views on the extent of our knowledge
- knowledge is power - for example is a belief system
- worldviews - self-reinforcing beliefs
- cornucopian/individualist - increased application of knowledge will solve problems
- hierarchist - set the right incentives or rules/ knowledge-centered
- egalitarian - have to work together to grow a plan
- fatalist - it's not worth the effort, no plan for action
- ignorance-based - we don't know enough and can never learn enough, so we need new explorations of the possibilities (mode 2 science) and involvement of broad range of interests (heterogeneous actors)
- diagram with axis being dependence on knowledge vs. ignorance / individual vs. group dependency /
- maybe the new world view is the second modernity version of egalitarians (twice removed from mainstream)
confronted with surprises
science (mode 2) should explore the information available and that not available
- set up experiences that are looking for surprises to happen
- include experts and heterogeneous stakeholders
- forced to use many different approaches (perspectives) to probe the issue
how can society handle this change in paradigm?
Outline and notes:
Understanding of environmental issues includes what we know and what we don't know
Uncertainty, risk and indeterminancy -
- the assumption of un-bounded rationality - everything can be known vs. bounded rationality in which not everything can be known or it might not be worth finding out
- from mp
- risk - probabililistic estimate of event or exposure
- uncertainty - broad range of possible outcomes and complexity makes it imposible to define the set of probabilities
- indeterminancy - some information that we will not be able to know
Gross 2010
- taxonomy of knowledge and ignorance - from Matthais Gross 2010
- surprise is when an observation is counter to accepted knowledge
- handling ignorance and surprise becomes one of the distinctive features of decision making in contemporary society
- precautionary principle is meant to shift burden of proof, not create a wait-and-see-for-more-science
- need to assess experimental practices in broader context of using reflexive tools of modernity
- "In second modernity, human societies have begun to realize that not all risks can be controlled and that they must be coped with and incorporated into planning and development"
- knowledge workers (in first modernity) are now faced with the bifurcation into the predominance of ignorance and nonknowledge
- need to take risks for society to learn (Wildavsky)
- avoiding risks or surprises will limit progress
- "Others believe that ecological restoration resembles a merging of science and artistic creation (Turner 1987)"
- different definitions of surprise
- Crawford S. Holling (1986, 294) defined surprise as Simmel used it in the context of his relation between subjective and objective culture and points to Arendt's "startling unexpectedness": "Surprise concerns both the natural system and the people who seek to understand causes, to expect behaviors, and to achieve some defined purpose by actionlist here
- when perceived reality departs qualitatively from expectationlist here
- lSchumpeter, the economist Neil Kay (1984, 69) defines surprise as follows: "A surprising event may be regarded as one whose occurrence was not anticipated, or which has been allocated such a low probability that the possibility of its occurrence was effectively discounted."ist here
- Ecologist Harvey Brooks (1986) categorized different forms of surprises into unexpected discrete events, sharp breaks in long-term trends, and the sudden emergence into political consciousness of new information.
- "local surprise, cross-scale surprise, and true novelty" (Gunderson 2003, 36)
- mode 2 science
- processes of restoration can be modularized via recursive interdependences between the previously discussed two modes of knowledge production-mode 1, discipline-based research, and mode 2, which is exploratory and experimental research in public
- dealing with surprises
- "This should mean that coacting and colearning are at the core of a participatory process that helps people deal with surprising events
- "knowledge production in the real world beyond the laboratory must be able to embed the learning process in a way that allows new surprises to be absorbed with fewer problems than traditional management strategies of scientific implementation introduce."
- "safe-fail approach or what organizational theorists call "the strategy of small losses" (Sitkin 1995). This means that the actors involved in a restoration project (including funding agencies) allow surprises and thus potential failure but have installed a structure that allows learning through these surprising events-such as focus groups, discussions, workshops, and repeated public meetings to assess the stakeholders' different views of the natural world.Read more at location
- Note: mechanism for learnung - but borders on incremenrslism
- I believe that a notion of public experiment with a focus on the core of experimentation-fostering and controlling surprises in a modularized manner-can move us one important step further
Vitek and Jackson 2008
- the Enlightenment lead to a worldview based on control
- success of rationality lead to a cornucopian worldview
- if we accept that we don't have enough information to run the world, then we should embrace ignorance
- ignorance-based worldview "predicated on the assumption that human ignorance will always exceed and out-pace human knowledge"
Berry 2008
- address the proposition that knowledge and technology can "forsee and forestall any bad consequences of their use of power"
Lamm 2008
- "history has become or significantly reduced usefulness for human wisdom and guidance in the management of the future"
- current environmental problems can't be addressed with historical information
- could be "downright dangerous"
- either depends on growth (for the West) or an "empty Earth" for many previous societies
tacit knowledge may be very important to enviornmental issues
- something that we can learn from traditional exposure to the environment and from previous generations
- however, if there is a discontinuity (such as to modernity or second modernity) then the new problems don't hav epast precident and we have to rely on new approaches
- such as acknowledging ignorance of many aspects
- and maybe using science in mode 2 - with much more focus on exploratory work to determine what is known and what is not known
- relates to Jared Diamond's new book on what can we learn from past societies -- probably should review that book
this range of thinking about knowledge is reflected in worldviews
- an ignorance-based worldview is counter to the individualist or cornucopian while not being fatalistic, it adds a new dimension for worldview
ignorance-based approach is related to:
- precautionary principle
- method to decide and take action (mode 2 science)
- uncertainty
- worldviews
Jensen 2008
- Education
- "but don't we all agree that knowledge is the goal of education?"
- what if that basic assumption wrong and "what if education is, ultimately about ignorance more thatn about knowldege"
- need to face that we have limited knowledge
- embrace "the inevitability of human ignorance" rather than it is a problem that needs to be solved or even can be solved by more education, requires a different type of education
- hubris is nothing new
- in the US we have assumed that we know enough to manage our world
- hubris is nothing new - back to the Greeks - but combining it with powerful technologies changes the potential for large scale destruction
- see adams-1988.html indeterminancy of applying too much energy density on a problem
marocco-2008
- knowledge-based environmentalism has 3 parts
- identify effects
- determine the causes
- address causes
- we need to admit that we can't prove the effects of climate change
- <!-- but that runs us into dicey territory as seen before in the battle of worldviews, it isn't about the information on climate science anymore, but beliefs -->
education - Leopold
- "Is it possible that education is the process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers."
relationship to MPF
- trains you to look for connections between different ways of looking at the world
- that training does two things:
- connections - how are these concepts related and how can you bring information from other areas
- different, conflicting or missinginformation - explicitly state how each view might have special information about something, how two views may conflict or provide ambiguous interpretations or what linkages and/or information is missing
unintended consequences
- Barry Commoner -1st law of environmental science and/or ecology:
everything is connected to everything else
- Hardin - "We can never do merely one thing" - his first law of human ecology
- Thiele-2011
- "the most menacing and pressing problems that we face today are by-products
- Homer-Dixon 2000
- Edward Tenner - Why things bite back
- Adams 1988 - as you increase effort to control a system it results in indeterminant outcomes because it is a novel use of power
Wicked problems
- information and values change as you're trying to solve the problem
Text:
References:
Berry, W. (2008). The Way of Ignorance. The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, sustainability, and the limits of knowledge. B. Vitek, and Wes Jackson, The University Press of Kentucky: 37-50.
Gross, M. (2010). Ignorance and Surprise: Science, Society and Ecological Design.
Holdrege, C. (2008). Can We See with Fresh Eyes? Beyond a Culture of Abstraction. The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, sustainability, and the limits of knowledge. B. Vitek, and Wes Jackson, The University Press of Kentucky: 323-334.
Homer-Dixon 2000
Jensen, J. (2008). Educating for Ignorance. The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, sustainability, and the limits of knowledge. B. Vitek, and Wes Jackson, The University Press of Kentucky: 293-306.
Lamm, R. D. (2008). Human Ignorance and the Limited Uses of History. The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, sustainability, and the limits of knowledge. B. Vitek, and Wes Jackson, The University Press of Kentucky: 59-66.
Marocco, J. (2008). Climate Change and the Limits of Knowledge. The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, sustainability, and the limits of knowledge. B. Vitek, and Wes Jackson, The University Press of Kentucky: 307-322.
Tenner, Edward
Thiele, L. P. (2011). Indra's Net and the Midas Touch: Living Sustainably in a Connected World. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
Vitek, B., and Wes Jackson (2008). Introduction: Taking ignorance seriously. The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, sustainability, and the limits of knowledge. B. Vitek, and Wes Jackson, The University Press of Kentucky.
