extent that it attempts to explain realitypurely in terms of underlying structures. As areframing of the possibility for science, critical

realism can downplay, perhaps even ignore, thepersonal ironies and messy contingencies thatplay such a major role in conflicts over nature.

If the above limitations of critical realism arevalid, what is ideally called for is an approach thatis more clear ly defined, somewhat lessepistemologically confident, and perhaps moregeared toward taking messy reality seriously. Thelatter two of these qualities are found at the coreof pragmatism, though, as I will argue, pragma-tism suffers even more than does critical realismin being rather loosely defined.

Pragmatism: RelativistAgnosticism, Plural Nature

Pragmatism (good sense): Never having to sayyou’re certain (Stout 1988:297).

The pragmatic does not have a theory of truth,much less a relativistic one. As a partisan of solidar-ity, his account of the value of cooperative humaninquiry has only an ethical base, not an epistemo-logical or metaphysical one. Not having any episte-mology, a fortiori he does not have a relativistic one(Rorty 1989:38).

Pragmatists cannot tolerate theoretical delays to thecontribution that philosophy may make to environ-mental questions (Light and Katz 1995b:4).

Perhaps it is time to just give the whole matter [ofrelativism] a rest (Weston 1992:174).

Which Pragmatism?

As a lay concept, pragmatism is readily defined,yet as a philosophical perspective it is somewhatmore difficult to establish. The dictionary defini-tion of pragmatism emphasizes its focus away fromtheory and speculation to action; the Greek wordpragma means deed. This suspicion regardingtheoretical debates runs through pragmatism as amajor undercurrent. The term “pragmatic” is thuswidely used in the lay sense to mean a focus onpractical issues or practical, workable means toaccomplish a desired end.

Yet is pragmatism simply a methodologicalproposition without any particular philosophical(e.g., epistemological) tenets? Some pragmatists,at least, clearly distinguish their approach asphilosophically based (for an example related toenvironmental pragmatism, see Parker 1995:21).In this same manner, Jeffrey Stout distinguishes


real pragmatism from “vulgar pragmatism,” the“whatever works” approach of “consequentialismapplied to mental acts; the view that cost-benefitcalculation is the ultimate language of rationalcommensuration . . . the doctrine that the es-sence of knowledge is problem-solving capability”(1988:297). Other pragmatists, however, are lesscommitted to defining pragmatism in philosophi-cal terms: Cornell West, for instance, sees thecore of pragmatism as “a future-oriented instru-mentalism that tries to deploy thought as aweapon to enable more effective action”(1989:5). Indeed, West’s book on pragmatism istitled The American Evasion of Philosophy, wherephilosophy is viewed in an abstract and founda-tionalist sense.

In contrast to critical realism, pragmatism hasnot been courted extensively in geography(Wescoat 1992). Those treatments by geogra-phers that do exist primarily emphasize philo-sophical as well as methodological tenets. JamesWescoat, for instance, notes how the work ofGilbert White shares many of the philosophicalfeatures of Dewey-style pragmatism; the fourthemes he develops include the precariousness ofexistence, a conception of inquiry as followingupon problematic situations, the importance oflearning from experience, and a commitment topublic discourse (1992). Another example is aneditorial by Jody Emel espousing “provocativepragmatism” (1991). Emel’s primary object ofcritique is the tendency within radical theory torender restorative action incomprehensible, asproblems become too structurally embedded toconceive of any possible solution. Emel argues,“Theories are not truths but tools. Explanationand diagnosis are encouraged to focus down tolevels where transformation can occur” (p. 389).More recently, Leslie Duram has adopted prag-matism as a framework for research in agriculturalgeography that can ultimately help geographersdeal with “real-world environmental concerns byfocusing on the practical consequences of ideasand actions” (1997:203).

Philosophical pragmatism is generally agreedto flow from a discrete set of American scholars,including Charles Peirce, William James, andJohn Dewey, through to more recent philoso-phers such as Hilary Putnam and Jeffrey Stout.22

Pragmatism is subject to various definitions(Lovejoy 1963) and arrangements of intellectuallineage (e.g., Was Peirce the central figure?Dewey? Did Emerson inspire the movement

[West 1989]?). It has its neo- and paleo-versions(Clayton 1993; Westbrook 1993).

Yet there are recurrent features. Richard Rorty,perhaps the most prominent contemporaryspokesperson for pragmatism (if not the mostrepresentative),23 offers three characteristics ascentral (1982:162ff.). The first is that pragmatismis “anti-essentialism applied to notions like‘truth,’ ‘knowledge,’ ‘language,’ ‘morality,’ andsimilar objects of philosophical theorizing” (p.162). The correspondence theory of truth is thusroundly rejected by pragmatists, according toRorty, as indeed are all theories as to the essentialcharacteristics of truth (cf. Alcoff 1996).24 Thesecond characteristic of pragmatism Rorty offersis that “there is no epistemological differencebetween truth about what ought to be and truthabout what is, nor any metaphysical differencebetween facts and values, nor any methodologicaldifference between morality and science” (p.163). Is and ought are not, for pragmatists, thequalitatively distinct realms they are commonlyheld to be in lay and scientific discourse, a pointwith significant implications for the linkage be-tween epistemologies and ethics of nature (Parker1995; Rosenthal and Buchholz 1995; Santas1995). Pragmatism’s third characteristic, accord-ing to Rorty, is “the doctrine that there are noconstraints on inquiry save conversationalones—no wholesale constraints derived from thenature of the objects, or of the mind, or of lan-guage, but only those retail constraints providedby the remarks of our fellow-inquirers” (p. 165).

Pragmatists who make statements about epis-temology often focus not so much on truth asjustification, i.e., the conditions under which weought to accept that x is true. In one such ac-count, D. S. Clarke argues that what is distinctiveabout pragmatist justification is that purelyepistemic criteria are not sufficient; rather, “justi-fication must in part be given relative to theactions for which the accepted proposition servesas a basis and to purposes these actions fulfill”(1989:20). This, Clarke argues, is the basis of thefamous saying by William James, “the true is theuseful.” Clarke, however, extends this rather bla-tant conflation of epistemology and methodologyby inserting a risk-benefit calculus in which onecompares potential costs of being wrong againstcosts of acquiring further evidence, a “goodenough” criterion of acceptance. Following thisapproach, then, the pragmatist is justified in ac-cepting a proposition as true without making any

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foundationalist or correspondence-based claimsabout truth.

Though pragmatists have often been accused,by critical realists and others, of embracing rela-tivism, few if any pragmatists would agree. Forinstance, the communitarian Philip Selznick ar-gues that the pragmatic viewpoint is anything butrelativistic (1992:115–16), and quotes RichardBernstein as supporting the view that pragmatismleads more to a pluralist approach, for reasonscentral to the pragmatist project:

Pluralism for the pragmatists never meant a self-enclosed relativism where we are forever doomed tobe prisoners limited to our own conceptual schemes,frameworks, or horizons. . . . Long before the currentfascination (obsession?) with radical incommen-surability, Dewey was aware of the danger of the typeof degenerate pluralism that would block commu-nity and communication (1987:521).

Perhaps no other pragmatist has been labeledas a relativist more so than Richard Rorty. Insummarizing Rorty’s position on relativism, Ishould admit that it is sometimes hard to deter-mine whether or not to take him at his word. Heis the kind of philosopher known for rhetoricalflourishes, word-bites, and likely exaggerationsthat, in combination with his fairly prodigiousoutput, have probably played a major role insecuring for him the status of one of today’s mostprominent pragmatists. Indeed, even radicalpragmatists generally give him philosophical, ifnot political, acclaim (e.g., Fraser 1989).

Rorty has published a number of importantbooks on pragmatism and how it differs fromfoundationalist accounts of reality (1979, 1982,1991). It is impossible, in the space allotted here,to do justice to this literature; I will instead focuson one essay in which he explicitly contrastshimself with realists, and addresses the relation-ship between pragmatism and relativism (1989).This essay, “Solidarity or Objectivity?”, appeared(among other places) in an edited collection onthe subject of relativism (Krausz 1989b), andserved as the first essay in his book Objectivity,Relativism, and Truth (Rorty 1991). Rorty has acuriously loaded definition of realists and pragma-tists, though much of his argument echoes that ofD. S. Clarke, presented above:

Those who wish to ground solidarity in objectiv-ity—call them “realists”—have to construe truth ascorrespondence to reality. So they must construct ametaphysics which has room for a special relationbetween beliefs and objects which will differentiate

true from false beliefs. They also must argue thatthere are procedures of justification of belief whichare natural and not merely local. . . . By contrast,those who wish to reduce objectivity to solidar-ity—call them “pragmatists”—do not require eithera metaphysics or an epistemology. They view truthas, in William James’s phrase, what it is good for usto believe. . . . Insofar as pragmatists make thedistinction between knowledge and opinion, it issimply the distinction between topics on which suchagreement is relatively easy to get and topics onwhich agreement is relatively hard to get(1989:36–37).

Rorty lists three aspects of relativism as gener-ally used (pp. 37–38): (a) every belief has equalvalidity, (b) there is no one criterion for truth, and(c) one can say nothing about truth outside ofdescriptions of procedures of justification used inone’s own society. The third, “ethnocentric” viewis that of the pragmatist, not the “self-refuting”first view nor the “eccentric” second. Rorty,however, disputes that meaning (c) should becalled relativist, since on his pragmatist account,relativism is a negative argument, namely thatthere should be no distinction between knowl-edge and opinion. As suggested in the epigraphabove, Rorty finds the notion of relativism non-sensical with respect to pragmatism, since on hisview, pragmatism has no epistemology. Rorty’s isthus a strongly agnostic view of the problem ofrelativism.

Pragmatism and Nature

Pragmatism has, in the last several years, re-ceived considerable interest in environmentalphilosophy, though mostly as applied to norma-tive versus specifically epistemological concerns.One philosopher who has considered implica-tions of a pragmatist ethics for a variety of prob-lems is Anthony Weston. Weston argues thatpragmatism leads to a reframing of ethics fromfocusing on “puzzles”—discrete problems thathave definite solutions—to “problematic situ-ations,” in which a great deal more creativity iscalled for to find “integrative strategies” that re-spond to the common ambiguities, complexities,and fuzzy boundaries involved in many real-worldpredicaments (1992). Weston acknowledges thatthis approach may lay his pragmatism open tocharges of relativism. His position, however, isthat pragmatism renders critique an “inside job,”one that does not refer to some Archimedeanpoint outside society. To Weston, “Our chief


critical resources lie within every community’straditions and values, even resources for radicallychallenging the community’s prevailing valuesand practices themselves” (1992:169). Weston’sargument suggests again the pragmatist’s agnosticposition on relativism: his approach is not somuch antirelativistic as a sense that it is the wrongproblem to worry about.

Another philosopher who has explored linksbetween pragmatism and environmental prob-lems is Bryan Norton. In common with methodo-logical pragmatists, Norton sees the philosophy“not as a set of metaphysical principles, but as amethod” (1991:x). Norton pins his pragmaticapproach to a call for pluralism, for a recognitionof the existence of a diversity of values in contem-porary environmentalism. Norton’s pragmatismleads him to see the differing philosophicalstrands of environmentalism, such as thosehearkening back to John Muir’s preservationismand Gifford Pinchot’s conservationism, as actu-ally converging in common policy objectives asregard pressing environmental problems. That is,what looks to most philosophers like an unbridge-able gap between the positions of different fac-tions of the environmental movement is toNorton more of a healthy diversity of valueswhich all support broadly similar goals. Questionsof relativism in environmental debates becomelargely irrelevant, following Norton’s account.

Pragmatist accounts of nature such as Nor-ton’s, due to their methodological bent, are notfull responses to the social-construction-of-nature argument. Norton’s emphasis is on policyconflicts between different factions of environ-mentalism and the extent to which they can reachpolicy consensus. One could, for instance, imag-ine consensus being achieved over wildernessprotection among groups of environmentalistswith rather different agendas (Weston 1992:123),but this does not challenge the possibility that“wilderness” itself is a social construction that is,on James’s account, “true” only to the extent thatit is a useful concept to support environmentalprotection. Indeed, though Norton acknow-ledges that wilderness is defined in a culturalcontext (1991:57), and not everyone thinks ofnature as wilderness (pp. 155ff), in the last analy-sis, he succumbs to the same sense of wilderness-as-other that was criticized by Cronon, citing ittoward the close of his argument as one pole of anature/civilization continuum: “At one extremeis wilderness, the ultimate test of our culture: Canwe halt the dash toward civilization, and save

nature itself, the wildness that is the origin of ourexistence, at least in a few places?” (pp. 248–49).

One recent multiauthored volume that appliespragmatism to the realm of nature is Environ-mental Pragmatism (Light and Katz 1995a). Thevolume represents a rich collection of essays onpragmatist thought (e.g., Hickman 1995; Parker1995) and its relevance to contemporary environ-mental problems, including wilderness protec-t ion. Some al lus ions to wilderness inEnvironmental Pragmatism invoke an epistemol-ogy that stresses practical interaction with na-ture: for instance, Larry Hickman maintains thatDewey would probably have supported wildernessprotection primarily to provide valuable data toscientists (1995:68), and Anthony Weston arguesthat wilderness as totally separate from humansis in some ways not as “real” as wild places asencountered by humans (1995a:153). Anotherdiscussion in the volume suggests that a pragma-tist perspective would best support wildernessprotection in specific situations versus in general(1995b:302), though some pragmatist support forwilderness preservation in the abstract is possible(Light 1995:332).

What, then, is environmental pragmatism, assuggested in these and other examples found inthe volume? As summarized by the editors, fourforms of environmental pragmatism are repre-sented (Light and Katz 1995b:5). The first con-siders applications of classical Americanphilosophical pragmatism to environmentalproblems. The second concerns inquiries intopractical strategies for closing gaps betweenstakeholders in environmental-policy disputes.The third addresses theoretical perspectives thatcan provide consensus among environmentalists.The fourth involves arguments favoring moralpluralism in environmental theory.

These approaches to environmental pragma-tism clearly span its methodological and philo-sophical dimensions, yet it is difficult to detectone overarching message running through theessays. Indeed, the editors’ introduction offers astrongly methodological account of pragmatism,arguing that “Environmental ethics must developfor itself a methodology of environmental prag-matism—fueled by a recognition that theoreticaldebates are problematic for the development ofenvironmental policy” (Light and Katz 1995b:2),and in a later passage, “The pragmatist [objec-tive] is toward finding workable solutions to en-vironmental problems now. Pragmatists cannottolerate theoretical delays to the contribution

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that philosophy may make to environmentalquestions” (p. 4). In a comment, one of theeditors, Andrew Light, clarifies his position bycontrasting “philosophical” and “metaphiloso-phical” pragmatism (1995:330ff). Philosophicalpragmatism entails specific philosophical (e.g.,epistemological) commitments, whereasmetaphilosophical pragmatism is more a plural-ism-endorsing perspective on philosophical ex-change. Metaphilosophical pragmatism, in otherwords, is methodological pragmatism as appliedto philosophical debate, a sense that pluralism isnecessary for true exchange of ideas and resolu-tion of philosophical conflict. Light counts him-self as squarely metaphilosophical—thoughsometimes philosophical—in his pragmatist in-clinations. It is apparent that methodologicalpragmatism runs as a major thread throughcontemporary applications of pragmatism tonature.

A Critical Assessment

This all-too-brief review raises several ques-tions about pragmatism in relation to relativism.The first concerns what exactly pragmatism is.Though the editors of Environmental Pragmatismmaintain that it “is clearly a distinct and identifi-able perspective in and for environmental phi-losophy” (Light and Katz 1995b:5), ThomasLovejoy’s thirteen separate defensible pragma-tisms appear to belie this statement (1963). As ifthe directions taken by neopragmatism weren’tenough, the founding fathers of the movementdisplayed considerable diversity over basic pointssuch as the necessity and content of pragmatistmetaphysics (Parker 1995:24). Thus, defining“the” pragmatist perspective on relativism be-comes an elusive project.

Most significantly, though there are major ex-ceptions as noted above, it is not always clearwhether pragmatism is anything more than amethodology. This may have serious implicationswith respect to relativism. From one angle, itcould mean that pragmatism embraces empiricalrelativism as just a symptom of pluralism: allperspectives are right in their own way. Fromanother angle, it could mean that pragmatismtacitly adopts dominant discourses in a decidedlyunrelativistic manner.

Pragmatists need to take greater pains to dis-tance themselves from the “vulgar pragmatism”

denounced by Stout. The great bulk of environ-mental policy today is motivated by what NeilEvernden derided as “resourcism”—a crude ex-trapolation of instrumentalist logic to the non-human realm, all done in the name of pragmaticenvironmentalism (1985). By not defining itselfcarefully, philosophical pragmatism slips over tomethodological pragmatism, which itself slipsover to vulgar pragmatism in its lesser moments.Pragmatism as such lacks what Michael Brunerand Max Oelschlaeger have called a “criticalrhetoric” (1994:388–89).

One major reason philosophical pragmatismlapses over into the lesser attributes of methodo-logical pragmatism is that it is decidedly ambiva-lent about theory. As suggested above, somepragmatists present theory as secondary to anddisconnected from practice. But surely this is aninadequate conceptualization of the relationshipbetween theory and action—and action is a majorpragmatist concern. Theory, far from being unre-lated to actual events, is necessary to inform ourunderstanding of these events and point to nec-essary components of a workable solution. If thereis insufficient formulation of what the problem is(as informed by theory), then solutions cannotultimately do what they are intended to do. Prag-matist agnosticism about relativism then is symp-tomatic of a larger agnosticism about theoreticalmatters.

Indeed, critical realists have taken some formsof pragmatism to account primarily for their rela-tive inability to make critical, theoretically in-formed pronouncements on reality (e.g.,Outhwaite 1987:24–26 et passim). If makingclaims on reality involves the form of objectivityRorty caricatures, the impossible God’s-eye viewof things, then pragmatists are wise to steer awayfrom this naive form of realism. Yet Bhaskar, afteracknowledging with pragmatists the necessity ofavoiding the “ontic fallacy” of considering realityto be so transparent that knowledge is collapsedonto it, nonetheless argues that Rorty (and bydefault, other pragmatists who adopt similar po-sitions) commit the “epistemic fallacy” of doingprecisely the opposite—that is, of reducing ontol-ogy to epistemology, being to knowledge, realityto our construct of it (Bhaskar 1989). If criticalrealism could be criticized for being rather tooepistemologically confident in its reality claims,pragmatism could likewise be criticized for beingtoo epistemologically tentative.


Conclusion

It is thus not truth that varies with social, psycho-logical, and cultural contexts but the symbols weconstruct in our unequally effective attempts tograsp it (Geertz 1973:212).

[The dread of relativism] is unfounded because themoral and intellectual consequences that are com-monly supposed to flow from relativism—subjectiv-ism, nihilism, incoherence, Machiavellianism,ethical idiocy, esthetic blindness, and so on—do notin fact do so and the promised reward of escaping itsclutches, mostly having to do with pasteurizedknowledge, are illusory (Geertz 1989:12).

Though Clifford Geertz was not speaking ex-plicitly with reference to nature, he could havebeen, both in his 1973 realist mood as evidencedin the first epigraph above, and in his “anti-antirelativist” mood in the 1989 quote following.As suggested in his dramatic about-face, socialconstructivism tends to induce polarized re-sponses. Yet many geographers of nature havefound these polarities to be unacceptable. Forinstance, David Demeritt, in his comparative as-sessment of environmental history and contem-porary cultural geography, rejects both therealism of the former and the arch-constructivismof the latter (1994b), while I. G. Simmons unen-thusiastically presents realism and idealism as thetwo prevailing choices one has in light of thesocial- construction- of-nature argument(1993:159).

It is against this backdrop of polarized andunattractive options, options that work to dividescholars of nature rather than provide a meeting-ground, that critical realist and pragmatist theorymay have something to offer. They largely arisefrom different sides of the Atlantic and in re-sponse to different philosophical concerns, buttheir recent aim is quite similar: to avoid theScyllan grip of empiricist objectivism, while navi-gating around the Charybdian whirlpool of sub-jectivism and strong relativism. Indeed, at afundamental level, they share a common suspi-cion of the subject-object dualism that undergirdsmany of these polarities, as geographers of bothpersuasions have testified (e.g., Sayer 1992:75ff.;Wescoat 1992:589).

Yet their paths from this common point ofdeparture have diverged. For their part, pragma-tists have adopted a deliberately agnostic positionon the relativistic implications of the social con-struction of nature. In their better moments,

pragmatists take to heart a deflationary accountof truth as espoused by their founders, a positionJeffrey Stout calls “modest pragmatism.” Modestpragmatism, which resides somewhere betweenthe impossible “God’s-eye view” of objectivity onone end and nihilism on the other, “stops short ofthe temptation to define truth” (1988:249ff).Pragmatists emphasize process over product, andas such, find relativism and other philosophicalpositions often to be beside the point. Criticalrealism adopts a different tack. It reformulatesontology and epistemology in nonatomistic,nonempiricist language to clear the ground forreality claims that avoid strong relativism, arguingthat social constructivism need not lead to sub-jectivist excess. Critical realism is a fine-tunedextension of the Enlightenment project, and assuch is unabashedly prepostmodernist in its en-dorsement of science as a fallible but criticallyimportant project (e.g., Outhwaite 1987:119).

In my estimate, then, pragmatists and criticalrealists are, among other things, of different tem-peraments and inclinations. They look at theworld in philosophically different ways: followingAnne Buttimer’s rubric (1993), pragmatists tendto conceive of the world as an arena of relativelydisconnected events, whereas critical realistsview the world as a mosaic of forms underlyingspecific events. Pragmatists and realists, then, areinterested in different orders of reality: pragma-tists find significance in the realm of the empiri-cal, whereas critical realists seek to identify thestructural conditions responsible for particularempirical events. Pragmatists are happier withlower-order truths than critical realists in largepart because truths at this level are often moreimmediately useful. Pragmatists are looking forworkable solutions to problems; they are tired oftheoretical battles—such as that between rela-tivist and antirelativist interpretations of nature—that loom large in higher-order epistemologicalcontroversies, and have little inclination to stepinto the fray. Critical realists, in contrast, placemuch greater value on correct conceptualizationof problems as a necessary first step in solvingthem, leading them to seek higher-order, struc-tural truths to help explain the empirical situationof interest. Critical realists of Marxist and similarpersuasions are decidedly uneasy with solvingproblems at the immediate level, because theyfeel these smaller-scale solutions often ignore im-portant larger truths. Critical realists, then, aremuch more interested in making grander truth-claims, though they realize that problems of

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relativism tend to magnify as scale and abstrac-tion increases, and hence take theoretical battlesvery seriously.

These differences suggest that pragmatists andcritical realists could learn something from eachother. Critical realists could learn a little episte-mological humility from philosophical pragma-tism, the understanding realists share but oftenforget that, beyond the scale of immediate, non-controversial truth-statements, knowledge is in-deed highly partial and fallible, and that we hadbetter not stake everything on it. To take to heartthe social-construction-of-nature argument, toadmit all that we really do not, and will never,know, signals not so much a capitulation to rela-tivism as a spirit of finitude. Pragmatist epistemol-ogy, however, works better to inject a healthydegree of doubt and reflexivity in our epistemo-logical claims than to provide a basis to makethese claims. This is the terrain of critical realism.Pragmatists know, but could be reminded by criti-cal realists, that nihilism and aphasia are notinevitable consequences of the admission that aGod’s-eye view of the world is impossible. Theycould also be cautioned against the kind of na-iveté that accompanies their tendency to takeexisting truth-statements at face value, grantingthem de facto validity. Pragmatism could thusstand a bit more of a critical context. It is quitepossible, for instance, that not all environmentalproblems can be solved, that many are too deeplyentrenched in social and human-environmentrelations to change in the timespan of interest topragmatists. A critical-realist analysis may, inother words, be the best way to suggest to prag-matists what can and cannot realistically bedone—a very pragmatic consideration.

I do not believe for a moment, however, thatpragmatism and critical realism could be readilymerged in geography, nor should they, as theyrepresent different moments in the arc that tracesa path beyond constructivism’s relativistic ex-cesses. Geographers have long gotten used toaccepting their internal differences as potentialstrengths; perhaps this is where they have themost to contribute to the social-construction-of-nature debate, given their tremendous philo-sophical diversity. I thus do not wish to suggestthat we create yet another philosophical “ism” ingeography—perhaps a “critical pragmatism” or a“pragmatist realism”—as these merged terms sug-gest a nondynamic blending of the two ap-proaches which denies the very strength thatresides in their dialectical tension.

Let us, then, return to the example of externalnature, the biophysical world we inhabit, inexploring ways in which pragmatist and critical-realist approaches may jointly point out a paththrough the polarities that commonly charac-terize responses to the social-construction-of-nature argument. Consider, again, wilderness.Both reality and social construct, wilderness rep-resents the best and worst of our imaginings ofautonomous nature, and also points through ourimaginings to the natural processes responsiblefor life in all its diversity—processes that havebeen significantly impacted by differentiated hu-man practices on the face of the earth. Thehyperrealist and hyperconstructivist would havelittle tolerance for each other’s epistemologicalinterests in wilderness, but the critical realist andthe pragmatist could, I believe, appreciate theneed for each other to the extent that they rec-ognize their own shadows—the limitations oftheir respective positions.

Imagine a critical realist interested in “wilder-ness” as relatively nonhumanized landscapes.This individual would, in explaining its ecologicalcharacteristics, maintain a healthy skepticism re-garding Clementsian notions of nature as com-munities-in-equilibrium, yet remain equallyaware that more recently prevalent individualis-tic, chaotic, and disturbance-driven notions ofnature have their social basis as well (Worster1990; Barbour 1995). As one result, a critical-realist inquiry into natural ecosystems wouldprobably proceed from a dialectical perspectiveon the role of individual organisms vis-à-vis theircommunities in a manner analogous to Bhaskar’stransformational model of social activity, whichlinks individuals and society in a mutually consti-tutive manner (1986: 122ff.). A pragmatist natu-ral scientist may, however, proceed rathercomfortably from the more empirically derivedand policy-implementable perspective that non-humanized landscapes consist of relatively inde-pendent species, each with its own habitatrequirements (for one example pertaining tovegetation dynamics, see Webb 1987). This latterperspective, in contrast to that of the criticalrealist, would consist of more modest, closer-to-the-surface truth-statements capable of directimplementation in management—indeed, a gooddeal of biogeography and conservation biologyhas largely followed this trajectory (e.g., Myersand Giller 1988; Caughley and Gunn 1996). Thestrength of each perspective is the shadow of theother: the pragmatist approach is less contextually


sensitive and may lack the ability to explainhigher-order relations among species, whereasthe critical-realist approach may lack the abilityto deliver policy-implementable truths due to itsdialectical complexity.

Now imagine a pragmatist interested in “wil-derness” as an overriding policy focus in contem-porary environmentalism. This person wouldprobably be well aware that there are historical,social, and political reasons for environmental-ism’s wilderness emphasis, as well as for contem-porary opposition to this emphasis among thoseof a more environmental-justice perspective (DiChiro 1995). The pragmatist’s epistemologicalinterest may be less in deciding whose version ofnature is “closer to the truth” than in identifyingpractically derived truths both sides share, truthsthat may help build coalitions to support bothnature protection and social justice (e.g., Weston1995a:153). The critical realist, however, may bemore driven to note the ideological embedded-ness of wilderness protection, and search to iden-tify structural processes potentially responsiblefor the imperilment of both nature and marginal-ized peoples (or that set one against the other),than in immediately looking for epistemologicalclosure between differing perspectives on wilder-ness (e.g., Benton 1993:66ff.; Soper 1995:155ff.).To those of a critical-realist bent, a more robustenvironmental policy must ultimately be built onthese deeper truths—as many contemporaryecofeminist and Marxist accounts jointly argue(e.g., Plumwood 1993; Harvey 1996). Here, too,each position is a shadow of the other: pragma-tism may achieve laudable, though limited, policyends, whereas critical realism’s truths are moreilluminating than immediately useful.

To the extent that either side recognizes its ownshadow, there is no necessary reason why thesediffering perspectives cannot complement eachother, as they both offer important truths aboutnature, albeit at different levels. Indeed, the mainepistemological contribution pragmatism andcritical realism offer together is their ability tospeak truth across a spectrum of relevant scales.The same social-construction-of-nature argu-ment that, among other inclinations, leads prag-matists to lower their truth-sights, leads criticalrealists to search deeper for more robust truths.

This joint response constitutes in my mind afar more adequate reply to the social-construc-tion-of-nature argument than the level of vehe-ment, hyperreal ist denial one typical lyencounters. It also is far more adequate than

taking constructivism to the opposite extreme: inits stronger versions, social constructivism repre-sents a pendulum swing away from the ontologies,epistemologies, and moralities connected withthe environmental determinism of a century ago,and ironically falls into the same traps. As Nicho-las Entrikin has warned in a recent review ofsocial constructivism in geography: “The preoc-cupation with the social in discussions of placeand region threatens to replace a long-disavowednatural reductionism with a social reductionism”(1996:219).

Yet Foucault’s well-known charge, “Truth is athing of this world. . . . Each society has its regimeof truth” (1980:131), speaks to an undeniablepolitical and cultural thread in the fabric of realityas we represent and evaluate it. To dismiss thischarge as relativistic greatly simplifies its import,as relativism is generally apprehended as an all-or-nothing concept. Properly understood, how-ever, some degree of relativism is undeniable.Pragmatists and critical realists alike admit thatall knowledges are bounded and partial; yet theyboth, in a sort of tense complementarity, point toways that geographers and others whose businessand concern it is to represent nature can still havesomething to say.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank several anonymous referees,my graduate students, and Denis Cosgrove and JamesWescoat for the very helpful comments they offered onearlier versions of this paper. James Birchler providedinvaluable research assistance. I also wish to acknowl-edge support from NSF grant #SBR-9600985.

Notes

1. Not all contributors to the volume equally sharedthis sentiment; thus essays like those of Soulé(1995)and Shepard (1995) stand in contrast tothe much more conciliatory essay of Hayles(1995). For a better conceptualization of the de-constructionist project of Derrida and others, seeBennington (1993).

2. The epistemological emphasis commonly givento social constructivism has been challenged byDavid Demeritt, who argues that social con-structivists ought to focus more on scientificpractices that produce “truths”: “Such a narrowfocus on epistemological questions simply feedsthe unfortunate sense that social constructivismpresents an exclusive choice between objectivity

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and relativism” (1996:486). Demeritt contendsthat social constructivism will be much more un-derstandable, believable, and useful if it sets aside“unresolvable” debates over truth and insteademphasizes specific material practices, and atten-dant realms of power, that produce scientificknowledge. While I am in agreement with De-meritt’s philosophical and political unease con-cerning overly idealistic implementations of socialconstructivism (i.e., those that ignore how truthsarise from practices), I still maintain that theproduct of science (its truth-claims) requires fur-ther epistemological clarification in light of theconstructivist challenge, and this clarification willnot be entirely provided by focusing on the processof science alone.

3. See, for instance, Williams (1980); Olwig (1984);Bird (1987); Latour (1988); FitzSimmons (1989);Burgess (1990); Haraway (1991); Oeschlaeger(1991); Wilson (1992); Bennett and Chaloupka(1993a); Evernden (1993); Lynch (1993); Milton(1993); Simmons (1993); Harrison and Burgess(1994); Cronon (1995b); Robertson et al. (1996).

4. One of the best-known early defenses of relativismwas ascribed by Plato to Protagoras, who lived inthe second half of the fifth century BCE. Pro-tagorean homo mensura (“man” is the measure)relativism has generally been understood as a formof ethical subjectivism, in which evaluative de-scriptors such as “true” or “right” become “true forme” and “right for me” (Lacey 1986:206–08;Angeles 1992:261).

5. See, for instance, Kurtz (1994); Rothman (1994);Salmon (1994); Teller (1994); Parsons (1995).

6. For critical appraisals of Putnam’s approach, seeSosa (1993) and Forster (1994). Nancey Murphyalso navigates between pragmatism and realism inher account of science and religion (Murphy1993). For their part, however, critical realistshave generally lumped pragmatists into the samecategory as other “conventionalists” (see, for in-stance, Keat and Urry 1982; Outhwaite 1987).

7. For a critical review by one geographer of post-modernist deconstructionism, see Marden(1992); a recent perspective emphasizing ques-tions of nature is presented by Matthew Gandy(1996:31). The position of Andrew Sayer, a well-known critical realist, on postmodernism is sum-marized in Sayer (1993), followed by a somewhatheated exchange among Sayer, Clive Barnett, andMatthew Hannah and Ulf Strohmayer (all 1993;see Antipode 25:4, pp. 345–69). Many, thoughcertainly not all, features of pragmatism and post-modernist philosophy overlap (Shalin 1993). Inaddition, postmodernism and relativism shouldnot necessarily be conflated. One defense of post-modern subjectivism against relativism has beenprovided by Agnes Heller (1990:7–8); a forcefuldistinction between postmodernist morality andethical relativism is offered by Zygmunt Bauman

(1994:14–15). Indeed, the common notion thatpostmodernism is inevitably committed to a rejec-tion of grand narratives has been forcefullydisputed by Arran Gare, who offers a new “poly-phonic” grand narrative of nature (1995).

8. The clash between wilderness advocacy and cri-tique is, in fact, nowhere more apparent than inthe juxtaposition of this article with a Sierra Clubad immediately following, “No Wild, No Wildlife”and featuring a picture of a polar bear and adescription of the Arctic Refuge in Alaska underthreat of attack by the oil industry. The ad ends,“The Sierra Club works to save wildlife by savingthe wilderness.”

9. Not all assessments of the idea of wilderness, itshould be noted, are unilaterally critical; see, forinstance, Nash (1982) and Oeschlaeger (1991).

10. Cronon, perhaps unsurprisingly, was not asked bythe editors of Wild Earth to respond to thesecriticisms, though he did in another forum (1996).

11. See Proctor (1998) for further discussion of theproblem of nature-culture dualism.

12. This dualism is problematic on both sides,whether in the ways that social constructivism canbe incorrectly understood as a separation of thesocial from the physical (Gerber 1997), or in theways that the philosophically naive doctrine ofobjectivism serves important political ends in ge-ography (Jones 1995) and elsewhere. See Proctor(1998) for further discussion.

13. David Demeritt correctly suggests that this mis-understanding of constructivism’s epistemologi-cal emphasis is at least in part the fault of socialconstructivists themselves, who have not alwaysbeen careful to distinguish their argument from amore ontological constructivism (1996:486).

14. As but one example involving a scholar sympa-thetic to constructivism, Donna Haraway arguesin her most recent work, Modest [email protected]© Meets OncoMouse™, thatthe position she and others working in feministscience studies take has been caricatured as rela-tivistic, but is decidedly not so (1997:301 fn. 12).

15. One exception is a provocative article by DavidNemeth (1997), in which he criticizes the post-structuralist reading of science provided by Dixonand Jones (1996) as insufficiently relativistic—afar cry from how the authors expected most read-ers to react (Dixon and Jones 1997).

16. The term “context” may or may not infer theexistence of distinct conceptual frameworks,which some philosophers hold to be logically im-possible (Davidson 1982; Krausz 1989a:1–2).

17. One other way to understand the opposition ofrationalism and relativism is the sense providedby Matthew Gandy, in which the two representmodernist and postmodernist extremes, respec-tively (1996:30).

18. Bernard Williams has differentiated between therealms of “the scientific” and “the ethical” in


terms of whether or not they converge in socialdiscourse (1985:136). Descriptive claims, Wil-liams observes, are shared more commonly thannormative claims; this empirical observation thusleads us to proceed with caution in conflating thetwo realms. Most people would hence probablyagree with Timothy Lukes that epistemologicalrelativism is less secure than ethical relativism(1977). Yet others have argued that the distinc-tion is not ironclad (e.g., Eagleton 1991:17).

19. The term realism in fact covers a variety of propo-sitions, not all with significant epistemologicaldimensions; thus, for instance, Bruno Latour(1993:85) differentiates between realism and con-structivism on wholly ontological terms (i.e., theextent to which mixing of nature and culture isacknowledged), and some philosophers have beenexploring the possibility of moral realism, “theview that there are moral facts which we candiscover” (Sayre-McCord 1988:ix).

20. In a series of publications stretching back twodecades, Bhaskar has carefully developed a posi-tion first called transcendental or scientific real-ism, and more recently critical realism (1975,1979, 1986, 1989). Bhaskar conceives his realismas a philosophy for and not merely of science; onepreface states, “The essays collected in this vol-ume all seek to underlabour . . . for the sciences,and especially the human sciences, in so far as theymight illuminate and empower the project of hu-man self-emancipation” (1989:vii). For summarydescriptions of Bhaskar’s realist philosophy, seeOuthwaite (1987:20f f. ) , Cloke et al .(1991:134ff.), and Pratt (1991, 1995:63–66). Yetnot all self-avowed critical realists trace their line-age in this manner; one recent monograph (Dolby1996) develops a “critical realist” perspective onscience without even one reference to Bhaskar, anomission I find almost impossible to comprehend.

21. The term “partial truths” has been used by JamesClifford (1986) to refer to ethnographic writing.Clifford asserts that ethnographies are all partialtruths, not in that they are partly false as well, butthat they are, by virtue of the fact that they areinterpretations, “committed and incomplete.”

22. One excellent bibliography of primary and secon-dary sources is found at the end of Pragmatism:From Peirce to Davidson (Murphy 1990).

23. Bhaskar has taken on Rorty on multiple occasions,though primarily “as emblematic of postmod-ernism” versus pragmatism (1991:139).

24. Jeffrey Stout cautions that Rorty and other prag-matists sometimes slip into essentialism by offer-ing negative statements, e.g. “Truth has noessence.” Stout considers antiessentialism to bebest understood as methodological nominalism:“The methodological nominalist is free to haveviews about truth or justification, beliefs useful inarguing against traditional philosophical theories,provided they do not go beyond the kinds of

claims that can be warranted by empirical inquiryand linguistic reflection” (1988:252).

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