A New Practice: Facilitating Sustainable Agriculture 313The erosion of realist–positivism as a universally trusted epistemology appears
to be associated with other important societal changes. For one, the trust in experts
and specialized institutions is waning. A recent survey found, for example, that
British respondents do not trust the information about biotechnology which they
get from scientists, business corporations or the Department of Trade and Indus-
try. They prefer to trust organizations such as Greenpeace (Tate, 1995).
The erosion of trust also appears to be related to uncertainty about issues for
which the stakes are high, such as global food security which was touched upon in
the section ‘Is it Immoral to be Concerned About the Health of Natural Resources?’
and ‘Making the Flip’. Funtowicz and Ravetz (1990, 1994) argue that we have
entered a period of ‘post-normal science’ in the sense of Kuhn (1970) because
‘normal science’ cannot deal with conditions of high uncertainty. The develop-
ment of reliable grounds for knowing must proceed in part along other lines. Self-
appointed activists emerge, who become formidably well informed across discipline
boundaries about a subject or situation which threatens their values or livelihood.
Decision fora include speech-makers and citizens, as well as scientists or specialists,
and ‘facts’ encompass people’s values and express cultural meaning. The final arbi-
ters of reliable knowledge are ‘extended peer communities’ made up of a much
wider membership than the conventional narrow professional elites or restricted
political circles.
Funtowicz and Ravetz (1994) speak of the ‘democratization of science’; that is,
a widely shared process of learning and informed public debate about goals, and
not just means, seems the only acceptable way to deal with high uncertainty when
the stakes are high and the consequences of getting it wrong are potentially cata-
strophic.
This observation is reminiscent of Habermas’ (1984, 1985) argument that
society can overcome the momentum of what we have constructed in the past –
and thus prevent the Norsemen on Greenland scenario – only by reaching consen-
sus about what action to take next; that is, not on the basis of controlling things
(instrumental rationality), nor on the basis of beating competitors or opponents
(strategic rationality), but on the basis of shared learning, collaboration and the
development of consensus about the action to take (communicative rationality).
Constructionism
Constructionism is the name given to the epistemology which supports the learn-
ing processes described in this book. If everyone agrees about the goals, we can
afford to worry about the best technical means of securing those goals. If everyone
agrees about the facts, we can speak of objective truth. ‘Objective’ knowledge has,
therefore, by no means become outdated or unneeded. But, if these conditions do
not hold, we have to stretch the positivist epistemology and embrace construction-
ism. Reality no longer appears as a ‘given’ but as something actively ‘constructed’