SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS, VALUES,
AND THE SCIENCE OF “PEOPLE MANAGEMENT”
By
Zachary Amedeo Piso

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Philosophy—Doctor of Philosophy
2017

ABSTRACT
SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS, VALUES,
AND THE SCIENCE OF “PEOPLE MANAGEMENT”
By
Zachary Amedeo Piso
This dissertation interrogates a shift in environmental science, policy, and management
toward conceptualizing the environment as a social-ecological system. Social-ecological systems
science reflects an interdisciplinary effort to understand how individuals and communities
achieve their environmental goals through the institutions that they maintain. Though the
paradigmatic institutions concern economic behavior (e.g. property rights institutions), the field
embraces the social sciences broadly, with contributions from sociology, anthropology,
geography, political science, and so on. That said, social science is fairly narrowly conceived;
leaders in the field stress that they are studying social mechanisms in order to predict and
manage social behavior. In a popular textbook on the subject, Fikret Berkes and Carl Folke stress
that “resource management is people management” and call for a social science of this
management.
Social-ecological systems scientists have generally neglected the ethics of people
management—for the most part they subscribe to a fairly typical fact/value dichotomy according
to which scientists describe social-ecological systems while managers and policymakers
prescribe actions in light of these descriptions. Following several philosophical traditions (in
particular pragmatist philosophy of science), I call attention to the ways that social-ecological
systems science is value-laden. I take environmental pragmatism to provide a roadmap for
conducting social-ecological systems science ethically. Environmental pragmatists stress that

science is always embedded in practical problem-solving activities that presuppose particular
goals for, and side constraints to, inquiry. Many traditions in the philosophy of environmental
science embrace social science for the specific role of facilitating this deliberation, but these
traditions do not seem to anticipate the explanatory ambitions of social sciences. This leaves
unaddressed several pertinent questions about how social explanations work (i.e. how functional
distinction structure inquiry), which have very practical implications for which social science
disciplines should be included in a collaboration and how social and ecological knowledge
should be integrated. For example, most social situations are characterized by property rights
institutions, cultural traditions, political alliances, and other social institutions within the purview
of particular social science disciplines, but researchers are not reflexive about whether to explain
environmental change according to one set of practices or another.
The dissertation traverses the following terrain: the first chapter more carefully motivates
the questions above regarding the need for ethics and the promise, but present inadequacy, of
environmental pragmatism to meet this need. Chapter two attends to Dewey’s theory of inquiry,
in particular the dialogical dimension of inquiry that authorizes warranted assertions. Through
reflection on Daniel Bromley’s volitional pragmatism and a debate between Richard Rorty and
hermeneutic social scientists, chapter three attends to the way that social science structures
inquiry in order to intervene in the normative practices of a community. Chapter four analyzes
social-ecological explanations in order to locate normative and evaluative assumptions that
should be accountable to democratic deliberation. Finally, chapter five redescribes
interdisciplinary integration as an ethical project where decisions about the centering and
decentering of different sciences is as much ethical as epistemological.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ...............................................................................................................vi
CHAPTER 1 ..........................................................................................................................1
THE SCIENCE OF PEOPLE MANAGEMENT ..................................................................1
Social Explanations of Environmental Problems ......................................................1
The Science of People Management ..........................................................................7
Inquiry, Facts, and Values .........................................................................................14
Three Unwarranted Emphases in Environmental Pragmatism ..................................22
Conclusion, and the Path to Come .............................................................................27
WORKS CITED ....................................................................................................................32
CHAPTER 2 ..........................................................................................................................35
WARRANTING ASSERTIONS ...........................................................................................35
Naturalistic Metaphysics as a Genre ..........................................................................35
Organism-Environment Interaction ...........................................................................41
Fixing Belief Versus Warranting Assertability..........................................................50
Inquiry into Causes ....................................................................................................62
Conclusion, or Finding the Social in the Ecological..................................................66
WORKS CITED ....................................................................................................................69
CHAPTER 3 ..........................................................................................................................73
VALUES AND THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATIONS .........73
Pragmatism and the Manifest Image of Humanity ....................................................73
Economic Institutions and Volitional Pragmatism ....................................................78
The Ontological Basis of Social Theory ....................................................................85
The Pragmatic Basis for Social Theory .....................................................................92
Conclusion, or Mechanism in Social-Ecological Systems ........................................94
WORKS CITED ....................................................................................................................100
CHAPTER 4 ..........................................................................................................................103
THE MEANING OF THE SOCIAL WITHIN SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL INQUIRY ..........103
The Early Emphasis on Structure and Function ........................................................103
Frameworks for Integrating the Social ......................................................................109
Values in Coastal Social-Ecological Systems Science ..............................................118
Conclusion, Plus Three Independent Factors in Moral Deliberation .........................131
WORKS CITED ....................................................................................................................135
CHAPTER 5 ..........................................................................................................................140
INTERDISCIPLINARY INTEGRATION AS ETHICAL INQUIRY ..................................140
One Last Occasion for Philosophy ............................................................................140
Making Sense of the Metaphors of Interdisciplinary Integration ..............................146
From Pragmatics to Ethics .........................................................................................154

iv

An Ideal for Integration: Well-Ordered Interdisciplinary Science ............................166
Conclusion .................................................................................................................173
WORKS CITED ....................................................................................................................175

v

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: A schematic of ordering interdisciplinary inquiry, with a parallel example
from the Menabe case study ......................................................................................166

vi

CHAPTER 1
THE SCIENCE OF PEOPLE MANAGEMENT
Abstract: This chapter argues that the development of social-ecological systems science,
and in particular the practice of explaining environmental change in terms of social
mechanisms, presents a number of philosophical and ethical challenges. Founding figures
in social-ecological systems science aspire to a science of “people management” that
understands the mechanisms governing social institutions and norms. These mechanisms
are investigated by disciplines as diverse as institutional economics, political science,
geography, and anthropology. By attending to examples of social explanations in this
literature, I argue that explaining environmental change in terms of particular social
mechanisms (or according to particular social scientific disciplines) necessarily involves
making normative and evaluative assumptions that complicates the fact/value dichotomy
presumed by researchers. I introduce environmental pragmatism as a way of diagnosing
such normative and evaluative assumptions, submitting these assumptions to democratic
deliberation, and thereby working toward the legitimate and just integration of facts and
values. Still, environmental pragmatism is currently ill-equipped to grapple with the full
significance of a science of people management. I close by considering three emphases in
environmental pragmatism that stand in the way of analyzing social-ecological systems
science: (1) emphasis on the physical world but not the social, (2) emphasis on the goals
of environmental management but not on the means for achieving these goals, and (3)
emphasis on the intentional character of human action but not on its habitual character.
Social Explanations of Environmental Problems
In the Malinau District of East Kalimantan, Indonesia, communities grapple with the
decentralization of forestry management. Traditional and industrial interests vie for control of
valuable timber in the district’s rainforests; historically, the local communities have received few
benefits from the extraction of their natural resources. Inadequacies in the region’s governance
has led to an undervaluation of ecosystem services such as water purification and sustained fish
stocks. Further, the governance system has failed to ensure that the benefits of logging are fairly
distributed among the diverse stakeholder groups in the district. An interdisciplinary team of
researchers has diagnosed these failings as the result of weak political institutions. Proper
valuation of natural resources, and equitable distribution of their value, are difficult to achieve

1

when “customary land tenure and associated property rights are frequently contested by different
groups and villages” (Lebel et al. 2006, 19). Without recourse to a stable institutional framework,
the compensation that local stakeholders receive is small, and “promises made about payments or
services to be provided are seldom kept” (Lebel et al. 2006, 19). The environmental problem of
over-logging in the Malinau District results from inadequate social institutions, and the solution
to such an environmental problem is a social solution. In particular, it is a social solution
informed by institutional economics, which can explain how different property rights systems
shape the management of common-pool resources such as the region’s forests.
In the Gulf of Maine, an important fishing ground in the United States’ New England
fisheries, overfishing has led to decline of key commercial fish species for the region. Here
common-pool resource management has struggled to interrupt the collapse of the gulf’s
groundfish species such as the iconic cod, flounder, halibut, and sole. Management strategies
unattuned to the complex social and ecological dynamics of the gulf have mistakenly managed
the fishery as though these species are homogenously distributed throughout the area.
Ecologically, the complex population structures of these fish are remarkably heterogeneous, and
“localized ecological adaptations of fish, for example, local spawning groups, nursery areas, and
so on, are ignored or assumed to average out over the management area” (Lebel et al. 2006, 19).
Socially, fishing practices also flaunt the assumption of homogeneity, as the “fishermen, like
fish, are diverse and operate on many scales” (19). An interdisciplinary team of researchers has
begun to investigate these diverse operations, tracking the development from the local operation
of small-scale fishing to technologically specialized operations that can chase down patchily
distributed stocks. Again the environmental problem of the fishery collapse has a social origin,
one which can only be appreciated by studying mismatches between the locations and scales of

2

management, fish populations, and fishing operations. Here the institutional economist on the
team would give way to the geographer, who has the requisite training to offer explanations in
these terms.
For the Chisasibi First Nation of Cree, Quebec, Canada, the hunting stewards of the
Chisasibi Cree worked to develop new hunting practices in response to the return and subsequent
overhunting of caribou to the territory. The caribou had been absent from the region for seventy
years, and hunters were particularly wasteful in their first hunt after the return. The hunting
stewards succeeded in reinstituting traditional management by “reinforcing the oral history
lessons” of the community. These history lessons were vital to the culture of the Chisasibi Cree,
and the lessons undergirded stewardship practices for sensitively managing caribou, beaver, and
fish. Traditionally, “rules and enforcement are decided collectively by the stewards, who provide
a second governance layer above the community in the form of the Chisasibi Cree Trappers
Association” (Lebel et al. 2006, 19). Here an interdisciplinary team of researchers documented
the rebirth of customary caribou hunting practices in light of the efforts of the Trappers
Association. Stories of past declines of the caribou, and the caribou’s subsequent “70-yr
‘retaliatory’ absence,” impressed upon hunters the need for stewardship (19). Here it is an
anthropological account of the environmental problem that reveals the ways that social practices
are the cause and consequence of environmental changes. The team’s anthropologist is in a
unique position to understand how customs and traditions helped to reinstitute stewardship
practices and sustain the growth of caribou populations.
These three case studies are drawn from Louis Lebel and colleagues’ “Governance and
the Capacity to Manage Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems” (2006). They represent three
of nine examples drawn from throughout the world of how analyses of social dynamics can

3

contribute to our understanding of ecological change. Here they offer an introduction to socialecological systems science. Social-ecological systems science reflects a turn in applied
environmental science and management toward an appreciation of how the environment is
shaped by both ecological and social dynamics. The ambitions of social-ecological systems
researchers are significant; by coupling our understanding of ecosystems with an understanding
of social systems, environmental scientists, managers, and policymakers will be better equipped
to predict, control, and adapt to environmental change. Lebel and colleagues use these examples
to locate several social mechanisms that help to explain environmental changes and thus serve as
candidates for social-ecological systems research.
When I first encountered these sorts of case studies in the social-ecological systems
literature, I was deeply impressed, but as a philosopher I was also interested in the way that these
social-ecological explanations work. I should be very clear that I believe they do work—that is,
by describing social-ecological systems according to mechanisms like those surveyed by Lebel
and colleagues, communities are better able to predict, control, and adapt to environmental
change. In that sense, these scientists are providing true descriptions of these complex systems,
and this is no small accomplishment. Yet in the case studies above, particular social mechanisms
bear the explanatory burden for understanding complex systems. Researchers explain logging
with respect to the property rights institutions (or lack of institutions) governing common-pool
resource management. They explain the collapse of fisheries by studying the scale at which fish
and fishermen interact, and they explain the collapse of caribou populations by studying
traditional stewardship practices and the oral histories through which those practices are shared.
Other case studies in the article explain environmental changes by focusing on incentive

4

structures, or on negotiations between political coalitions, or on the legal procedures that govern
civil lawsuits.
The interesting thing about these social explanations is that, in many cases, several of
them seem applicable. Social systems are usually characterized by property rights institutions, by
multiple scales of coordination, and by traditions and customs; they are usually shaped by
incentive structures, coalition building, and legal procedures. Partly, the emphasis on particular
mechanisms reflects the disciplinary training of members of interdisciplinary teams, teams that
not uncommonly rely on a single social scientist from a single discipline. The institutional
economist is able to explain the complex system by investigating property rights institutions, the
geographer by investigating the scales of use, and the anthropologist by investigating customs
and traditions. Philosophical questions abound: Are the contingencies of researcher expertise
enough to justify focusing on some of the countless dynamics that shape social and ecological
systems? If not the composition of the collaboration, what warrants explanations that focus on
particular dynamics within these very complex social systems?
This first chapter serves two goals. First, it continues the above effort to articulate
philosophical and ethical questions that arise in the practical problem-solving activities of socialecological systems researchers. This goal reflects a programmatic commitment to do engaged
philosophy, and in particular engaged philosophy of science, which recognizes occasion for
philosophical investigation in the concrete situations facing communities (Thompson 2002). By
integrating ecological and social sciences, social-ecological systems researchers give rise to a
constellation of philosophical questions. Question that initially appear innocuous—Which social
scientists should we recruit for our interdisciplinary collaboration? How should we coordinate
diverse and sometimes rival explanations from different social sciences?—turn out to pose

5

complex philosophical problems. They require engaged philosophers to remember (in the sense
outlined by Latour 2004, 154-161) how it is that we warrant explanations at all, and social
scientific explanations in particular.
As will become clear through the analysis of scientific inquiry, these philosophical
problems are as much ethical as they are epistemological. Pursuing the first goal reveals that
methodological decisions inescapably require value judgments. The second goal of this chapter
is to sketch out the implications of these value judgments from the point of view of
environmental pragmatism. In pursuing this second goal, I want to accomplish two very
preliminary tasks. Initially I want to show that environmental pragmatists are correct to call for
democratic deliberation to structure inquiry into environmental problems. This structure is
reflected most pronouncedly in the language used to describe a problem, a language that
environmental pragmatists argue should be constructed and legitimated through public dialogue.
But my second task, still preliminary, is to locate a lacuna in environmental pragmatists’
theorization of the science-value nexus. While prevailing theories of environmental deliberation
do guide us in deciding how to describe the environmental features of problematic situations, we
lack a guide for describing the social features of these situations. In this chapter I only want to
suggest that the tools we have for describing the environmental features are not the tools we need
for describing the social features. These tools are especially important as social-ecological
systems researchers become more adept at managing complex problems in light of social
explanations. They are also especially important because the ethics of social explanations
requires that we countenance values that are not as obviously at stake when describing the
environment. Social explanations involve normative and evaluative judgments about who we are
and who we are to become.

6

The goals, then, are to trace a series of moves from a very practical question—Which
social scientists should help explain the dynamics of social-ecological systems?—through a set
of philosophical questions—What is a social scientific explanation? What does it assume and
what does it let us know?—back to another very practical question—By what procedure can we
legitimate the use of particular social scientific explanations as the basis for environmental
management? These questions are answered over the course of the dissertation, and at this point I
want to justify the overall course that I’m charting through these questions. I begin by more
closely interrogating the self-understanding of social-ecological systems researchers, in
particular how they understand social science as the science of “people management” (Berkes
and Folke 1998, 2).
The Science of People Management
In their introduction to the 1998 volume, Linking Social and Ecological Systems:
Management Practices and Social Mechanisms for Building Resilience, Fikret Berkes and Carl
Folke justify their social-ecological approach. Historically, they explain, resource management
sciences had treated the natural world as comprising discrete boxes of resources (e.g. timberproducing forests, or fish-producing bays) that yield a flow of goods and services which should
be individually maximized. This treatment compromised the sustainability and resilience of
different environments, and in order to achieve sustainability and resilience, resource managers
needed to fundamentally rethink their understanding of the natural world. The environment
would be reconceptualized as an ecosystem in which entities once thought to be discrete were
drawn into systematic relationships with other entities. Berkes and Folke report that “the systems
approach is replacing the view that resources can be treated as discrete entities in isolation from
the rest of the ecosystem and the social system” (2).

7

Just as vital as this new systems approach, Berkes and Folke advocate for greater
appreciation of the social dynamics that bear on social-ecological systems. They argue
…improving the performance of natural resource systems requires an emphasis on
institutions and property rights. A people-oriented approach which focuses on the
resource user rather than on the resource itself is not a new idea; many have pointed out
that ‘resource management is people management’. However, tools and approaches for
such people management are poorly developed, and the importance of a social science of
resource management has not generally been recognized. (2)
The project of this dissertation is to grapple with the ethical import of “people management.”
Unfortunately, social-ecological systems researchers have reflected little on the ethics of this
science. At risk of overgeneralization, most of these researchers operate under a traditional but
problematic understanding of the science-policy interface. According to this traditional
understanding, scientists describe the world in value-neutral terms and policymakers bring back
values when deciding how to respond. This traditional understanding is complicated by efforts to
co-manage natural resources (Olsson, Folke, and Berkes 2004), or develop place-based or
participatory management strategy (Gunderson and Light 2006, Walker et al. 2002), but even in
these efforts the goal is to abbreviate the distance between description and decision, rather than
to integrate the two. The result of this understanding that concerns us at the moment is that
social-ecological systems researchers rarely step back to reflect on whether and when “people
management” is an ethical science, since on the prevailing self-conception, science is neither
ethical nor unethical.
In order to understand more precisely what this social science of people management
would investigate, it’s worth unpacking Berkes and Folke’s definitions and examples. The social

8

side of social-ecological systems is characterized by institutions, and the paradigmatic
institutions concern property rights. The broader category of institutions is formally defined at
the outset of the volume: “Institutions are defined as ‘humanly devised constraints that structure
human interaction. They are made up of formal constraints (rules, laws, constitutions), informal
constraints (norms of behavior, conventions and self-imposed codes of conduct) and their
enforcement characteristics’” (5). Institutions “organize repetitive activities that produce
outcomes” for a set of individuals (5). The definition is meant to be inclusive, covering any
individual activity that means something for another individuals’ activity. Property rights are
understood as a particular type of institution; property rights institutions are a complex
arrangement of practices that coordinate the use, management, and exchange of resources. Of
particular interest to social-ecological systems researchers, some property rights govern the use
of common pool resources, and these institutions are especially important for understanding
these systems. Generally, according to Berkes and Folke, “local systems of rights and
responsibilities develop for any resource deemed important for a community. Even under rapidly
changing conditions, there are usually incipient property rights; rules arise and evolve according
to local needs” (7).
A more thorough example here is illustrative. Elinor Ostrom offers a foundational study
of institutions significant for social-ecological systems research in her 1990 Governing the
Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Here Ostrom calls into question
key assumptions of resource managers, specifically, assumptions that the collective use of
common pool resources will lead to the degradation of those resources and the ecosystems that
sustain them. A classic case of this degradation is the well-known “tragedy of the commons”
(Hardin 1968). Tragedies of the commons affect common pool resources, such as the East

9

Kalimantan forests or Maine fisheries, which are open to all resource users. Indeed, many
environmental goods can be thought of as “commons,” which secures the research significance
of commons and the institutions according to which they are managed. The paradigm commons
is a meadow where shepherds pasture their sheep. Now, from the point of view of the
shepherding community, it is imperative that the sheep do not overgraze the meadow and
compromise the ability of the commons to regenerate fodder for the sheep. But each individual
shepherd faces a dilemma; unsure whether her fellow shepherds will appreciate this imperative,
she must decide whether to increase her herd and graze more intensively. The rational response
to this uncertainty, at least according to classical economic frameworks, is to always increase the
intensity of one’s grazing—after all, if others restrain themselves, your own intensification may
be sustainable, and if others intensify, your own restraint will go unrewarded. In any scenario,
intensification is the smart strategy. Yet this leads to the counterintuitive results that, when
everyone acts in their individual self-interest, the result is in the best interest of none. Hence the
tragedy of the commons.
Ostrom observes that worries like these (generally, where individual rationality is at odds
with what all take to be the optimal outcome) have informed the dominant approaches to
environmental management and policy. Two schools of thought have emerged to grapple with
these dilemmas; either the environment should be controlled by the state (Ostrom’s Leviathan)
which governs with the best interests of all in mind, or the environment should be privatized,
divided into property under sole ownership by individual actors. Absent these approaches,
common pool resources will succumb to some host of market failures that threaten their
exploitation and collapse. Yet, as Ostrom chronicles in Governing the Commons, communities
around the world have developed social institutions that mediate both of these extremes and yet

10

circumvent tragedy. Her first example (based on Netting 1976) conveniently resembles the
famous sheepherding thought experiment. In the Swiss Alps, villagers must coordinate the
grazing of alpine meadows to avoid overgrazing. Villages democratically pass statutes,
commonly known as “cow rights”, which limit the number of cattle that each villager can send
out to pasture in the commonly owned lands. Key among cow rights is the “wintering rule”,
according to which no villagers may pasture more cattle than he can commit to feed over the
winter; since the economy of the village revolves around cheese production, pasturing beef cattle
with Autumn expiration dates is effectively curtailed by the wintering rule. Statutes are enforced
by an Alps association that monitors grazing, and the general system of commons management
reaches back to at least 1507.
The burden for Ostrom is to explain how these institutions evolved, and why neither
Leviathan nor privatization came to dominate the Swiss Alps. Here the account is rich in details
of the social context of these herdspeople. Following Netting, Ostrom locates several features of
the economy that help to explain the evolution of these institutions: the value of production per
unit of land is low, the dependability of yield is low, the profitability of intensification is low,
high upfront capital-investment is required, and so on. These features are significant because, by
keying on economic realities, they relate this context to the paradigm of sheepherding at the core
of Garrett Hardin’s influential “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968).
I want to draw attention, for a moment, to some features of the social context that do not
key on economic features. Alongside the features of the economic reality, Ostrom also includes
details about the region’s political procedures, the village’s traditions for inheriting land
holdings, the topography of the meadows, and the spirit of the culture regarding monitoring and
enforcement. At least on their surface, these variables are not the subject of institutional

11

economics but of fields like political science, anthropology, geography, and sociology; each of
these fields studies the causal relationships between, for instance, a village’s traditions for
inheriting land holding, and other anthropological interests like the cultural norms surrounding
gender and family structure. The metaphor of “keying” is helpful here, as it points to the ways
that some notes (terms) sound right in one field or key, as we understand the relationship
between that note and other notes in that key. Part of training within a field is to learn which
notes agree with which. Now, I don’t doubt that notes in, for instance, sociological or geographic
keys can be tuned so that they chime with economic variables—after all, I agree with socialecological systems researchers that all of these features hold together in a system. Tuning would
involve transposing our understanding of an anthropological note like the village’s traditions into
a more economic note (perhaps these traditions are a matter of “social capital”). Just as they can
be tuned to chime with economics, they might be tuned to chime with political science,
geography, or sociology. The openness raises a critical challenge—if all of these features work
together to produce the social-ecological system, how should we decide what strings to pull to
produce social-ecological change?
Ostrom’s example offers a clear sense of what institutions are and why it is important to
understand institutions in order to understand the whole system. Care is taken in the socialecological systems literature to maintain an objective stance toward institutions and property
rights. The case studies throughout Berkes and Folke’s Linking Social and Ecological Systems
address two objectives central to social-ecological systems research:


how the local social system has developed management practices based on ecological
knowledge for dealing with the dynamics of the ecosystem(s) in which it is located;
and

12



social mechanisms behind these management practices. (3)

The proper purview of a social-ecological systems researcher qua social scientist is to understand
the causes of various institutions so that an understanding of these causes can inform
environmental management and policy. Characteristically, social-ecological systems researchers
investigate social mechanisms. Of course, these scientists appreciates that the mechanics of
social-ecological systems are complex and, in a word, systemic. A mechanistic understanding is
not intended to contrast with a holistic understanding.1 Rather, a mechanistic understanding is an
understanding that explains and predicts the behavior of individuals and social systems in terms
of their causes, complex as they might be.
Berkes and Folke are hardly alone in their emphasis on mechanistic explanation. Neil
Adger and colleagues explain that social-ecological systems achieve resilience by means of
“diverse mechanisms for coping with change and crisis,” and that social mechanisms such as
“institutions for collective action, robust governance systems, and a diversity of livelihood
choices” increase resilience (2005, 1037-1038). Brian Walker and colleagues (2002) note that
“we know that both social and ecological systems have self-reinforcing mechanisms” and that
one goal of social-ecological systems science is “to describe these phases and the underlying
mechanisms that give rise to them, and variables that effect those mechanisms” (14). Social
scientists that participate in interdisciplinary environmental research often report that their
biophysical counterparts prefer hypothesis-driven, mechanistic understandings over interpretive,
often qualitative understandings (Gardner 2013, MacMynowski 2007, Campbell 2004). Despite
these social scientists’ objections, leaders of the field uphold mechanistic explanation as the sin
qua non of social-ecological systems science. Yet the preference for mechanistic explanation

1

Berkes and Folke do note that social-ecological systems scientists do not go as far as the deep ecologist in their
praise of interconnectedness (2)

13

writ large, or the mechanisms within the purview of particular disciplines, is rarely subject to
critical scrutiny.
Some summary here is in order. Social-ecological systems research reflects a turn in
applied environmental science to appreciate the social dimensions of environmental change.
Systematic understandings of the environment require insights from both biophysical sciences
and social sciences. The role of social scientists in these collaborations is to comprehend the
social institutions that influence the environment, such as property rights for managing common
pool resources and social practices such as local customs, legal procedures, and coalition
building. While any of these social practices might invite research, social-ecological systems
science is dedicated to discovering social mechanisms underpinning these practices—for now we
might say that they are interested in understanding the causes and effects of these practices in
order to better predict, control, and adapt to these mechanisms. Such a science of people
management seems to give rise to philosophical and ethical questions that neither socialecological systems scientists nor philosophers of science have engaged.
Inquiry, Facts, and Values
Part of social-ecological systems scientists’ ignorance of ethics stems from problematic
assumptions about the science-policy interface. If scientists did indeed procure value-neutral
descriptions of complex social-ecological realities, so that policymakers could resolve what these
descriptions meant for management and policy, then scientists could safely neglect many of the
ethical implications of a science of people management. Part of the task here is to interrogate this
picture of the science-policy interface, show that it is woefully misguided, and (for the moment)
sketch the ethical implications that scientists can no longer neglect. This demonstration begins
with a story shared by environmental pragmatist Bryan Norton before countenancing some time-

14

honored philosophical questions such as “What is an explanation?” Again the goal is to move
from very practical questions about which disciplines to include in a collaboration to still very
practical questions about how to facilitate stakeholder engagement, and to justify the series of
transformations between the questions.
In his Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management, Bryan Norton
recounts his experience working with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (2005).
Norton’s role was to help a team composed largely of ecologists and economists propose policies
informed by the proper valuation of ecosystem services (things like water purification and
sustained fish stocks). As a philosopher, Norton was invited in part to build bridges between the
very different scientific communities of ecology and economics. The particular bridge that
needed to be built would span the ideally value-free descriptions offered by ecologists and the
ideally value-neutral evaluations offered by economists. For example, ecologists would eschew
terms or phrases that might evoke human values, such as “ecosystem health” or “integrity,” in
favor of terms of phrases that were free of the evaluative connotations that might be associated
with those terms. Ecologists would instead study how hypothesized policies and management
strategies would bear on ecosystem services, and economists would study consumer preferences
to estimate the dollar value of these services. Get the ecological mechanisms correct and the
dollar values correct, and policymakers could straightforwardly mandate whichever policies
would optimize the total value produced by the ecosystem.
Norton suspected that this procedure was not as value-neutral as it espoused. The
problem with deferring to economists’ valuation of ecosystems is that economists are better at
measuring some values than others. Economists are very good at appreciating the value that
individuals receive from using resources, okay at appreciating the value that individuals receive

15

from preserving resources, and pretty bad at appreciating the value that communities receive in
sustaining ecosystems. This is not because economists’ hearts are in the wrong places—they very
much want to properly value ecosystems—but because the theories and methods of economics
were developed to understand a particular range of values (generally individual use value in the
short term). The supposed value-neutrality of economics turns out to be fundamentally biased to
favor this particular range of values. The trouble, from Norton’s point of view, is that scientists
and policymakers have no way to weigh values beyond this range. Evocative terms such as
ecosystem health and integrity are getting at something, and these vague notions need to be
articulated, not purged. Norton’s bridge building efforts located an important gap in the way that
scientists and policymakers understood ecosystems; they needed a crucial set of terms that
described environmental changes in ways that were directly significant for management and
policy. Far from purging values from the way that ecosystems were described, scientists and
policymakers needed to reenchant the environment so that the significance of our management
practices was transparent.
To a non-philosopher, Norton’s emphasis on language might seem peculiar. After all,
scientists don’t think of themselves as in the business of telling us what we ought to do; their
goal is to remain as objective as possible, and to simply “tell us how it is.” When “it” determines
what scientists tell, there seems little room to argue over semantics. For now I want to forego
some of the esoteric philosophy required to dismantle this theory of knowledge and quickly
motivate a tentative alternative to be fleshed out in Chapter Two. On the traditional theory of
knowledge, the idea of “telling it how it is” makes good sense; there is a fact of the matter about
what exists in the world, and scientists need to name this fact to the best of their abilities. Claims
that get these facts right are true, and scientists’ main goal is to discover these truths. On the

16

alternative theory of knowledge that Norton embraces, there are too many facts of the matter to
make good sense of the idea of telling it how it is. In particular, the idea of “it” loses any clear
sense, as does the clear separation of the “telling” from the facts to be told. Norton’s emphasis,
following pragmatism, is that the language in which we do the telling makes a huge difference
for what facts the scientist discovers and what facts we organize our lives around. The economist
speaking in one key (say the dollar valuation of ecosystem services) will make sense of an
environmental problem differently than the economist speaking another (institutions governing
common-pool resource use). The population ecologist will concern herself with different facts
than the systems ecologist, and even more obviously, both of these ecologists are concerned with
altogether different facts than the economists.
Norton and his philosophical allies appreciate this radical plurality of facts and resolve
that whatever’s “out there” isn’t going to settle what we have to say about it. Because there are
so many facts around which we could organize our lives, part of the challenge of science is to
locate the significant facts, the ones that actually do make a difference for how we get about in
the world (Kitcher 2011). Pragmatism offers the pretty mundane observation that we key on facts
relative to our goals and interests. On this view, modern science is not the heir to classical quests
for essences and eternal truths; science is the heir to designing plows, navigating the ocean, and
treating illnesses. Mixing up these two lineages, so that scientists treat illness by discovering the
essences of pathogens, adds nothing to the logic of science, save confusions such as the sciencepolicy (or fact-value) dichotomy. Sometimes scientists discover new technologies to help us
reach our goals, other times they discover new scientific descriptions that serve as solid guides
for our pursuits, and still other times it becomes difficult to pull technoscience apart.

17

Perhaps because technologies so often advertise their goals, Norton focuses on the
tougher cases of scientific descriptions. How is it that descriptions of the way the world is
implicate particular goals and interests? Why isn’t it possible to keep the facts separate from our
values? The general answer—again to be elaborated in the next chapter—is that descriptions
bring to bear a language that gives structure to scientific inquiry. Languages offer names for
some of the plurality of objects we encounter in the world, and language codifies norms that help
us respond to these encounters. In the language of some ecologists, blooming and buzzing
confusion is experienced as an ecosystem, an ecosystem that we might label resilient or fragile
(see James 1890 on blooming and buzzing confusion). According to these labels and what they
mean for our community, we might restore stream banks or create habitat for pollinators. Notice
that the language does not create the blooming and buzzing confusion that it names, and also
remember that when two scientists disagree about what to name a blooming, buzzing confusion,
they submit to their peers their various reasons for one name or another. Scientific inquiry is
concerned with facts, and it achieves objectivity by abiding by norms of the scientific
community. The main thing that falls away from the traditional theory of knowledge is the idea
that some (or likely one) language gets the facts right, all of the facts, without any tainted by the
values that motivated our inquiry.
Pragmatists like Norton are especially attuned to the way that inquiry is ameliorative—
that it produces beliefs that help individuals improve their situation. This is the goal-setting
dimension of inquiry, and at issue for environmental managers is that they have no way to
describe inchoate environmental goals that do not register in economic studies. Norton
summarizes, “in public policy debates concerning environmental choices, we lack a crucial type
of term that can (1) encapsulate a great deal of information and (2) present this information in

18

such a way that its importance for widely held social values is transparent” (50). Pragmatists
recognize that the construction of this type of term is a matter for democratic deliberation, where
democratic deliberation is understood as inquiry into the values that the community should hold.
Part of this is to say that while scientists can be trusted to review one another’s use of terms like
“ecosystem,” they are not the best judge of how to use terms like “desirable” or “just.”2 Just as
the application of terms like “ecosystem” must be submitted to the careful scrutiny of one’s
colleagues, the use of terms such as “desirable” or “just” must be adjudicated by those expert in
making such judgments. Democracy is characterized by granting expertise about these ethical
norms to everyone. Just as the scientist must offer reasons for declaring blooming and buzzing as
signs of ecosystems, citizens must exchange reasons for finding a situation desirable or
undesirable, just or unjust. This giving and taking of reasons constitutes ethical inquiry.
Ethical inquiry is not willy-nilly declarations of what one would prefer or lament; it is
structured by preexisting commitments to democratic norms such as egalitarianism that
stakeholders must share if they are going to pursue ethical truths at all (Putnam 2002). These
commitments provide the ground that stabilizes inquiry into the uncertain values that ought to
inform environmental science, such as whether an ecosystem has integrity. When inquiry into
community values relies on such a structure, the language ordained through deliberation has
promise to produce agreement between the community’s way of life and the environment it must
navigate. This ordainment eschews a division of labor between a descriptive language—
presently ecology—and an evaluative language—presently, by and large, economics. Insisting
on a value-free environmental science amounts to “the construction of alien appendage to the
world in which we do our living” (Sellars 1963, 40). Democratic deliberation mobilizes a

2

The difference here is not hard and fast, however; it’s not clear who the best judge of terms like “integrity” might
be, and indeed these discussions need both scientists and stakeholders.

19

vocabulary consonant with our being “first and foremost democrats” (Norton 2005, 251) and
enrolls environmental science as a set of tools capable of directly addressing problems faced by
the community.
Norton offers the deliberative construction of metrics as a clear example of how facts and
values can be integrated through the negotiation of goals. Basically, environmental managers
need terms that measure environmental change while fairly directly motivating public and
private action. The problem is that the metrics that we do have either (1) require substantive
debate over the meaning of the descriptions, e.g., what environmental health looks like in
empirical terms, or whether and when we should be committed to protected environmental
health, or (2) in the case of environmental economics, capture only a subset of the values at stake
and impede the intelligent management of legitimate but competing goods (2005, 137).
Obviously, these thick ethical terms will not arise out of thin air, and less obviously,
environmental scientists are unlikely to discover descriptions that coincidentally resonate with
social values. Hence these terms need to be constructed communally such that their significance
for environmental management is negotiated and internalized by the community from the start.
Because a diverse community may attach significance to different thick terms for a plurality of
reasons, deliberation holds out hope that alignment of values can be achieved in the interplay of
deliberation and adaptive management of the environment.
Norton’s Sustainability goes a long way toward transforming a question about scientific
practice (how should economists and ecologists collaborate in describing the environment?) to a
question about stakeholder engagement (how should democratic deliberation settle on metrics for
interdisciplinary investigation?). It charts a path that I will more or less adopt. First, we must
explicate the ways that existing theories and methods presuppose values. Values inform both the

20

goals that inquiry sets and the practices that are taken for granted as fixed and stabilizing.
Second, we must resolve which of our many values ought to inform inquiry in a given case. For
environmental pragmatists, these resolutions follow from democratic deliberation. Turning
values questions over to democratic deliberation is consistent with our prior commitments to
egalitarianism and inclusive participation.
While Norton’s Sustainability offers a detailed guide of one path, the opening exploration
of social-ecological systems research suggests uncharted terrain for environmental pragmatism.
As Berkes and Folke point out, social-ecological systems science is characterized by two distinct
commitments. The first of these commitments is to understand the environment as a system,
governed by threshold effects, feedbacks, and other non-linear mechanics. It is this commitment
that Norton and other environmental pragmatists have elegantly theorized in their appreciation of
the values that ecosystems secure that are undervalued by conventional evaluations. While
social-ecological systems scientists are liable to use terms such as ‘resilience’ without
appreciating the dual descriptive and evaluative role of these terms, I don’t believe these
liabilities are due to inadequacies in pragmatists’ theorization of adaptive ecosystem
management.
The second commitment that Berkes and Folke uphold is the commitment to a peopleoriented approach. As analyzed above, this commitment takes as its ideal a science of “people
management” pursued through mechanistic understandings of human behavior. This, I contend,
is undertheorized in environmental pragmatism, and generally undertheorized among ethicists of
science. Generally, ethicists of science agree that social science offers a valuable contribution to
environmental inquiry, but for the most part, the role of social science is to ascertain the values
of community members (Norton 2005). This is a crucial role—if fully inclusive democratic

21

deliberation was required for every environmental management decision, we would spend all of
our time deliberating and very little of our time savoring the fruit of these deliberations. It is,
however, a very different role than the social-ecological systems scientists have in mind—by and
large, they are more concerned with accurately describing complex systems, and less concerned
with the legitimacy of these descriptions (that’s the job of policymakers). Human values are
important to many social-ecological systems scientists only insofar as they help to explain
human behavior.3 Social-ecological systems scientists seek a science of people management
because a more mechanistic understanding of human behavior would help predict, control, and
adapt to environmental change.
Three Unwarranted Emphases in Environmental Pragmatism
The remainder of this dissertation offers a detailed exploration of how to diagnose the
normative and evaluative assumptions of social-ecological systems science, and how to subject
these assumptions to democratic deliberation. Before embarking on that exploration, it’s worth
interrogating Norton’s dominant account of environmental pragmatism, which reveals three
emphases at odds with the thrust of social-ecological systems science. First, environmental
pragmatism has focused on describing the ecological dimensions of social-ecological problems;
on this view, policies and management strategies produce different ecological consequences
rather than different social-ecological consequences. Related, but distinct, is a second focus on
the goals of inquiry at the expense of careful attention to the means of realizing these goals.
Recall that we can draw functional distinctions in inquiry between the goals that inquiry sets as
well as the practices spared from reconstruction, and that values play a role in resolving both

3

Often following Heberlein (2012), many social-ecological scientists will lament that values are a poor predictor of
behavior, and thus contribute little to understanding social mechanisms. The point here is that we often study values
in order to legitimate environmental management and policies, and in these studies, the connection between values
and behaviors is beside the point.

22

ends and means. Third, some environmental pragmatists are too optimistic that, armed with good
reasons, communities will engage in social practices in accord with these reasons. What studies
of the social side of social-ecological systems suggest is that our practices are not quite so free,
and that many of our habits are less deliberate, or amenable to deliberation, than we might hope.
Consider the first emphasis. Most of the examples in Norton’s Sustainability involve
describing the environment in ways that capture what it is that we find valuable about the
environment. This involves finding a language that can describe landscapes, or ecological
processes with long temporal horizons, in a way that can be scientifically studied and
immediately significant for environmental managers and policymakers. While Norton no doubt
admits humans as members of ecosystems, most of the work he recommends involves
redescribing the non-human environment. Indicators might track the biodiversity of threatened
ecosystems, or the recreational quality of hiking trails, but rarely does Norton discuss indicators
for the trustworthiness of logging companies, or the social sustainability of idyllic New England
fishing communities. This is a problem if social-ecological systems theorists are correct that
certain ecosystems are only sustainable when coupled with certain social systems. In other
words, we need to begin to consider environmental outcomes together with the social outcomes
with which these environmental outcomes are coupled. Other environmental pragmatists have
been much more appreciative of the ways that social and ecological systems hold together. Paul
Thompson has explored the ways that agrarian social practices constitute and are constituted by
agricultural ecologies. As long as it is the case that sustaining particular ecosystems requires
sustaining complementary social practices—which is a founding commitment of socialecological systems research—then redescribing ecological dimensions, alone, is insufficient. We

23

need a language to evaluate both the ecological features of a social-ecological system and the
social features.
Second, environmental pragmatism tends to focus on the goals of social-ecological
inquiry without as much attention on the means by which these goals are realized. By
democratizing the way that we describe the environment, environmental pragmatism ensures that
ecological inquiry investigates ways of managing the environment that are responsive to our
goals. When ecologists study the effects of different policies on biodiversity, their conclusions
help us decide which of these policies we might prefer given a prior commitment to preserve
biodiversity. If we think of explanations in terms of the effects that we explain (i.e., the
explananda) and the “causes” that do the explaining (i.e., the explanantia), we might say that
environmental pragmatism has so far focused on the language of explananda. But, as mentioned
earlier, most social-ecological systems are the effects of too many causes to enumerate. Property
rights institutions, the scale of fishing management, or the medium of cultural transmission
might all serve as the explanans for a given explanandum. Norton has overlooked conceptual
challenges on the explanantia front in part because his decision context is usually characterized
by a polity debating between the implementation of a set of policy options. In that situation, it
makes sense to evaluate the consequences of these different policies options in a language that
does justice to the explananda. But that is not the only situation in which we find ourselves—
sometimes we agree on what sort of social-ecological system we want to sustain, and we inquire
into the various means of realizing that system. Environmental pragmatism has generally had
less to say about the sort of democratic procedure that could legitimate the social scientific
investigation of some means instead of others. Since it is exactly these means—social
mechanisms—that social-ecological systems researchers seek to better understand, philosophers

24

of science need to scrutinize the values implicit in these understandings and the ways that such
values might be legitimated through democratic deliberation.
Third, environmental pragmatism’s emphasis on democratic deliberation is both a virtue
and a vice. By focusing on democratic decision-making, pragmatists like Norton have shown
how deliberation can integrate facts and values in the most ethical method we have so far
developed. The trouble is that this emphasis can give the mistaken impression that all human
conduct is the result of deliberate decision-making. Pragmatists have long emphasized that most
human conduct is actually habitual, and that it is only when our habits fail us that we engage in
conscious reflection. Classical pragmatists like James and Dewey studied psychology in addition
to philosophy, and they admitted that our intentions played little part in many of the regularities
of human behavior. Thompson’s studies of agrarianism likewise attend to cultural practices that
are more habit than reflective thought. When Norton relegates social science to facilitating
communication between stakeholders (2005, 302), or somewhat more broadly to help evaluate
competing policy proposals (298-301), he has abandoned this earlier pragmatist program.4 Yet it
is this pragmatist program echoed in the social science of social-ecological systems research;
Berkes’ and Folke’s emphasis on “repetitive activities that produce outcomes” can be thought of
as an emphasis on habit. Their’s is a social science that seeks to explain human conduct. Even if
Norton is right that conscious decision-making is required to legitimate some courses of action
over others, it would be an obvious mistake to think that all of our actions are the result of such
dedicated attention. One of the promises of the social sciences is to reveal truths about us that we
ourselves had failed to notice, and that once brought to our attention we can criticize or cherish.
4

In his discussion of the merits of social science, Norton does offer one cryptic remark that he doesn’t develop: “It
is possible to use social science methods to develop more comprehensive evaluative tools, tools that will allow us to
move toward an articulation of a particular community’s sense of identity, including who the community,
collectively, really wants to be.” This is the closest he comes to thinking of social science as answering questions
about who we are and who we are to become, but he doesn’t pursue that idea further.

25

Theorizing the science of people management requires tracing the same sorts of steps that
environmental pragmatists have traced for the ecological side of social-ecological systems.
Loosely, this requires recognizing the values implicit to social scientific explanations of human
behavior, and then facilitating democratic deliberation that could countenance and legitimate
these values. We need to come to think of social scientific inquiry as problem-solving,
characterized by both assumptions (who we are) and goals (who we are to become). More
concretely, this rethinking requires that we distinguish between institutional economics, human
geography, and cultural anthropology (to name only those sciences featured in the opening)
according to the values that structure their inquiry. At present, social-ecological systems
scientists seem to think of these sciences as rivals, each offering a model of human behavior that
is more or less predictive (Schluter et al. 2007; Fabinyi, Evans, and Foale 2014). Whichever
science more truly predicts social dynamics is thought to better grasp social reality, and this
grasp warrants our reliance on that particular science. The normative assumptions that social
sciences make about social reality should not be thought of as themselves hypotheses that might
be falsified, but as practices that a community might sustain, and that through sustaining, uphold
the social reality presupposed by inquiry.5 Deciding to sustain particular practices (for example
property rights institutions or cultural traditions) depends on whether we value those practices,
and, at the same time, brings about a context where explanations reliant on those practices will
be true. Hence, if social sciences present themselves as rivals, it is not as rival models of a preexisting social reality, but as rival proposals for a way of life.

5

The difference between assumptions in social science and something like auxiliary hypotheses in the biophysical
sciences is that the truth of these social scientific assumptions is something that we make true depending on the
social practices we choose to sustain. When an auxiliary hypothesis in the biophysical sciences proves to be false,
we are usually forced to abandon the assumption. When an assumption about community norms proves to be false,
that community can choose to make it true, and thus to recontextualize our inquiry.

26

Insofar as social-ecological systems sciences do not understand social explanations in this
way, they will fail to pose the right questions in stakeholder deliberations. Stakeholders need to
be able to deliberate about questions like “Are the norms that researchers presuppose in their
explanations norms that the community values?” and “Are explanations in terms of property
rights institutions the right basis for describing and managing the environment, or would
explanations in terms of the scale of governance be more valuable?” At the end of the day, such
questions boil down to anticipating various social practices that might bring about a desirable
social-ecological future, then deliberating over which social practices are consistent with
preexisting commitments (e.g. egalitarianism and inclusivity). These deliberations separate truths
about social realities, of which there are many, from significant truths about social realities,
truths that answer the questions legitimated through deliberation, of which there are fewer
(Kitcher 2011). Whereas deliberations over ecological metrics are somewhat straightforwardly
questions about what environments we most value, deliberation over social practices are more
complicated questions about who we are and who we are to become.
Conclusion, and the Path to Come
The goal of this first chapter was to show how certain philosophical questions arise in
social-ecological systems science and suggest why these questions are inadequately addressed by
environmental pragmatism. Social-ecological science calls for social scientists to provide a
mechanistic account of the social institutions that bear on social-ecological systems. These
scientists have overlooked the ethical implications of their inquiry, in part because they
mistakenly understand the science-policy interface as a gap between value-free science and
value-laden policy. This gap, symptomatic of a deeper fact/value dichotomy, is philosophically
untenable—inquiry necessarily invokes values, in part because inquiry relies on language, and

27

language use, as complex social practices, is pervaded by values. Environmental pragmatists
such as Bryan Norton have prescribed democratic deliberation to dissolve this fact/value
dichotomy and integrate facts and values in our language. This is more or less the right path,
save for three emphases: environmental pragmatists have tended to (1) focus on redescribing
only the environmental features of social-ecological systems, (2) focus on redescribing only the
goals, but not the means, of social-ecological change, and (3) ignore the extent to which our
conduct is habitual. Environmental pragmatism must recognize the values implicit in social
science, and facilitate democratic deliberation about the legitimacy of these values, if a science
of people management is going to be just.
The following summaries roughly approximate the path of the remaining chapters:
Chapter Two provides a detailed account of inquiry from a pragmatist perspective.
Drawing particularly from John Dewey, I analyze scientific practice as primarily an activity of
problem-solving rather than as an activity of representing reality. Pragmatists’ account of inquiry
as problem-solving traces the continuity between pre-linguistic interactions between an organism
and its environment to the rich, deliberate interaction characteristic of human inquiry. Although
pragmatists insist that this continuity lacks pronounced gaps or dichotomies, they do
acknowledge that the use of language in problem-solving deserves careful attention. I contend
that pragmatist philosophers of science have so far failed to provide a clear picture of how
inquiry is normatively structured through language, and hence it remains difficult to appreciate
how scientific descriptions participate in our (as organisms) continual reconstruction of our
environment. This lack of clarity is somewhat surprising given Dewey’s theory of inquiry that
locates “warranted assertions” as the goal and product of scientific inquiry. On the pragmatist
picture, scientists construct warranted assertions rather than discover truths. What this amounts

28

to is a recognition, alongside many non-pragmatists, that scientists necessarily use language and
that this language, when used responsibly in accord with ordinary usage, will issue in judgments
significant for day-to-day practice.
Chapter Three considers pragmatist philosophy of social science to guard against a
particular type of confusion: pragmatists cannot maintain an ontological distinction between the
natural sciences and social sciences. I show this ontological distinction to damage the otherwise
promising account offered by Daniel Bromley’s volitional pragmatism. I argue that Bromley
takes the wrong side in a debate between pragmatists Richard Rorty and Keith Topper, and that a
careful review of this debate shows Rorty to be appropriately cautious about overreaching the
warrant of inquiry. The trouble with accounts such as Bromley’s and Topper’s is that they grant
too much to the will, and effectively endorse a picture of human behavior that would wrest the
social from social-ecological systems. Thus they echo the third problematic tendency of Norton’s
environmental pragmatism, which emphasizes the intentional character of human action but
neglects the many ways in which human action is habituated. Rather than think of human beings
as always the sorts of beings that act intentionally, I argue that the social sciences provide
descriptions in terms of norms and institutions in order to intervene at the level of human
practice. Because our way of life is already organized according to a plurality of values, we need
descriptions of practices, not mere behaviors, in order to recognize what is at stake in
reconstructing these practices.
Chapter Four considers, in much greater depth, how social-ecological systems scientists
have sought to integrate diverse social sciences. Some scientists recommend particular social
theories, such as political ecology, that exhaustively cover what we know about human agency.
Other scientists sort social theories according to how they fit the social context under

29

investigation, and recommend choosing the theory that is most predictive, and thus understood to
best represent the social reality. I follow a third proposal, which distinguishes among social
theories on the basis of normative and evaluative assumptions they make about who we are and
who we want to become. I then consider a specific meta-study of coastal and marine socialecological systems to illustrate the ways that particular social scientific disciplines understand
situations as problems and understand mechanisms as ameliorative. In order to evaluate whether
these disciplines rightly problematize these situations, we must bridge social scientific
vocabularies with moral vocabularies. In the case of the social sciences, it will be vital to bridge
scientific vocabularies with deontological and virtue-theoretic traditions in ethics, which
represents a departure from the typically instrumentalist leaning of environmental pragmatism.
Chapter Five considers the challenge of integrating various social sciences and
biophysical sciences in social-ecological systems science. I take two senses of integration to be
relevant to this task: the integration of facts and values, and the integration of disciplinary
understandings through interdisciplinary collaboration. After reviewing the ways that facts and
values are integrated in all disciplines (not just the social sciences as explored in Chapters Two
and Three), I diagnose philosophical confusions central to the interdisciplinarity literature that
maintain integration to be an epistemological or ontological project. Instead, I advance an
account of interdisciplinary integration that foregrounds the ethical nature of prioritizing among,
and weighing tradeoffs between, candidate disciplinary descriptions of complex systems. I
recruit Philip Kitcher’s ideal of well-ordered science as a starting point for thinking about wellordered interdisciplinary science. Well-ordered interdisciplinary science works outward from the
truths deemed most significant to stakeholders, abiding by a procedure that integrates the insights
of diverse disciplines. The integrated understanding of a social-ecological system is the

30

understanding that helps us to navigate tradeoffs between the plural values at stake in a
community’s interaction with its environment.

31

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CHAPTER 2
WARRANTING ASSERTIONS
Abstract: This chapter details a pragmatist theory of inquiry with the specific goal of
demonstrating how science is value-laden. It opens with some prefatory remarks about
naturalistic metaphysics that respond to the charge from pragmatists and non-pragmatists
alike that a naturalistic metaphysics amounts to a contradiction. I argue that pragmatists
can offer an account of experience grounded in organism-environment interaction
provided that they do not treat this account as a scientific theory that provides the one
true picture of the world. I then draw on Dewey in offering a pragmatist account of
experience grounded in organism-environment interaction characterized by three levels
of organization: a basic level comprising a system of tensions directed toward
maintaining a dynamic equilibrium, a second level of psycho-physical organization or
“feeling,” and a third level of “mindedness.” For Dewey, mind emerges when social
organisms communicate and forge a language, through which they indicate their plans
and expectations, and by which they mark off objects in the world. Locating the
normative role of language in representing the world as a field of objects is crucial to
appreciating the ineliminability of pragmatics, and pragmatic values, in scientific inquiry.
By his later years, Dewey transitioned from a theory of inquiry characterized by doubtinquiry-belief to one characterized by indeterminate situations-inquiry-warranted
assertion, and it is this later theory of inquiry that can contribute to contemporary
discussions of values in science. I close by focusing on the specific normative structure of
inquiry into causes, or mechanistic explanation, to open up social-ecological systems
science to necessarily pragmatic discussions of means and ends.
Naturalistic Metaphysics as a Genre
In his review of John Dewey’s Experience and Nature, George Santayana remarked that
Dewey’s attempt to naturalize metaphysics seemed contradictory (1925). Naturalism can mean
many things—indeed much of Santayana’s review disputes whether he or Dewey staked a
rightful claim to the term—but naturalism in all of its meanings makes a living within
experience. The entities and processes to which naturalistic philosophies appeal must be located
in the activities of worldly beings. Entities and processes that claim to exist beyond these
activities, that cannot be experienced, are eschewed from naturalism; they belong to the domain

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of the supernatural. It is in that domain that traditional metaphysicians built their philosophical
systems, drawing resources from realms of pure forms, sensible ideas, and world spirits. The
trouble is that philosophers had long posed questions that set metaphysics against naturalism,
while at the same time demanding a metaphysics for naturalism. Naturalists had to admit that
their knowledge of the world was gained through experience, and yet any explanation of how
this “experience” worked must either appeal to worldly knowledge (and thus beg the question) or
appeal to metaphysics. It is in Dewey’s attempt to avoid this dilemma that Santayana suspected a
contradiction. Near the end of his life, Dewey himself admitted regret for the title Experience
and Nature, confessing that the term “experience” was beyond recuperation as a naturalistic
notion, and suggesting that Culture and Nature might have better avoided misunderstandings.
Subsequent critics have issued similar complaints against Dewey’s naturalistic
metaphysics. Richard Rorty reads Experience and Nature as trying to bridge the gap between our
understanding of how organisms navigate their environments and our understanding of how
human beings engage in rational discourse about these environments (1982). This gap separated
the empiricist philosophies traced to Locke and the idealist philosophies traced to Kant, Hegel,
and T.H. Green, while it also separated the emerging scientific fields of psychology and
sociology (1982, 80-81). It is a gap that cradles many of the most trenchant philosophical
problems, problems originating in dualisms between body and mind, object and subject, world
and word. In his metaphysical writings, Dewey appealed to Darwin’s theory of evolution as a
blueprint for bridging these dualisms. Evolutionary theory allows philosophers to recognize the
continuity between our sensory engagement with the environment and our ability to deliberate
about (and thereby act deliberately within) that environment. Rorty points out that this is exactly

36

the sort of bridge that the earliest empiricists sought in order to connect ideas with the causal
antecedents of these ideas, which they dubbed sense impressions.
The trouble, Rorty maintains, is that this psychological account tells us absolutely
nothing about how we go about justifying our ideas, which for Rorty is a thoroughly social affair.
We should look to Dewey, according to Rorty, in those moments where Dewey dissolves
philosophical problems by chronicling the historical conditions that gave way to now-outdated
philosophical commitments. Look to the way that metaphysical systems undergirded social and
political prejudices, for metaphysics is less the product of inquiry as it is a directing bias for
inquiry (Hook, 1939). Indeed, the chief impediment to the sort of open-minded inquiry that
Dewey sought was, according to Rorty, how distinctions such as mind and body have come to
seem so natural to interlocutors. For instance, talk of “sense impressions” has grown popular
enough that we can unobjectionably appeal to them in our discussions of our knowledge
practices, yet no philosopher nor scientist has produced an account of sense impressions that
does all of the work required of these entities in empiricist theories of knowledge. Clearing away
such philosophical obstacles requires less, not more, naturalism; it requires philosophical writing
that demonstrates the contingency of our epistemological and metaphysical commitments.
More recently, Isaac Levi has advanced a “wayward naturalism” with the intended goal
of “saving Dewey from himself” (2012). Here, the project of tracing continuities between
thought and action falls to the wayside. In the absence of “bridge laws” that connect terms like
belief, desire, and value to bodily and linguistic behavior, Levi recommends a retreat from the
Deweyan picture of inquiry (113). As I detail in Section 2, inquiry for Dewey is a matter of
warranting assertions that guide us as situated organisms toward the reconstruction of our habits
and our environment. Yet a naturalist who relies on inquiry to give an account of inquiry is,

37

according to Levi, dismayed by the lack of empirical evidence connecting thought and action. At
best, naturalists can model doxastic categories, such as belief, as dispositions to linguistic
action—for example, we might reply to a query about one’s name by uttering one’s name.
Naturalism keeps its promise to appeal only to relationships found within experience, but breaks
its promise of dispensing with dualisms (here word/world) that hark back to supernaturalism. On
Levi’s account, inquiry ends by transforming an organism’s “commitments to points of view,”
but does not extend all the way to the action of organisms embedded in an environment (116).
Given pragmatists’ insistence that inquiry is only intelligible when understood as exactly that
sort of organism-environment interaction, Levi’s position more resembles the idealisms that
Dewey resisted than the pragmatism that he endorsed. If the pragmatists’ account of inquiry
terminates in dispositions for linguistic action, then pragmatism has abandoned its characteristic
commitment to the embeddedness of language and meaning in social practice. Language, as a
system of meaning, only makes sense as a way of coordinating action within a community. Drop
the way that thought guides our material practices, and we are left with linguistic idealism.
I offer these critiques of Dewey as a preface to a chapter that borrows heavily from
Dewey’s theory of inquiry. The two critiques mark a transition from the naturalistic pragmatism
of Dewey, through the linguistic pragmatism of Rorty, to the threat of linguistic idealism present
in Levi. Responding to the threat of linguistic idealism requires exactly the sort of bridge terms,
or continuity between the psychological and social, that Dewey attempted to motivate. While I
agree with Rorty that the social cannot be reduced to the psychological, I believe that Experience
and Nature can be read without reductionist ambitions. On that reading, chapters like “Nature,
Life, and Body-Mind” should be read in the same spirit as intellectual history, and it is when
writing in the spirit of intellectual history that Rorty finds Dewey at his best. There is a simple

38

reason for this reading: if Dewey believes that organisms’ actions, including their linguistic
actions, ought to be understood as tools for navigating their environment, then no description of
the organism can be understood as disclosing its essential nature (a hollow concept for Dewey).
Pragmatists like Dewey cannot be simple realists about their reasons for constructivism. Rorty
wants to read the scientific passages of Dewey’s corpus as part of a genre of philosophical
writing, initiated by Locke, that appeal to scientific findings to try to get to the bottom of
understanding. That genre, as Rorty takes pains to detail, is guilty of the charge of conflating
conceptual and psychological questions.
But there is another way to read Dewey’s naturalism—as natural history akin to
intellectual history. Rorty and fellow linguistic pragmatists are more comfortable with dissolving
philosophical dualisms through narratives of the social and historical contexts within which they
arose. Their preferred narratives deflate realisms, foundationalisms, and essentialisms while
deriving their force from exactly the philosophical positions that they critique (Janack 2012).
Offering an alternative history of the ideas (ideas such as Cartesianism) works because we take
those alternative histories to track the true origins of those ideas. We have to read these
intellectual histories in an “ironic” spirit—where irony is the posture Rorty recommends for
recognizing the contingency of our beliefs while still being moved by them in the same way that
we are compelled by realist, foundationalist, and essentialist commitments (Rorty 1989).
Reading them literally would succumb to the same inconsistencies that the histories are meant to
highlight; we can no more be simple realists about history than we can about biology.
It is in that ironic spirit that pragmatists can offer biological and psychological accounts
of the nature of experience. This requires that we read Experience and Nature, as well as the
naturalistic metaphysics that show up in Dewey’s later work such as Logic: The Theory of

39

Inquiry, as imagining an alternative natural history of humans as organisms. This alternative
natural history is not a theory such that it could turn out to be true or false (that is what Levi
requires of it); rather, it is a different story about the human organism without which we may
remain captivated by the story offered by empiricism. Dewey’s metaphysical writings spend
more time contrasting the pragmatist picture of organism-environmental interaction with the
empiricist picture of sensory impressions than they spend marshalling evidence to attest to the
superiority of the pragmatist theory. Instead, as natural history, they ask us to think like this, and
then to reflect on whether thinking thusly would be beneficial in the long-run. They concede
Sydney Hook’s point that all metaphysics is a directing bias for inquiry, but they maintain that,
as a directing bias, their consequences are preferable to those of other metaphysical systems.
What I find desirable about Dewey’s naturalistic metaphysics is that, given its account of
the logic of inquiry, it cannot lose sight of the role that values play in inquiry. Fundamentally,
pragmatism’s theory of inquiry is a logic for ameliorating problematic situations, and situations
are problematic insofar as they jeopardize what we value. Here I offer an account of organismenvironment interaction to ground a theory of inquiry that is value-laden through and through. I
argue, however, that contemporary pragmatists have overemphasized the biological matrix of
inquiry while underemphasizing the cultural matrix. The contrast between these two emphases
can be brought out by explicating Dewey’s notion of “warranting assertions” in juxtaposition to
the Piercean notion of “fixing belief.” After providing a general account of how values play a
role in warranting assertions, I consider the specific case of warranting assertions about
causation, which Dewey (1938, 454) declares “the ultimate objective of any existential inquiry”.
The goal here is to clarify many of the philosophical confusions that plague our commonsense
understanding of causation; by clearing away these confusions, the role that values play in

40

inquiry into causes is undeniable. As shown in Chapter 1, social-ecological systems scientists
aim for a mechanistic account of social practices while ignoring the ethical dimension of this
account; Chapter 2 will show that this objective inescapably demands value judgments, and
therefore that ethical dimensions cannot be ignored.
Organism-Environment Interaction
Dewey’s theory of inquiry, which anchors most if not all of his philosophy, is grounded
in his account of organism-environment interaction. This grounding can be productively likened
to a naturalization of Hegelian metaphysics. Dewey’s contribution to that tradition was to
articulate the continuity between a Hegelian picture of the development of consciousness with a
Darwinian picture of organism-environment interaction. In “The Influence of Darwin on
Philosophy” (1910), Dewey traces how pre-Darwinian biologies suggest that existence echoed
essence and that the task of the philosopher was to decipher the essences, and thus the absolute
truth, that stands behind appearance. While most scientists had embraced the new picture of
biology, philosophers were yet to recognize the flawed biological underpinnings of their quest.
Such philosophers still assumed the account of organisms implicit to modern thought, where a
passive observer forms ideas by synthesizing sense impressions into ideas. Dewey found in
Darwin an antidote to the dualisms given rise by this traditional account. A more Darwinian
account of organisms didn’t so much solve these dualisms, but dissolve them, as the new account
avoided the problems from the start.
Many of Dewey’s writings, from treatises on education (1916) to epistemology (1938),
open with his account of organism-environment interaction. In Experience and Nature (1925),
Dewey distinguishes three levels of organism-environment interaction; these levels range from
simple to complex, where complex levels amount to a dynamic reorganization of the capabilities

41

already present in simpler levels. The simplest level of organism-environment interaction depicts
organisms as a system of tensions through which an organism sustains its continued existence
(Dewey 1925, 253). This system of tensions serves to establish a dynamic equilibrium between
the life-functions of an organism and an environment as it bears on these life-functions (1938,
40). Dewey cautions that we should avoid wresting the organism from the environment within
which it is embedded and only within which its activities are meaningful. An organism “does not
live in an environment; it lives by means of an environment” (1938, 32). Living is the activity of
drawing energy from the environment in order to preserve the unstable equilibrium characteristic
of a particular organism. This picture of organism-environment interaction is not a biological
theory; it does not provide an explanation of why an organism pursues a dynamic equilibrium,
but rather it seeks to clarify, conceptually, what we mean when we talk about living beings.
Dewey notes that no special telos distinguishes the inanimate iron molecule from a living
organism (1925, 254). The living organism responds to interruptions in “a temporal pattern of
activity” through internal and external changes that tend to perpetuate that pattern. The iron
molecule simply does not—there is no “why” in either case, and if the iron molecule happened to
have the sort of organization that did perpetuate a particular pattern of activity, “it would have
the marks of a living body, and would be called an organism” (254).
Dewey distinguishes this very simple level of organization from two more complex
levels: the psycho-physical and the mental. Though Dewey generally sticks to the term “psychophysical,” likely in order to emphasize the embodied quality of psychology, he sometimes refers
to the psycho-physical level as “feeling” (1925). The psycho-physical helps to distinguish
between the more constrained life-functions of plants from the life-functions of animals that
extend outward through the environment. Organisms with certain biological capacities—in

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traditional parlance, sense organs—render themselves sensitive to qualities now characteristic of
their environment.6 Each “new organ provides a new way of interacting in which things in the
world that were previously indifferent enter into life-function” (32). Notice that Dewey does not
say “in which things in the world to which the organism was previously indifferent;” interaction
goes both ways. In response to sights and sounds and smells, the organism undergoes changes to
continually reestablish a dynamic equilibrium between its organization and the environment.
It’s important philosophically that Dewey does not treat perception (regardless of sense
organ) as yet representing the world. As he would say, experience at this level is felt, but it is not
“had”; what we mean by “having an experience” requires capabilities characteristic of the more
complex level of mind. Psycho-physical organization is simply the means by which organisms
anticipate, adapt, and respond to an extended environment. We might say (though subsequent
remarks about “causes” will discourage such phrasing) that perception is a way of having one’s
activities caused by the environment where, in the absence of perception, the objects of this
environment were unrelated.7 Pragmatism’s naturalistic remarks are existential, not epistemic,
and Dewey does not commit the error that Rorty suspects and that empiricists accused him of
committing of conflating psychological and conceptual issues. But Dewey is adamant that any
objective account of inquiry must ground conceptual practices in organism-environment
interaction (1938, 40). This means that inquiry, usually understood “by terms such as doubt,
6

Because Dewey restricts “environment” to the world as it enters into the life-functions of an organism, it would be
misleading to refer to these qualities as pre-existing within the environment—they become characteristic of their
environment once they enter into the life-functions of the organism. Dewey is not teetering toward idealism here—
he acknowledges that there is of course a world external to the organism and its environment—but he is cautious
about treating qualities as “existing” independently of organism-environment interaction. This is a conceptual
remark about qualities—that they obtain relative to the life-functions of an organism—not an ontological remark
about nature.
7
The use of “cause” here accords with Searle’s (2015) account of perception. I don’t deny that there is an ordinary
way to discuss causality where we can speak straightforwardly about causes. The phrasing that I discourage in the
final section of this chapter is the projection of causality from this phenomenological context to a scientific context.
When we talk about causality in a scientific context, we are doing something different than describing the world as
observed by inquirers.

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belief, idea, conception,” ultimately refers back to a reconstruction of organism-environment
interaction. It is through this interaction that an organism establishes a dynamic equilibrium with
its environment.
One clarification is in order. For pragmatists such as Pierce inclined to give a semiotic
account of experience, the psycho-physical level of organization brings with it the emergence of
signs. On this semiotic account, something becomes a sign of something else when the former
comes to elicit the same response as the latter; smoke is a sign of fire when the organism
responds to smoke in the same way as it would respond to the immediate perception of fire.
Among classical pragmatists like Pierce, James, and Dewey, even psycho-physically complex
organisms exist in a semiotically rich environment. Such complex organisms live in a world
shot-through with signs, responding to the scent of prey as prey itself, or the calls of a potential
mate as the mate itself. In contrast to later, linguistically oriented philosophers, classical
pragmatists referred to these associations as the meaning of a sign, where the meaning of a sign
amounted to the difference it made in the actions of an organism. The trick in all this is to
demarcate sign from symbol, since ordinary language does not neatly distinguish the two.
Pragmatists contrast the two terms by thinking of signs as a conduit for responsiveness and
symbols as a vehicle for reasoning; a sign brings about a difference in the actions of an organism,
but a symbol can serve as a reason for the actions of an organism. At the level of psychophysical organization, Dewey denies that organisms use or encounter symbols. Though psychophysically organized organisms live a meaningful life in the sense that signs allow them to
anticipate and dynamically respond to their environments, they are yet to acquire meaning in the
sense (prevalent among philosophers) that one experience “stands for” or “represents” another.

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Symbols emerge for Dewey in the third level organization, mindedness. Here Dewey
must excavate the rubble of earlier epistemological theories that suggest that mental, or
conceptual, relationships are relationships between a word or idea and the ready-made objects in
the world to which it refers. Such theories invest in the psycho-physical level of organization two
metaphysical realms; first, there is the physical level, comprised of ready-made objects, and
second, there is the psychic level, often portrayed as a sort of theater inside of our heads where
we represent these objects to ourselves. This investment gives rise to a host of philosophical
questions, but its cardinal sin for a naturalist metaphysician is that it seems to require a rupture in
the evolutionary development of human organisms. Non-human organisms make sense by
responding to changes in their environment through changes in their own constitution; nonhuman animals establish psycho-physical relationships through which they anticipate and adapt
to environmental conditions through changes in their behaviors. Yet the prevailing non-naturalist
metaphysics has a tough time understanding the evolutionary origins of the mind without
positing the surreptitious appearance of a whole new faculty.
Dewey traces a continuity between the psycho-physical capabilities of organisms to the
mental by attending to the social practices of social organisms. The key here is the development
of linguistic, or more broadly, communicative practices; he writes:
As life is a character of events in a peculiar condition of organization, and ‘feeling’ is a
quality of life-forms marked by complexly and mobile discriminating responses, so
‘mind’ is an added property assumed by a feeling creature, when it reaches that organized
interaction with other living creatures which is language, communication. Then the
qualities of feeling become significant of objective differences in external things and of
episodes past and to come. (258)

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Language or communication is key because it marks the deliberate deployment of signs to
coordinate “organized interaction”; Dewey stresses this deliberate quality by noting that
“differences in qualities (feelings) of acts when employed as indicators of acts performed and to
be performed and as signs of their consequences, mean something (258). Notice the relationship
between “qualities” or “feelings” in this passage and the passage previously cited. In this
passage, the quality of the act serves as an indicator of how the organism responds to the world
and the consequences of that response; in the previous passage, the quality of the act becomes
significant of objective differences in external things and of episodes past and to come. Indeed,
Dewey is consistent throughout his work that the objectivity of the world is constructed
according to our abilities to interact with the world and how the world behaves in these
interactions (here he shares much with phenomenologists). Objects simply are the totality of our
possible interactions with them—they do not stand ready-made, independent of us, awaiting
representation.
For signs to serve as indicators of acts performed and to be performed, or to be a medium
for communication at all, both parties to the communication must attach similar significance to
differences in the qualities of sounds or gestures. In other words, social organisms must use
sounds or gestures “normally,” or in keeping with the norms that surround their use within their
community. If a social organism attempts to signal its plans, or signal the likely consequences of
its or another’s interactions with the world, through sounds and gesture that lack significance to
its “interlocutor,” that sign will fail to produce the intended differences in the interlocutors
actions. Dewey pays close attention to how human beings are socialized into a community that
uses sounds and gestures to communicate—render common—an understanding of an objective
situation. When sounds and gestures, or signs in the semiotic sense, are shared and significant of

46

objective differences, then these signs have reached the level of symbols, and the community
shares a language.
A “just-so story,” one which sketches a plausible evolutionary account of the emergence
of language or communication, is helpful here. Organisms who happen to live together become
sensitive (in the psycho-physical sense) to the movements of one another. When a member of the
social group inadvertently yips at the sight of danger, others (at least the more fortunate) come to
attach the same significance to this yip as they’d learned to attach to those sights themselves. In a
very rudimentary way, the sound of the yip becomes a sign for danger and gives rise to the same
anticipation and adaptation that a direct encounter with danger would. Note that at such a
rudimentary level, “yip” hardly stands for anything in the world. Pragmatist just-so stories
speculate on the refinement of these psycho-physical capabilities; “yipping” in the face of danger
gives way to “yopping” for terrestrial threats and “yapping” for aerial threats (see Kitcher 2011
for a paradigmatic example of a pragmatist just-so story, and Schel et al 2013 for an empirical
study corroborating these sorts of stories). The community responds to “yopping” much
differently than they would respond to “yapping,” and when we talk about the meaning of “yap”
or “yop” we are describing differences in organism-environmental interaction. For all this
yapping to amount to a language, organisms must learn to yap under the same conditions as one
another, and to actually use their yapping to indicate their plans and expectations. Yapping
serves as a symbol when it conveys these plans and expectations, and thus represents an object
understood as a regularity in our interaction with the world.
The eventual richness of our symbolic practices is impossible to convey through these
sorts of just-so stories—most of our symbolic practices today are enmeshed in syntactically and
semantically complex linguistic practices—but the basic machinery of such stories can help to

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dissolve our pre-Darwinian intuitions about a nature with essences. The symbol “snake” picks
out a particular feature of a situation by connecting—immanently, through material practices
such as sounds and gestures—that feature with the social practices that have developed in
response to snakes. Still, no single symbol captures the complexity of these practices. Settling on
a robust description such as “this is a snake that probably will not bite our dog and could help
with the infestation of crickets in the garden” involves such a suite of symbols that a complete
analysis of their meaning would take us through every alternative symbol countenanced in its
construction. This is a far cry from tracing the meaning of “yops” and “yaps.”
On the earlier epistemological account, finding the right word was a matter of settling on
the symbol that accurately represented the way the world is. This account then struggled to
produce theories of how we could come to know the essences of objects that justified our
referring to them the way that we do. Dewey finds in Darwin a solvent for this essentialism—
there are no lingering philosophical puzzles regarding about how organisms develop social
practices that differentiate objects in the world (though empirical questions abound). Being
socialized into a community simply involves learning the words that communicate the exigencies
of a situation. Dewey writes that, “To represent things as they are is to represent them in ways
that tend to maintain a common understanding; to misrepresent them is to injure—whether
willfully or no—the conditions of common understanding” (1911, 103). Uttering a sound that
has no common meaning—for instance, “yop”—is meaningless. It is only within a community
that sounds become symbols and that symbols have meaning for how we interact with one
another and the world. To work, these interactions must abide by the community’s norms. Here
the naturalist metaphysician must deny to Nature the normative role of determining the meaning
of discourse. For Dewey, “either there is no social way in which it is fitting to conceive and state

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to others and hence to oneself objects, and then the matter is wholly outside the sphere of truth
and falsity, or the objects have a social status and office, which are authoritative for all
statements about them” (1911, 105). Truthfully describing a situation has to do with abiding by
the norms of the community. Though there are no norms governing the use or response of the
sound “yop,” there exists a whole host of norms governing the use and response to each word in
our robust description, from “infestation” and “garden” to “probably,” “not,” and “is” (the norms
governing these latter words are the primary subject of Dewey’s Logic). It is according to these
norms that an inquirer justifies their description of a situation, or warrants an assertion.
Some summary is in order. Throughout his career, Dewey developed an account of the
nature of inquiry that serves to defuse many of the founding intuitions of traditional empiricism.
His naturalistic metaphysics articulates the continuity between human cognitive practices and the
life-sustaining practices of other organisms. Dewey traces this continuity across three levels of
increasingly complex organization. Being an organism means being engaged in transactions with
an environment that function to establish dynamic equilibria. Animals in particular are marked
by sensory organs by which they establish more complex patterns of action in response to
psycho-physical transactions. Experience for psycho-physically organized creatures is felt. When
organisms come to live in social groups, they become psycho-physically responsive to one
another’s activities. Sounds and gestures enter into situations as symbols that are meaningful for
the conduct of the social community. The meaning of any particular symbol is a matter of
communal norms that govern the appropriate use of and response to that symbol. Sophisticated
languages coordinate a community’s conduct, and settling on the “right” description is a matter
of abiding by communal norms. To warrant an assertion is to demonstrate that one is using the
right symbols as governed by shared social practices and the individual situation.

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Fixing Belief Versus Warranting Assertability
By Dewey’s later works, he had come to appreciate the thoroughgoingly social character
of objective scientific inquiry. This appreciation is evident in his transition from a Piercean
theory of inquiry comprised of doubt-inquiry-belief to his own theory of inquiry comprised of
indeterminate situation-inquiry-warranted assertion. Whereas Piece’s theory of inquiry is
available to the individual inquirer, the main concepts of Dewey’s theory—indeterminate
situation, inquiry, and warranted assertion—require a social context in which the individual
inquirer is situated. In this section I discuss recent philosophical debates between pragmatists and
non-pragmatists on the role of values in science. My main aspiration is to highlight the social
context of Deweyan inquiry, which provides inquiry its normative structure; without attending to
this normative structure, pragmatists are hard-pressed to contribute to a pluralist engagement
with values in science. With this normative structure in plain sight, pragmatism can make
significant contributions to the values in science debate, particularly with respect to the
normativity of problem formulation.
Much of the values in science debate concerns the sense in which science is laden with
values, and pragmatists can be too quick to assert an ontological basis for the value-ladenness of
inquiry. At the close of his essay, “John Dewey’s Logic of Science,” Matthew J. Brown
concludes that:
It is because all inquiry has to do with transforming a problematic, indeterminate
situation into a unified one, which requires an active modification of one’s circumstances,
that all judgment is (in part) a judgment of practice because the ‘primary object of our
attempts to understand the world is not to describe it but to manage it’ (Welchman 2002,
39). A problematic situation is, as we have said, a disruption of some practice that
matters; resolving it requires a judgment about how to reconstitute the practice (2009,
301).

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From this characterization of inquiry, it follows that “there is no phase of inquiry in which values
play no role” (2009, 301). Values inflect the language used in problematizing the situation,
which bestows on inquiry “a specific normative structure governed by values” (301). Reaching a
judgment about the facts of a situation puts into action a way of describing that situation, and the
purchase of that description is its significance for how we interact with one another and the
environment. Inquiry simply is a matter of reconstructing our practices when those practices fail
us. Descriptions of situations are not merely mental representations of an objective world; they
signify our ways of interacting with the world, a significance that is first and foremost pragmatic.
On this pragmatist account, there is no coherent sense in which the scientist can first describe a
situation in value-free terms so that the policy-maker can respond to the situation in a valueneutral manner.
What is lacking in Brown’s pragmatist account of inquiry is a specification of the
normative structure of inquiry, one which shows how (and not simply that) every phase of
inquiry is governed by values. Such a specification is exactly what Dewey articulated in his
Logic, which is principally concerned with the structure (for Dewey, the form) of inquiry.
Inquiry is structured according to functional distinctions made within experience; for example,
certain experiences count “as evidence” in light of the role that those experiences are taken to
play in the reconstruction of organism-environmental interaction. Much of Logic is dedicated to
a functional account of how propositions of particular forms provide structure to how we should
interact with the environment. Propositions that state particulars coordinate these interactions
differently than propositions regarding generalizations or universalizations; propositions that
state disjunctions coordinate interactions differently than those stating conditionals. The project
of Logic is to avoid several philosophical puzzles by demonstrating that these logical roles are

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grounded in the ontology of organism-environment interaction. Logical forms are not the
shadows of Platonic forms; they are enacted through the practices of a community, and they are
themselves the product of prior inquiry.
Pragmatists may be guilty of moving too quickly from a Deweyan account of the
organism to a declaration of the value-ladenness of all inquiry. Unless elaborated as a logical,
rather than ontological, theory, pragmatism’s account of organism-environment interaction is not
obviously significant for today’s philosophy of science. By articulating the functional role of
propositional forms, Dewey places his pragmatist account of inquiry into conversation with the
logical empiricists who were prominent in his day and that still shape the contemporary
discussion of science and values. Offering a logic that details a specific normative structure of
inquiry promises to avoid conflating conceptual with psychological issues. In order for Dewey to
attend to conceptual issues, however, he had to transition from a pragmatism of fixing belief to a
pragmatism of warranting assertions. The practice of warranting assertions is the practice of
giving and sharing reasons within a community, and it is these practices that provide normative
structure. They provide structure because “the genius of language, reflecting a vast network of
social traditions and purposes, enters quite as much as the thing told about in deciding whether
what is told is a truthful representation” (1911, 103). The conceptual, as Dewey takes pains to
demonstrate, is fundamentally a matter of abiding by community norms; he joked that “to
observe a thing rightly is perforce to observe social prescription; that ‘observe’ is used in both
senses may be a poor philosophic pun but is nevertheless a description of a basic fact” (1911,
105). We need both senses, sensing the world at the psycho-physical level and “making sense” at
the mental level characterized by shared social norms, in order to observe a thing rightly.

52

That said, placing Dewey’s theory of inquiry into conversation with contemporary
discussions of values in science requires a broader view of inquiry than these discussions usually
countenance. Pragmatists mobilize a model of inquiry that is functionally divided into multiple
phases (see Brown 2012 regarding disagreement over the precise number of phases). Following
Thompson (2015), we might functionally divide inquiry into five phases (though I use somewhat
different labels for the phases, I draw the same distinctions). First, inquiry is initiated by a
disturbance in the dynamic equilibrium established between an organism and its environment.
This disturbance establishes the formerly determinate situation as indeterminate, which sets into
motion inquiry. Inquiry must first find orientation within the indeterminate situation, and this
second phase of inquiry establishes the formerly indeterminate situation as a problematic
situation. In light of the way that the situation is taken to be problematic, the inquirer proposes
conduct that might respond to the problem and re-establish unity. This third phase is
approximately the articulation of hypotheses, which are then evaluated in the fourth phase. Once
proposals are evaluated, the inquirer settles on the most promising proposal and, in this fifth
phase, engages in conduct that follows from that proposal. The success of this conduct is in no
way guaranteed by the positive evaluation adjudicated in the fourth phase. This pattern of inquiry
can be enumerated as (1) disturbance, characteristic of an indeterminate situation, (2) orientation,
characteristic of a problematic situation, (3) proposal of conduct, (4) evaluation of proposals, and
(5) action, which if successful re-establishes a determinate and unified situation.
The entire arc of inquiry is initiated in response to a disturbance in the activities of
organisms, and activities, properly understood in conceptual contrast with mere movements, are
purposive. The purposes that motivate activities are the values of an organism (again, a
conceptual point, not a causal claim about motivation), and so inquiry is necessarily value-

53

laden.8 But pragmatists have so far struggled to clearly specify the role of values in the
normative structure of inquiry, which impedes conversation between pragmatists and nonpragmatists. Harold Kincaid argues that many traditions in the philosophy of science grant that
values play a role in inquiry, and that this sanctions further questions: “What kinds of values are
involved—moral, political, epistemic? How are they involved—inevitably or contingently?—In
what part of science—questions asked, confirmation, explanation—are they involved? And what
does this tell us about science?” (2007, 219). The task for pragmatists is to make a critical
contribution to this conversation, but that requires quite a bit of reconstruction to fit pragmatists
and non-pragmatists into a dialectical relationship.
The difficulty of bringing pragmatist accounts of inquiry into conversation with nonpragmatist accounts is, in part, due to the more narrow focus of many non-pragmatist accounts.
The specter haunting contemporary accounts of inquiry is the threat of relativisms and antirealisms that locate their point of departure in Kuhn (himself neither a relativist nor anti-realist)
and that locate the central philosophical challenge in the determination (or underdetermination)
of theory by evidence (Brown 2013a). For certain concatenations of empiricism,
underdetermination is the crisis that threatens the rationality of scientific inquiry and societies
that adjudicate competing claims through scientific inquiry (Janack 2012). Meanwhile, nonpragmatists have long granted that values play a role in questions asked, and (for the most part)
non-pragmatists appear willing to concede the value-ladenness of any phase of inquiry that
doesn’t directly deal with hypothesis formation and testing. More or less, many non-pragmatists
8

That this very much sounds like a causal claim is a result of misplaced philosophizing about the nature of values
(Sellars 1963). Because “value” sounds like a noun, and because part of the meaning of “value” is that it governs
action, philosophers have been compelled to offer an ontology of values according to which they are the cause of
actions. This reflects a confusion regarding the grammar of values—“value,” like many of our mental constructs, is
grammatically more naturally an adverb than a noun. Talk of values most appropriately describes how an action was
carried out, whether it tends to produce a certain sort of world, whether the actor showed satisfaction but not surprise
in that production, and so on. When we talk of values we are not talking about things in the world as much as we are
talking about processes in the world.

54

adopt the view of inquiry held by social-ecological researchers: policymakers can bring values to
bear in supporting particular research, and in deciding what to do in response to the conclusions
of research, but values cannot directly interfere with the conduct of research itself.
On the pragmatist view, values have already entered the picture during the phases of
inquiry of concern to non-pragmatists, but in a much more robust sense than that granted in
conceding the value-ladenness of questions asked. By conceding that values play a role in
motivating research, philosophers of science acknowledge that the first phase of inquiry—
disruption, which marks an indeterminate situation—is guided by values. Then, by focusing on
the third and fourth phases—proposal of conduct and evaluation of proposals—philosophers of
science narrow their focus to those aspects of inquiry that they take to be essentially epistemic.
The trouble for conversation between pragmatists and non-pragmatists is that the second phase
of inquiry—orientation, wherein the situation is problematized—receives little attention. Yet this
is exactly the phase of inquiry that provides normative structure to scientific practice, and it is to
these norms that pragmatists attend when investigating the values implicit in inquiry.
Orientation is critical because indeterminate situations do not come ready-described.
Indeterminate situations are experienced like the blooming and buzzing confusion discussed in
Chapter One; they are marked merely by the disruption of our practices that maintain a dynamic
equilibrium, or unity, with our environment. With William James we might stress that existence
is a stream of consciousness, and that our task is one of analysis not synthesis (1890). In Chapter
One, I noted that an indeterminate situation might set into motion inquiry into the ecological
characteristics of that situation, and in particular whether the ecosystem should be described as
resilient or fragile. Scientists inquire into the details of an individual ecosystem and exchange
reasons for describing the ecosystem one way or another. Crucially, these descriptions participate

55

in our engagement with the world—describing the ecosystem one way will support a suite of
practices different than those supported by an alternative description. This follows the
pragmatists’ account of language as a constellation of symbols and relations among symbols that
coordinate collective action.
An important point here is that the environment alone does not determine what
description is correct. Initially, inquiry is relatively unstructured, and the first task of the inquirer
is to orient herself to the situation. Again, we can borrow from the first chapter and think of this
orientation as deciding on a vocabulary from which any descriptions of the situation will be
drawn. Concretely, this might amount to deciding whether to approach the situation with the
vocabulary of a systems ecologist or the vocabulary of a population ecologist; in a truly
unstructured situation, inquirers might debate the merits of a broadly ecological vocabulary or a
broadly economic vocabulary. Note though that, in this phase, the merits of a vocabulary is a
wholly separate matter from the merits of a description. When scientists exchange reasons for
one description or another, they are commonly debating the truth of these candidate descriptions.
When exchanging reasons for one vocabulary or another, truth is yet to enter the picture, and if it
did, it would provide little guidance. Both the ecologist and the economist are able to offer true
descriptions of the environment, so truth alone is not determining which description is right.
Rather, when deliberating over the appropriate orientation, or vocabulary, for a situation, we
must reflect on the pragmatics of the situation. What are our values, in all their plurality, and
what practices might harmonize our pursuit of these values? There are truths that will help us in
this pursuit, but they are truths about the environment and ourselves. The whole situation,
marked by organism-environment interaction, enters into deliberation about the right orientation
to an indeterminate situation. Because an indeterminate situation might warrant any number of

56

responses, we must narrow down the responses we might consider, and we do this by prioritizing
one vocabulary over others.
For Dewey, and for Pierce, the vocabulary within which inquiry is conducted serves to
orient us to the truths that we deem significant for reconstructing our practices. Pierce expresses
this orienting feature by noting that inquiry as we know it is not possible without granting that
many of our beliefs are beyond doubt. On the Piercean model, inquiry is a practice of fixing
belief in the face of doubt. Belief here notes a disposition to act, as Pierce sets the stage for a
pragmatism that roots thought in our practical engagement with the world. We cannot doubt
everything all at once, in part because fixing belief involves abiding by the norms that adjudicate
whether a belief is true or false. For example, one cannot fix belief about the resilience of an
ecosystem without accepting beyond doubt that resilience is marked by resistance to change and
ability to adapt (Walker et al. 2004). These relationships between concepts mark the vocabulary
of the inquirer (in this case, the vocabulary of the systems ecologist). As a language, a
vocabulary structures the inferences that we can draw from any particular judgment; these
inferences are both general (if A then B, A, so B) and specific (ecosystems marked by resistance
to change and ability to adapt are resilient, resilient ecosystems can support particular human
practices, and so on). This web of belief connects our conceptual practices to one another and to
our material practices, and it is in this “ungrounded way of acting” where thought connects us to
the world (Wittgenstein 1969). On the Piercean model of fixing belief, inquiry is settling on a
disposition to act in the face of a situation that calls into doubt our established patterns of
conduct.
Dewey initially accepts the Piercean model of fixing beliefs, but eventually transitions to
a model of warranting assertions. This transition is noted without much elaboration in Brown’s

57

reading of Dewey (2012, 281), as Dewey shifts from doubt-inquiry-belief to indeterminate
situation-inquiry-warranted assertion. On Brown’s view, this maturation in Dewey’s thought
mostly aims at avoiding the subjectivist or psychologistic reading of the Piercean phrasing, but I
think the transition is more philosophically significant. Between How We Think (1910) and
Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), Dewey adopts a much more sociological perspective than
in his earlier work, which was anchored in psychology. His middle works, such as Experience
and Nature, locate intelligent conduct in the social practices of a community. 9 When founded in
psychology (e.g. “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology”) Dewey takes the objects of
experience to be constructed in the relationship between the organism and its environment. By
Experience and Nature, the objective quality of inquiry is a thoroughly social accomplishment.
Dewey notes that it is a mistake to take “the structure of discourse for the structure of things,
instead of for the forms which things assume under the pressure and opportunity of social
cooperation and exchange” (1925, 170-171). This is a rather cryptic way of stating what was
mentioned earlier, that the environment alone does not determine what ought to be said of it.
Under the pressure and opportunity of social cooperation and exchange, communities have
mobilized symbols that distinguish objects in the world. To be an object in this sense is to mark
an opportunity to practically direct the present situation toward valued situations in the future.
Pragmatically, vocabularies provide structure to how we reconstruct our practices in light
of our particular values and the exigencies of situations that threaten these values. Deciding on a
vocabulary to orient inquirers to an indeterminate situation is, in effect, privileging certain
projects and the values with which those projects are aligned. It is mobilizing a set of social
practices that work to restore the problematic situation to a desirable unity. Perhaps less

9

“Intelligent” conduct for Dewey is simply action regulated in accordance with what we’ve learned of the world. It
is more or less used as the adjective form of “mind,” as “mindful” conduct carries different connotations.

58

obviously, sparing some beliefs from doubt effectively spares some of our practices from
reconstruction. This too involves valuation, as the decision to secure some of our practices from
criticism and reconstruction is a decision about which of our practices we value and which we
are willing to adapt. This type of valuation is especially salient when we inquire into the causes
of a particular situation, which is discussed in the next section. But valuation informs any form
of inquiry because it is only through orientation to a problem as a problem that some actions
count as ameliorative. The ultimate test for how we describe a social-ecological system is
whether that description helps us to coordinate action and direct that system toward a valued
state.
Dewey’s shift toward a more sociological perspective on meaning represents an
appreciation for the role that social values play in inquiry. On the doubt-inquiry-belief model, the
inquirer appears insulated from her community’s purposes and projects. Pierce does not attend to
the role that community plays in establishing the meaning of symbols, and his imagery suggests
that an inquirer can mobilize a system of symbols to personally structure inquiry. Dewey agrees
that symbols are indispensable when carrying out inquiry, but that these symbols only attain
meaning within a community. This is because meaning is a product of how a community
responds to a particular sound or gesture as it figures into an evolving system of symbols.
Remember, “either there is no social way in which it is fitting to conceive and state to others and
hence to oneself objects, and then the matter is wholly outside the sphere of truth and falsity, or
the objects have a social status and office, which are authoritative for all statement about them”
(1911, 105). But having social status and office is not arbitrary—objects obtain these roles
because they navigate the pragmatics of individual situations and eventually become standard for
navigating similar situations. Languages evolve as new uses of symbols prove pragmatically

59

useful, and vocabularies (as used here) function as subdivisions of languages that prove
pragmatically useful for particular sorts of problems.
These remarks on the sociality of language development are meant to discourage any
stark division between values, such as between “moral, political, [and] epistemic” values as
queried by Kincaid. Many debates on the role of values in science have concerned whether
epistemic values alone should adjudicate scientific decisions, or whether non-epistemic values
can also play an important role (Douglas 2009, Steel and Whyte 2012). The trouble for
pragmatists is that epistemic values do not even enter into the equation until a vocabulary has
been selected, as it is only within pragmatically structured inquiry that truth and falsehood
pertain. So there is no sense in which epistemic values alone could adjudicate scientific
decisions, and there’s no sense in which inquiry is coherent without reference to non-epistemic
values that structure it. Of course, once a structure is adopted for a given inquiry, truth and
falsehood are no longer directly accountable to non-epistemic values, even if non-epistemic
values played an indirect role in establishing the truth conditions of that inquiry.10 In other
words, once we warrant an orientation to the problem as a problem, the reasons that we provide
for that orientation no longer serve as reasons for or against our experimental conclusions. As
scientists are wont to say, “Wishing it so does not make it so.” The larger point here, though, is
that “wishing it so” plays a critical role in structuring inquiry in the first place. Non-epistemic
values inform how we orient ourselves to a problem, what sort of unity we pursue, and what
counts as ameliorative. Wishing that an ecosystem can sustain particular human practices does
not make a sustainable ecosystem, but it does inform how we ought to go about describing that
ecosystem in order to manage it toward sustainability.

10

See Douglas 2009 and Elliott 2013 on direct and indirect role of values, and Brown 2013b on the ambiguity of
this distinction.

60

On a pragmatist account of inquiry, these non-epistemic values do not compromise the
objective character of inquiry. Indeed, they are constitutive of it. For Dewey, the objective
character of inquiry is owed to the form that objects take in the social practices of a community
of organisms: “To represent things as they are is to represent them in ways that tend to maintain
a common understanding” (1910, 103). Here the significance of “warranting assertability” is
most clearly felt. On the doubt-inquiry-belief model, there was no procedure through which
beliefs were held accountable to the common understanding of a community. Because beliefs
were taken as individual dispositions to act, their symbolic expression through language could be
viewed as merely incidental. To transition from “beliefs” to “assertions” is to foreground the
linguistic form that beliefs take in a social community. This linguistic form demands that
dispositions to act take their place in “the genius of language,” or in the system of social
practices that coordinate collective action. To transition from “fixing” to “warranting” is to
appreciate the social character of justification. Whether one rightfully asserts that things are thusand-so is always accountable to whether community members would themselves make such an
assertion or trust you to do so. Warranting an assertion, though, begins in the earliest phases of
inquiry. We must warrant our orientation to an indeterminate situation, and warrant the
vocabulary deployed in problematizing the situation. Generally, this involves deliberation about
the values at stake in managing a problem and the different conduct we might propose for
ameliorating that problem. The facts that are pertinent to how we should orient ourselves are as
much a feature of a situation as are the facts that are pertinent when proposing and evaluating
conduct. After all, we are parts of these situations too, as situations include both the organisms
and the environments of organism-environment interaction. To assert that a situation is

61

problematic, or that a reconstruction of that situation is desirable, is to issue a claim that may
come under public scrutiny and require warrant.
Inquiry into Causes
It is the normative structure of inquiry into causes that most concerns the project of this
dissertation. In Chapter One, I noted that social-ecological systems scientists characteristically
pursue “social mechanisms behind…management practices” (Berkes and Folke 1998, 3). Berkes
and Folke are explicit that the proper purview of social science within the social-ecological
systems approach is to locate the causes of human behavior and subsequently for socialecological change. Like these social-ecological systems scientists, Dewey held a special place for
causal explanations in his theory of inquiry:
The determination of a sequential order of changes is the goal of every scientific
investigation that is occupied with singular phenomena. The institution of just such
temporal-spatial continuities is the ultimate objective of any existential inquiry. When the
objective is realized, there is judgments, as distinct from propositions as means of
attaining judgment (1938, 454).
For Dewey, ordinary talk of causal mechanisms, and of explanation that cites causal
mechanisms, is appropriately understood as inquiry into “sequential order of changes” or
“temporal-spatial continuities.” These are not simply esoteric rephrasings of ordinary language,
however, as Dewey is motivating a vocabulary that avoids some of the confusions implicit to
common usage. The stakes are high, too, because for both pragmatists and social-ecological
systems researchers, inquiry into these “mechanisms” is the ultimate objective of inquiry.
Meeting this objective results in “judgment,” which is the determination of a course of action—
perhaps issuing a warranted assertion—that concludes the fourth phase of inquiry and justifies a
response to the indeterminate situation. Such judgments are critical to Dewey’s account of
inquiry. Whereas “propositions as means of attaining judgment” are presupposed, and neither

62

true nor false, judgments are a matter of truth or falsehood. Successful inquiry generates true
judgments that hold promise for ameliorating problematic situations.
Why is Dewey so reluctant to embrace the ordinary language of “causation” or
“mechanism”? In short, Dewey takes talk of causes and forces to be an artifact of that preDarwinian mindset that took for granted the distinctness of objects in the world.11 This artifact is
owed to the aforementioned conflation of “the structure of discourse for the structure of things,”
and, in its more metaphysical version, the commitment that different kinds of things share a
common essence. Once things are taken to be essentially distinct from one another, the idea that
some special force must relate them and explain change was a natural development. Talk of
“causes” or “forces” have puzzled philosophers since the Greeks, as these occult substances do
not seem available to empirical investigation. Yet this has not stopped most of us from talking of
causes and of positing causal relationships as a special sort of ontological relationship.
The trouble here is that this account of causality mistakes a logical structure for an
ontological insight. Dewey’s philosophical remarks here are meant to discourage the first
ontological move—that objects are fundamentally distinct from one another—that demands a
special relational force in the first place. It is only in light of our capacities as organisms that
objects are distinguished from the flux of experience—our world assumes a particular form
because we as organisms have learned to relate to it in particular ways. As social organisms,
these relations have been codified through language, but the stable relationships between words
and the world need not suggest that the world stands ready-made for our labels. On the
11

As I go on to discuss at the opening to Chapter Three, this pre-Darwinian mindset has deep roots—following
Sellars, we might say that the notion of cause is fundamental to “the framework in terms of which man came to be
aware of himself as man-in-the-world. It is the framework in terms of which, to use an existentialist turn of phrase,
man first encountered himself—which is, of course, when he came to be man” (1963, 6). Causes on this view are
conditions for which we are responsible, which form the basis of understanding ourselves as agents. This selfawareness is then projected onto the world, where other objects are conceived as agents. The key here is that this
projecting is doing something quite different from describing the world scientifically, as I elaborate throughout this
section.

63

pragmatist account, the universe can accommodate all sorts of ontological structuring depending
on how we are trying to bring a future, desirable situation into fruition. Apart from pragmatic
questions of how we are trying to manage it, is not structured. If the universe is not already
structured, then there is no coherent sense in which some objects are uniquely “real” and that
some relationships between objects, such as causal relationships, are uniquely real.12 Rather,
existence is better imagined in keeping with the John Muir quote popular among ecologists:
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the
Universe” or simply, that everything is connected to everything else (1911, 211).13 And if
everything is connected to everything else, then connectedness cannot be sufficient for
distinguishing something as a cause. Dewey laments that any ontological interpretation of
causation will fail to make sense of the ordinary meaning of saying one thing caused another,
which cannot simply mean that one thing is connected to another, for in that case the
specification of the cause will swim in a sea of similarly interconnected causes. He resolves that
“the only possible conclusion upon the basis of an existential or ontological interpretation of
causation is that everything in the universe is cause and effect of everything else—a conclusion
that renders the category completely worthless for scientific purposes” (1938, 453).
But causation is not entirely worthless—indeed, Dewey suggests that it is the ultimate
aim of any existential inquiry. Recuperating the concept requires abandoning the ontological
interpretation in favor of a logical interpretation. Rather than thinking that an “event comes to us

12

The trouble here is the notion of “uniquely,” not with “real,” though some versions of realism appear committed
to the idea that there is only one true way that the world is structured (see Rorty 1999, “A world without substances
or essences,” on this commitment). Pragmatism offers a realism that is opposed to the picture of carving nature at its
joints. Dewey tended to grant that, of course, products of inquiry were real, but to resist the inference that these
products were uniquely real or that “real” entailed a nature with joints.
13
The Muir passage is frequently misquoted, and it’s worth emphasizing that, in the correct quote, Muir makes note
of the observer who is actively picking out the “anything.” The popular mantra implicitly suggests that there’s an
“everything,” or that all that there is can be thought of as a collection of things, and this picture of an already
structured existence is misleading.

64

labelled ‘cause’ or ‘effect’,” Dewey reminds, “An event has to be deliberately taken to be cause
or effect” (1938, 453). Though causality is not an ontological category for Dewey, it is a vital
concept to inquiry, because it provides a logical structure to ameliorating a problematic situation.
The functional role of causal explanations in inquiry is to locate means-end relationships. When
searching for causes, inquirers are analyzing antecedent events into objects that might serve as
means for bringing about desirable, subsequent events. This requires at least two important
distinctions within temporal-spatial continuities: some feature of the antecedent situation is
distinguished as a means, and some feature of the subsequent situation is distinguished as the end
or effect. While we can be said to discover these temporal-spatial continuities, we cannot be said
to discover causes and effects, for an event’s status as a cause or an effect requires a pragmatic
point of view. The search for causes imposes a purposive structure to inquiry. Dewey writes,
“The conception of effect is essentially teleological; the effect is the end of be reached; the
differential means to be employed constitute its cause when they are selected and brought into
interaction with one another” (1938, 455). Later Dewey declares that any intelligible sense of
causation “is practical and teleological through and through” (456).
While Chapter Four explores in detail the actual practices of social-ecological systems
researchers engaged in causal explanations, a quick example here is helpful. Recall the
discussion in Chapter One of the social practices of Swiss cowherders. There I suggested that the
sustainability of that social-ecological system can be explained by reference to economic
institutions, but that it might also be explained in various alternative keys, such as political
science, anthropology, or geography. On a pragmatist theory of inquiry, we might say that
everything antecedent to the rise of sustainable practices are, on an ontological or existential
sense, connected to, and in this overly broad sense causal with respect to, subsequent events.

65

This everything could be analyzed into objects according any number of vocabularies, but the
products of these analyses—for example economic features such as low dependability and high
upfront capital-investment—are not suddenly more causally responsible for the continuity of
events. On the ontological interpretation, this sense of causal responsibility is “worthless for
scientific purposes” since everything is connected to everything else. Those antecedent events
could be analyzed into the region’s political procedures, or the village’s traditions for inheriting
land holdings, or merely the regular rising or setting of the sun, since all of these dimensions
exist in continuity with the emergence of sustainable practices in the region. We are inclined to
think that some of these continuities represent more rich and productive mechanisms for
managing the social-ecological system, but these inclinations are rooted in pragmatic
considerations that we mistake as ontological.
Conclusion, or Finding the Social in the Ecological
This chapter set off to contextualize pragmatists’ account of inquiry within pragmatists’
account of organism-environment interaction. The goal here was not to “reconcile” the two
images, or reduce the social to the biological, but to join them together for a richer account of our
social and material practices (Sellars 1963). Dewey is not guilty of conflating psychological with
conceptual issues as charged by friend and foe; his ontological writings must be understood as
offering an alternative account of what it means to be an inquirer if we have any hope of
understanding inquiry. That alternative account centers on the notion of organism-environment
interaction, whereby an organism acts to maintain a dynamic equilibrium with its environment.
Humans and some non-human organisms have developed complex social practices to coordinate
these actions. Language is among these social practices, and it is through language that the
present situation symbolizes future possibilities that we may actively pursue. Social practices

66

including language are meaningful only within the ecological activities of an organism and its
community (Rosenthal and Buchholz 1996).
Communities engage in inquiry in order to deliberately maintain a dynamic equilibrium
with their environment. Pragmatist philosophers of science have emphasized that this ontological
basis of inquiry establishes the value-ladenness of inquiry; after all, situations are only
problematic, or unstable, with respect to situations deemed less problematic or more stable. So
far, however, pragmatists have struggled to articulate the normative structure of inquiry and the
role that values play in this structure. I suggested that part of this struggle is due to narrower
scope of non-pragmatist theories of inquiry, which tend to focus on hypothesis formation and
testing, and which take these phases to exhaust the epistemic character of science. Pragmatist
theories recognize disruption (which establishes an indeterminate situation) and orientation
(which establishes a problematic situation) as crucial phases in inquiry. In particular, orientation
requires consideration of values when choosing a vocabulary that structures inquiry, and it is
only within such a structure that epistemic values pertain.
Social-ecological systems science is particularly concerned with mechanistic, or causal,
explanations. Rather than shelter social-ecological systems scientists from evaluative or ethical
questions, this quest for a causal understanding brings values to the foreground. Although
causality is commonly considered an ontological category, pragmatism details the
inconsistencies of treating causality as an ontological relationship between pre-existing things in
the world. Because “everything is connected to everything else,” inquiry into causes is in fact
inquiry that abides by a particular logical structure of causal explanations. This logical structure
is fundamentally teleological, as it requires features of antecedent situations to be taken as
pragmatic means for bringing about consequent situations. This “taking” requires valuation of

67

both means and ends, and such valuation involves judging a situation as desirable according to
the norms of one’s community. Warranting an assertion about causes is, in part, warranting an
assertion about the pragmatic value of both means and ends, and this opens up inquiry to the
wider community of stakeholders.

68

WORKS CITED

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WORKS CITED

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CHAPTER 3
VALUES AND THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATIONS
Abstract: This chapter argues that we have good reasons to describe the social
dimensions of social-ecological systems in terms of norms and institutions, but that these
reasons are thoroughgoingly pragmatic rather than ontological. The chapter opens with a
discussion of Sellars’ distinction between the manifest and scientific images of the world.
Sellars’ clarifies the sense that the manifest image, according to which human beings are
persons who act for reasons, and the scientific image, according to which the world is
comprised of deterministic relations between objects, are not rival images but rather two
different ways of relating ourselves to the world. This clarification informs my critique of
Daniel W. Bromley’s volitional pragmatism, which insists on an ontological treatment of
human action in social-ecological systems. The critique is furthered through a
consideration of a debate between Richard Rorty and Keith Topper over the appropriate
methodology for social science. I follow Rorty in arguing that our reasons for preferring
hermeneutic methods are pragmatic rather than ontological, but I diverge from Rorty’s
dichotomous framing of the methodological choice. The diversity of disciplinary
approaches in the social sciences reveals a range of value-laden methods for describing
and explaining social practices, and our choice among these methods depends on our
normative and valuational commitments.
Pragmatism and the Manifest Image of Humanity
In his 1963 Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association, Wilfrid
Sellars suggested a new way to read the history of philosophy. Sellars noticed that his peers in
the association had become preoccupied with the increasingly reductive account of nature
discovered in the physical sciences. As philosophers, they took their task to be the reconciliation
of this picture, wherein everything reduces to inert matters, with the widespread sense that
human beings do things for reasons, and when they have reasons, act on their own free will. The
trouble for philosophy and for the humanities in general was that science had become so
powerful that few philosophers were willing to stand behind a picture other than that given by
the physical sciences (for a vivid account of this transition, see Reisch 2005). That widespread
sense, which Sellars calls the “manifest image” in contrast to the “scientific image,” seemed to

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be an irresponsible holdout in the face of mounting evidence that reality is comprised of atoms
and the void. Such a view of reality had little place for mystical forces like the human will.
Sellars regards the tension between the manifest and scientific images of humanity as a
perennial problem for philosophy. This struggle can be located in how it is that we understand
human beings as persons, beings who think, hold beliefs, build character, deliberate with one
another, and act for reasons. That understanding is constitutive of the manifest image, which,
Sellars chronicles, is “the framework in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as manin-the-world. It is the framework in terms of which, to use an existentialist turn of phrase, man
first encountered himself—which is, of course, when he came to be man” (6). Only by happening
upon patterns of behavior that anticipate the consequences of our behavior could we have come
to see ourselves as we see ourselves in the world. Being who we are, we now understand these
complex behaviors as the eventual basis of self-descriptions. Movements become significant of
their consequences; they become actions. The contrast between the manifest image and the
scientific image is rooted here—on the scientific image, objects move, but they do not act.
Originally, Sellars reminds, humankind understood all objects as persons. Trees and
forests were not mere physical entities, but fellow actors to whose movements we could attribute
reasons or purposes. On such an understanding, Sellars maintains, “to say of the wind that it
blew down one’s house would imply that the wind either decided to do so with an end in view,
and might, perhaps, have been persuaded not to do it, or that it acted thoughtlessly (either from
habit or impulse), or, perhaps, inadvertently” (12-13). It is this original image that philosophers
traditionally revised through the “de-personalization” of objects other than human beings. But
Sellars insists that we do not owe these revisions to discoveries about what wind really is. The
manifest and scientific images are not rival images, in the sense that one can stake a claim to

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being true of the really real; they are instead radically different ways of relating human beings to
the world. Philosophers who struggle to defend the personhood of human beings against the
further encroachment of the scientific image make a mistake when they insist that human beings
are really persons or not really atoms and the void. For while this is correct, as far as things go in
the manifest image, their interlocutors would be just as correct to insist that human beings are,
when we get to the bottom of things, atoms and the void. What is at stake is not what is, but how
what is is to be related to everything else.
The relating of everything to everything else is what Sellars takes to be the purview of
philosophical reflection, in part because philosophers spend much of their time reflecting on the
practices of language use, and language—as previous chapters have shown—are in the business
of codifying these relations. Philosophers get into trouble, however, when they misplace
concepts that are at home in either the manifest or the scientific images. These mistakes are easy
enough to make but result in the pinning of the two images against one another, such that we do
feel compelled to adjudicate which is truly representative of reality. Pertinent to our endeavor,
Sellars echoes the point made by Dewey that the notion of “causes” is not at home in the
scientific image:
…it is important not to confused between an action being predictable and its being
caused. These terms are often treated as synonyms, but only confusion can arise from
doing so. Thus, in the ‘original’ image, one person causes another person to do something
he otherwise would not have done. But most of the things people do are not things they
are caused to do, even if what they do is highly predictable…Thus the category of
causation (as contrasted with the more inclusive category of predictability) betrays its
origin in the ‘original’ image (13).

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Sellars point is that the notion of “cause” only makes sense in contrast with the deliberate actions
of persons. Detached from a framework where some behavior is intentional and other behavior
unintentional, or indeed the intention of another person, and the category of causation ceases to
hold meaning. In short, causes require becauses.
Philosophical confusions abound, though, when we confuse predictability (the hallmark
of the scientific image) for causation (one way in which things might be predictable, but hardly
the only):
…the category [causation] continued to be used, although pruned of its implications with
respect to plans, purposes, and policies. The most obvious analogue at the inanimate level
of causation in the original sense is one billiard ball causing another to change its course,
but it is important to note that no one who distinguishes between causation and
predictability would ask, ‘what caused the billiard ball on a smooth table to continue in a
straight line?’ The distinctive trait of the scientific revolution was the conviction that all
events are predictable from relevant information about the context in which they occur,
not that they are all, in any ordinary sense, caused (14).
It is the confusion between predictability and causation that pervades social-ecological systems
scientists’ understanding of the social sciences (Berkes and Folke 1998, Walker et al. 2002).
These researchers justify their pursuit of mechanistic explanations of human behavior according
to their goals to predict, control, and adapt to environmental change. If we distinguish between
causation and predictability, this goal does not justify their mechanistic orientation. What does
justify the search for causes is the need to assign responsibility for environmental changes and to
recommend means for bringing about different ends, and yet all of these categories
(responsibility, means, ends) are alien to the scientific image.

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Reconciling this confusion is no small task. The prevailing alternatives similarly conflate
prediction and causation and, agreeing that causation is a misleading way to describe human
beings as persons, insist that empirical investigation of human activity is bankrupt. As Charles
Taylor remarks (1985),
There is a constant temptation to take natural science theory as a model for social theory:
that is, to see theory as offering an account of underlying processes and mechanisms of
society, and as providing the basis of a more effective planning of social life. But for all
the superficial analogies, social theory can never really occupy this role. It is part of a
significantly different activity (92).
In this chapter I am worried about a specific type of confusion—the idea that the social sciences
and natural sciences reflect an ontological divide between the study of things (persons) who will
their actions and the study of things that do not. Cede too much to this idea and the possibility of
science—for Sellars the “conviction that all events are predictable from relevant information
about the context in which they occur” and for social-ecological researchers the goal to predict,
control, and adapt to environmental change by appeal to human practice—is seriously
compromised. For social-ecological systems scientists and pragmatists alike, this compromise is
damning; classical pragmatists were as dedicated to the social sciences as they were to the
humanities—James in psychology (1890), Dewey in educational theory (1916), and Mead in
sociology (1934). All of these figures believed that social science must eschew the sorts of
dualisms that protect the manifest image from the scientific image, and that a mature social
science aimed for prediction warranted by empirical description of the context of human activity.
Their empiricism, however, was more radical than that imagined by Taylor and the philosophies
of social science that follow in his wake (James 1912).

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My reason for worrying about this specific type of confusion is that I see it as a
fundamental flaw in an otherwise promising pragmatist philosophy of social science in Daniel
W. Bromley’s volitional pragmatism (2006). Bromley’s philosophy of social science is
especially pertinent to social-ecological systems science because Bromley, a practicing
institutional economist, articulates a philosophy meant to grapple with epistemological issues
confronting the study of economic institutions such as land use practices. Situating Bromley’s
argument within the context of a debate between Richard Rorty (1982) and Keith Topper (2000)
on the ontological purchase of social theory, I argue that Bromley mistakenly locates the human
will as an ontological feature of human nature. Such ontological commitments are misplaced
because, to quote Sellars one last time, “the essential dualism in the manifest image is not
between mind and body as substances, but between two radically different ways in which the
human individual is related to the world” (11). To find the will “in” human action is to
experience human action within the social contexts within which behavior is meaningful. This is
a logical feature of explanation, not an ontological discovery.
Economic Institutions and Volitional Pragmatism
In the first chapter, we encountered two different approaches to economics. On the one
hand, social ecological systems researchers deployed economics to make sense of the regulations
and informal conventions by which Swiss alps cowherders managed their pastures. Here the
emphasis was on the evolution and enforcement of social norms for collective action. On the
other hand, Bryan Norton chronicled the interdisciplinary policy assessments of economists and
ecologists. There, economists deployed cost-benefit analysis to recommend a course of action
that maximized social utility. The former framework is institutional economics, and the latter
framework we will call “Pareto economics” following Bromley. Although it is Pareto economics

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that has been the center of debates in environmental ethics and environmental philosophy more
broadly (e.g. Sagoff 1988, Daly, Cobb, and Cobb 1994), it is institutional economics that most
commonly appears in social-ecological systems inquiries (e.g. Berkes, Folke, and Colding 2000,
Olsson, Folke, and Berkes 2004, Ostrom, 2009).
In his Sufficient Reason: Volitional Pragmatism and the Meaning of Economic
Institutions, Bromley defends institutional economics as the more defensible approach to
policymaking generally and environmental policymaking and management in particular. While
the specifics of his critique are beyond the scope of this dissertation—the problems of costbenefit analysis and rational choice theory do not directly pertain to the problems of explanation
in institutional economics—a brief review helps locate his conception of economic institutions.
Rational choice theory assumes that people make choices by weighing the costs and benefits of
each of their alternatives and choosing the alternative that maximizes net benefits. At the level of
policymaking, this calculus is aggregated across the population of stakeholders affected by the
policy. For individual action, maximizing net benefits is the definition of rationality; for
collective action, maximizing net benefits for all affected is the definition of rationality. Bromley
reminds that decisions can be rational only against a background of established costs and benefits
accruing for particular choices. The social practices that render some actions possible and others
impossible, or even unimaginable, are understood to be outside the scope of rational decision
making. Laws that ban certain practices, or technologies that make new practices available for
comparison, are “exogenous,” and so the existing ethical, social, legal, and technological limits
are taken as given when comparing costs and benefits.
As a pragmatist, Bromley follows Dewey in taking causal explanation to be “the ultimate
objective of any existential inquiry” (1938, 454). In light of this conviction, Bromley’s volitional

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pragmatism finds Pareto economics woefully inadequate to inform social policymaking. His
critique has two fronts: first, Pareto economics is circular with respect to how it explains action
endogenous to a given “field of action” (33), and second, Pareto economics cannot, on its own
terms, explain the development of institutions that define these fields of action. The first point is
relatively simple. To say that a person chooses a course of action because it maximizes net
benefits hardly counts as an explanation, in part because any choice that they make must be
taken as rational. Bromley points out that, “given that much of contemporary economics employs
the circular logic of revealed preference to ‘explain’ choices consistent with preferences, it
should be obvious that we are unable to say anything meaningful about the substantive reality of
so-called rational choice” (9). Rather, Bromley recommends, we must (at minimum) look to the
institutions that define some outcomes as costs and others as benefits, as well as to whom these
costs and benefits accrue and who is responsible to compensate whom. It is this architecture that
provides the context within which people act, and, according to Bromley, it is this architecture
that explains distinctively economic action.
Some Pareto economists recognize the significance of traditionally exogenous factors and
seek to make them endogenous to their frameworks. This would amount to explaining the
construction and maintenance of different institutions by appeal to cost-benefit calculus and
rational choice. Bromley regards this endeavor misplaced, however, because the assignment of
costs and benefits relies on a background of social practices through which costs and benefits are
constituted as such. To explain these constituting practices as themselves the result of costbenefit analysis is once again circular, as it makes use of the very norms and institutions that it
intends to explain. Ultimately, Bromley concludes, the effort to render endogenous the
institutions that structure economic activity is “doomed on logical grounds” (70). “Once

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something is made endogenous,” he contends, “it is no longer capable of being explained by the
structure within which it is embedded. By virtue of its embeddedness, it is now indistinguishable
from the system of which it is a part—the ‘two’ things are, in fact, one thing” (70). On
Bromley’s view, there is simply no way to explain human action purely in terms of instrumental
rationality.
If the institutions that explain economic activity cannot themselves be explicated in
economic terms, where should we look for their origins? Here is where volitional pragmatism
takes on its volitional character. In contrast to Pareto economists who seek to reduce human
action to the cold calculus of “a machine process,” Bromley urges:
What is needed here is not mechanism. What is urgently needed is, instead, a theory of
institutions and institutional change built on the concept of prospective volition—the
human will in action, looking to the future, and deciding how that future ought to unfold.
The prospect of attaining particular outcomes in the future constitutes the reasons for
humans to undertake specific events today—whether acting as individuals or acting
collectively in those democratic entities (legislatures, parliaments, administrative
agencies, courts) created precisely for the purpose of considering and implementing
institutional change. When we get a grip on those reasons, we will get a grip on why
institutions change (22).
According to volitional pragmatism, institutions change because we have sufficient reasons for
changing them. It is human agents armed with good reasons for altering the architecture that
defines fields of action that are the causes for institutional change. It is crucial to Bromley that
“the human will in action” is the cause of changes in the formal and informal norms that regulate
collective conduct. Volitional pragmatism draws on a certain interpretation of pragmatism’s

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theory of action to free the human will from the mechanistic logic of more deterministic social
theories. On this interpretation, policymakers can freely imagine creative solutions to social
problems, and it is these creative imaginings that, once democratically negotiated, serve as
justification and explanation for institutional change (Bromley 2006, 72-73). It is here that
explanation “bottoms out”—Bromley takes the human will in action to be the necessary
ontological level according to which we explain institutional change.
In order to understand the ontological character of volitional pragmatism, it’s worth
attending to one of Bromley’s examples. Bromley contrasts the standard economic approach to
tropical deforestation with that recommended by volitional pragmatism (169-178). On the
standard approach, deforestation is modeled as the outcome of readily quantifiable factors in a
region’s economy, including rates of population growth, household income, infrastructure that
provides access to markets, timber prices, foreign debt, and so on. The Pareto economist then
attempts to correlate changes in these factors with observed rates of deforestation. The factors
that are found to be antecedent to increases in deforestation are taken to be causes of the
deforestation, and policymakers try to develop policies that will alter these factors and prevent
further deforestation. Policymakers, for example, may find a strong correlation between
population growth and deforestation, deem population growth the cause of deforestation, and set
forth to construct policies that discourage population growth and thereby discourage
deforestation. Alternatively, they may find a strong correlation between road building and
deforestation, and set forth to discourage road building and the access it provides to rainforest
timber.
Bromley’s complaint is that the epistemology underlying such policymaking is
inadequate. He charges that such analyses “focus too quickly on what is imagined to be the

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antecedent conditions to deforestation” even though “events and outcomes such as deforestation
can only be understood—explained—by giving explicit recognition to the purposes that might be
served by those particular outcomes” (170). This leads Bromley to the somewhat hasty
conclusion that deforestation happens “because there are purposes to be served by deforestation,”
and further, that causes such as population growth or road building cannot count as causes
because neither activity intends deforestation. By narrowing the search to causes emanating from
human intentions, Bromley finds it “logically necessary” to explain deforestation by appeal to
one of two possible causes; to either (1) earn revenues from harvesting trees, or (2) convert forest
land to other uses. These intentions are, at the end of the day, the basis for any number of
intermediate institutions that structure, but do not cause, deforestation. The Pareto economist
who attributes deforestation to timber prices is appealing to institutions governing the exchange
of timber, yet the volitional pragmatist insists that these institutions are themselves subject to
explanation.
Bromley concludes his analysis of tropical deforestation with the following general
remarks about explanation in the social sciences:
The key here, however, is to keep in mind that explanations pertaining to human action
are incoherent without explicit reference to intent. All other alleged explanations are
merely mechanical and, as such, provide no insights about policy reform. That is, the
prescriptions that flow from mechanical causes will inevitably address symptoms of the
problem—observed phenomena—rather than the reasons for those phenomena (176177).14

14

There’s a lot going on here, and I focus only on a few philosophical confusions. It’s worth noting, though, that
Bromley’s distinction between “observed phenomena” and “the reasons for those phenomena” is a straightforward
appeal to the appearance/reality distinction. That distinction appears throughout Bromley’s work on volitional
pragmatism and, as far as I can tell, echoes a Kantian conviction about the noumenal subject.

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Bromley’s hearkening to inevitability marks an important contrast between the volitional
pragmatist’s concept of causality and the Deweyan treatment of the concept of causality from the
previous chapter. For Bromley, there must be some ontological level at which explanation
bottoms out, and he argues that social explanations necessarily bottom out in the reason giving
and taking of democratic deliberation, which makes explicit reference to intent. For Dewey,
however, explanation doesn’t bottom out in this way. Causality is a concept that functions to
structure inquiry into problematic situations, but we do not discover the cause to phenomena—
we take certain features of situations to be responsible for others, but we could take other
features (but not just any other features), depending on where we choose to intervene. For most
pragmatists, we certainly should not approach inquiry with preconceived notions about what
sorts of things can count as causes.
Volitional pragmatism is motivated by a contrast between Pareto economics and
institutional economics. Pareto economics is methodologically invested in a theory of human
action—rational choice theory—that withdraws from the social context of preferences and
purchases. Institutional economics is instead interested in the formation and maintenance of the
social context within which economic activities can be rational. As Bromley takes pains to show,
it is only within established norms for conduct that consequences can count as costs or benefits.
This irreducibility of economic norms is the basis for volitional pragmatists’ ontological
distinction between human beings and other things. Human beings can be properly said to “act,”
which means our movements must be understood as goal-directed rather than merely the
mechanical interplay of cause and effect. And the goals toward which actions aspire are not the
abstract goals of utility maximization; the goals of economic actions, qua volitional pragmatism,

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are available as socially-recognized reasons to the actor. The human will in action is the
ontological capacity to justify our actions by giving and asking for such reasons.
Bromley’s theory of inquiry rests on a false but widespread conviction that, at some
ontologically fundamental level, humans are different sorts of things than rainforest timber or
new roads. Following Sellars we might agree that humans are different from this other stuff, but
we would not hold this conviction on the basis of an ontological distinction between mind and
body. And it turns out that our reasons for maintaining a distinction between persons and nonpersons does matter quite a bit. Since volitional pragmatists believe that persons are uniquely
free from mechanical causes and instead subject to teleological causes, they see no way to assign
responsibility for social-ecological changes beyond assigning them to human actors. As I will
continue to argue, insofar as we have reasons to assign responsibility to fellow human beings, it
must be on pragmatic rather than ontological grounds.
The Ontological Basis of Social Theory
Bromley’s reliance on an ontological basis for his volitional pragmatism places him into
a longstanding debate between social theorists and philosophers. I here consider that debate as it
plays out between Richard Rorty and Keith Topper, which concerns the specific matter of
whether the success of a social science provides a reason for taking onboard the ontological
assumptions of that science. At stake is whether we think of successful social scientific theories
as representing the “really real,” instead of the more modest achievement of describing the world
in ways that help us to get about productively and reliably. On the one hand, many social
scientific traditions have presupposed that the epistemologies of the biophysical sciences are
appropriate for studying human behavior, and these traditions have sought to discover law-like
generalizations for social activity. Rational choice theory is a variant of such traditions, though

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the mindset finds its paradigm in behaviorism. On the other hand, other social scientific
traditions have rejected the epistemologies inherited from the biophysical sciences and
championed new methods that stake a claim to better understand social reality. These methods
commonly trace their heritage to Clifford Geertz and attend to the richly symbolic practices of
human beings (1973). Rather than seek law-like regularities among third-person observations of
social behavior, these traditions argue that social science must begin from a first-person
perspective. According to this view, it is only from within the perspectives of language-speaking
communities that we might understand social conduct.
Richard Rorty tries to reconcile this debate in his “Method, Social Science, and Social
Hope” (1982). At the time of Rorty’s essay, the debate had crystalized as a dispute over the
specific method of hermeneutic interpretation. Advocates for the hermeneutic approach, most
notably Charles Taylor (1971), insisted that the epistemologies of the biophysical sciences were
inappropriate for studying human beings. In contrast to the objects studied by biologists,
chemists, and physicists, social science was interested in objects (human beings) who used
language to reflect on, and thereby direct, their own actions. Whereas studies of brute matter
need not take the standpoint of its subject matter, the social sciences, according to this
hermeneutical tradition, cannot proceed without taking that standpoint. In short, human beings
are the sorts of things who create meaning, and understanding these meanings is necessary for
understanding human beings. The hermeneuts maintained that the understanding gained through
a first-person engagement with their subjects was, at minimum, a different sort of understanding
than that offered by rival epistemologies. Some went so far as to claim that third-person
methodologies ought not claim to understand human behavior at all, and that the immaturity of

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the social sciences was in large part due to these methodologies’ mistaken assumptions about the
human subject.
While Rorty found this debate productive, he did admonish the more brazen advocates
for hermeneutics. Social scientists get into trouble when they try to draw ontological conclusions
from the success of their practices. Rorty cautions that the criticisms issued by Taylor and fellow
hermeneuts are “a useful protest against the fetishism of old-fashioned, ‘behaviorist’ social
scientists who worry about whether they are being ‘scientific.’ But this protest goes too far when
it waxes philosophical and begins to draw a principled distinction between man and nature,
announcing that the ontological difference dictates a methodological difference” (198-199).
Waxing philosophical starts when social scientists assume that the predictive success of their
theories provides a reason for taking onboard the theories’ ontological commitments:
…philosophers who make a sharp distinction between man and nature are, like the
positivists, bewitched by the notion that the irreducibility of one vocabulary to another
implies something ontological. Yet the discovery that we can or cannot reduce a language
containing terms like ‘is about,’ ‘is true of,’ ‘refers to,’ etc., or one which contains
‘believes’ or ‘intends,’ to a language which is extensional and ‘empiricist’ would show us
nothing at all about how to predict, or deal with, language-users or intenders (201).
Rorty here echoes Sellars’ opening point that we find ourselves with both a manifest image (a
language that contains terms like “believes” or “intends”) and a scientific image (a language
which is “empiricist,” or refers exclusively to the features of the situation that any observer could
verify, regardless of their familiarity with prevailing social norms). With Sellars, Rorty concedes
that neither of these languages is irreducible to the other, and yet both resist the urge to draw
ontological conclusions from this irreducibility.

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Most pragmatists resist this urge because they set aside the longstanding philosophical
question, “Why does this language help us to get about productively and reliably?” For such
pragmatists, this question only has the semblance of intelligibility—all that we can say is that
such a language does help us to realize our goals. Advocates for hermeneutics do engage this
question, and it is the sort of question that begs an ontological response. Because the language
preferred by hermeneuts, which draws on the first-person perspective of human subjects, often
helps understand subjects’ reasoning and patterns in their conduct, that language is the one that
more accurately represents the really real. Meanwhile, traditions that face criticism from the
hermeneuts, mainly the many brands of empiricism which Rorty refers to as “Galilean” science,
also engage the question. According to these traditions’ epistemological convictions, purely
extensional and empiricist vocabularies are appropriate to all scientific endeavors because the
modern success of the biophysical sciences attests to the merit of such vocabularies. The
argument traces the same path: because third-person vocabularies are more productive and
reliable, such vocabularies have proven their ontological purchase. Most pragmatists, with the
pertinent exception being volitional pragmatism, simply reject the ability to draw these sorts of
inferences. We might say “because one vocabulary or another is more reliable, we ought to use it
when making sense of a particular problem,” but we should not say “because one vocabulary is
more reliable, it must have a better handle on true reality (social or otherwise), and hence all
inquiry must be conducted in its terms.”
Volitional pragmatism wants to make this further claim—to discredit rational choice
theory and the constellation of assumptions, theories, and methods that undergird Pareto
economics. On this point Bromley finds an ally in the hermeneuts and in particular Keith Topper.

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Topper responds directly to Rorty’s “Method, Social Science, and Social Hope” in his own
essay, “Disunity, Pragmatism, and the Social Sciences” (2000). According to Topper,
…hermeneutical commitments to an ontological and methodological distinction between
the natural and social sciences, and to the idea that ‘a people’s understanding must be
among the things which any adequate theory can explain,’ not only are compatible with
pragmatism but are the offspring of it. With this in mind, we might profitably restate the
conflict between Rorty and hermeneutical social science: the problem is not that
hermeneutical social science is unpragmatic but that Rorty’s pragmatism is not pragmatic
enough (532).
Topper’s charge here is worth examining. It accuses Rorty of three fallacious arguments. First,
Rorty argues that hermeneuts have not refuted the possibility that social scientists could explain
human conduct using the same epistemologies as the biophysical sciences (Topper refers to this
as the possibility of scientific unification). Second, Rorty argues that hermeneuts must rest their
epistemological and ontological convictions on outdated metaphysical dualisms. Third, Rorty
accuses the hermeneuts of mistaking the first-person perspective as the social scientific corollary
of “Nature’s Own Language,” or the idea that there is some vocabulary that carves nature, or
social reality in this case, at its joints.
Let us quickly countenance the first and third arguments as they do not explicitly relate to
the core of the debate. Topper notes that Rorty’s first argument should not lead us to adopt the
Galilean epistemologies for social science. Just because we have no a priori demonstration that
an extensional vocabulary will not work, we are under no obligation to employ such a
vocabulary. This in my mind is a bit of a distortion of Rorty’s claims. What Rorty is advancing is
the more modest claim that, until the productivity and reliability of extensional vocabularies is

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ruled out once and for all, we should continue to experiment with those (among other)
vocabularies. Because ruling this out once and for all would require an ontological commitment
that Rorty finds unjustifiable, advocates of hermeneutic and Galilean methods should not debate
the unity or disunity of social and biophysical sciences (see Kitcher 1981). Meanwhile, the third
argument should not be read as an argument for or against Galilean methods, but as a therapy to
help us understand the rise of ontological philosophizing in the first place. A genealogy of
modern commitments to a language that carves nature at its joints cannot adjudicate whether we
are warranted in maintaining such commitments. What Rorty is trying to do by chronicling that
history is help us understand ourselves and the contingencies of our metaphysical assumptions,
which for at least some of us will help loosen the grip that these assumptions have on us. Perhaps
we should maintain them, but our resolve should be warranted only according to whether these
commitments improve the quality of our inquiry.
It is with respect to Rorty’s second argument that Topper and Rorty fundamentally
disagree. Topper remarks that extensional approaches such as behaviorism, cognitivism,
operationalism, systems-theory, and rational choice theory have not found predictive or
explanatory success to date. Meanwhile, Topper asserts that hermeneutic approaches have found
such success (curiously, evidence for this is conspicuously absent from the essay). Accordingly,
Topper believes that we should adopt hermeneuts’ ontological and methodological commitments
on pragmatic grounds. He argues that this belief “rests on a claim about ontological differences
between physical nature and human beings” but that “it is manifestly not a metaphysical thesis in
the sense that most pragmatists presume when they describe metaphysics pejoratively as a
‘sterile’ or ‘vain’ activity” (530). Rather, “far from being a product of disembodied exercises in
first philosophy, the ontological and methodological distinctions adumbrated above emerge from

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examination of the fortunes of different types of natural and social scientific inquiries” (530).
These examinations lead Topper and fellow hermeneuts to conclude that human beings are a
different sort of thing from physical objects, and as different sorts of things, they require
different methods for inquiry.
Topper is straightforwardly drawing the inference that Rorty forbids: we cannot infer
from the productivity and reliability of a vocabulary anything ontological in the robust sense that
Topper requires.15 In order for the productivity and reliability of hermeneutic methods to count
against Galilean methods, Topper first needs to locate the two methods as rival ontological
positions, and second needs the success of one method to substantiate its ontological purchase.
The first need, according to which the two methods are deemed incompatible, requires that we
think of social reality as consisting of objects for which there is only one true way of describing.
The second need requires that we ask why certain vocabularies work, and here it is useful to
remember William James’ point that “it is useful because it is true,” or “it is true because it is
useful” mean exactly the same thing for our epistemic practices (1907, 115). Vocabularies that
we find productive and reliable are true as far as it goes, but no further. And in the absence of
bottoming out in a robustly ontological sense, social scientists such as Topper and Bromley
cannot justify their preferred ontological and epistemological commitments the way that they
have.
The Pragmatic Basis for Social Theory
While robustly ontological and epistemological commitments cannot justify choices
between vocabularies, I want to spend this final section explaining how normative and
15

Dewey was prone to say something like “the practical achievements of our inquiries can attest to the potentiality
of nature to abide by the regularities to which our inquiries attest.” Rorty is on the whole skeptical of whether these
potentialities add anything above and beyond the specific claims made about the objects themselves, and would
prefer we stop talking about “nature” at all. In any event, Topper needs these practical achievements to have more
ontological purchase than either Dewey or Rorty allow.

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valuational commitments can justify the logical structure of social scientific inquiry. The basic
claims are as follow: (1) most social theory is, by design, operating at a logical level more
complex than that of behaviorism and its correlates, (2) the logical level distinguishes within
experience those practices that are taken to be given (for the purposes of a particular inquiry), (3)
such practices are intersubjectively maintained, and (4) by operating at such a level that social
theory can offer explanations that intervene in the practices at the level.
At the outset, it is important that I complicate the account that Rorty provides regarding
the pragmatics of social scientific inquiry. Rorty is correct to diagnose the dispute between
hermeneutic and Galilean social science as a pragmatic disagreement masquerading as an
ontological debate. Where hermeneuts and behaviorists essentially disagree, on Rorty’s take, is
over the goals that social science ought to help us better pursue. In part this disagreement is
spurred by the uncomfortable role that social scientists are asked to play in contemporary
societies. Social scientists are expected to play two parts: first, they are expected to provide
value-free descriptions that serve as the basis for evidence-based policies or management
strategies, and second, they are expected to issue these descriptions in terms that already hold
significance to policymakers, managers, and their constituents (197). This is exactly the set of
obligations that Norton (2005) finds impossible to reconcile given prevailing misunderstandings
of the practice of science. Wrest terms with evaluative significance from the vocabulary of any
science, and the descriptions that they offer for the world will not mean anything for deliberation
and collective action.
Galilean and hermeneutic social scientists accept these terms of the debate but disagree
over how to reconcile the two roles (198). Galilean social scientists assume that a value-free
social theory will most widely predict human behavior and that policymakers will be able to

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bring their values to bear in deciding on a course of action in light of these predictions.
Hermeneuts assume that the only predictive social theory is the one articulated from the
perspective of community members and that this language is already invested with sufficient
significance for legitimate policymaking. Rorty’s point is simply that the roles are not so tightly
interwoven, and that it is both possible to issue a value-free but policy-irrelevant social theory
and possible to issue a social theory in policy-relevant terms that is poorly predictive.
Hermeneuts’ reasons for preferring a first-person perspective, and the vocabulary used
from this perspective, is not merely empirical. Rather, Rorty intimates, we adopt a first-person
perspective on moral rather than epistemic grounds. He writes:
Friends of hermeneutics have protested that Behaviorese was inappropriate for
‘understanding’ people—meaning that it could not catch what they were ‘really’ doing.
But this is a misleading way of saying it is not a good vocabulary for moral reflection.
We just don’t want to be the sort of policy-makers who use those terms for deciding what
to do to our fellow-humans (198).
This diagnosis is oversimplified. While Rorty is correct that moral considerations must be
brought to bear when choosing a vocabulary for social science, he suggests a false dichotomy
between first-person and third-person perspectives.16 Instead the choice should be from a
plurality of frameworks that span the vocabulary of first-person moral reflection and the purely
extensional vocabularies that Topper finds lamentable in behaviorism, cognitivism,
operationalism, systems-theory, and rational choice theory. We can truthfully describe the social
dimensions of social-ecological systems in all of these frameworks, and none is uniquely true in
16

This is less of a provocative claim than it may seem. Social science is constitutively about human subjects, and
describing human subjects has moral implications because we in fact do import such significance on such
descriptions. In short, it would be disingenuous to say both “here is how human beings act in a particular context”
and “these are simply the facts and mean nothing for how we assess one another’s character and assign rights and
responsibilities.” Language-users simply do not how that sort of authority over what their verdicts mean.

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the sense that it refers to a fundamental social ontology. Rorty sets up a narrow choice between
purely extensional and empiricist vocabularies that rarely mean much for policy and
management and the subject’s own self-understanding that can be unreliable or idiosyncratic.
The real choice, however, is between the diversity of frameworks that are (contingently) reliable
and formulated in terms pertinent to deliberation and collective action.
These frameworks are represented in the wide-ranging approaches in the social sciences,
from anthropology and human geography to policy science and institutional economics. The
primary purview of all of these social sciences is human action, which resists description in
purely empiricist vocabularies.17 When an anthropologist investigates the traditions of a
community, say the importance of oral traditions in sharing knowledge of caribou behavior, they
hardly describe these traditions as the mechanical interplay of stimulus and response. Likewise,
the institutional economist who describes the maintenance of property rights systems does not,
per Bromley, issue descriptions in the reductive calculus of cost-benefit analysis. Social sciences
are studying human actions, not human movements, and this means that they must understand
(most of) the behavior that they observe as purposive, not mechanical. This attests to the first
claim, that most social theory is, by design, operating at a logical level more complex than that of
behaviorism and its correlates.
To clarify briefly, and without getting too much into the weeds, it is important to note the
notion of “operating at a more complex level” as a “grammatical” remark (Wittgenstein 1953).
The grammar of a concept is the sense in which it refers to objects in the world. We might think

17

While I am skeptical that any social science could peddle in purely empiricist vocabularies (e.g. I think even the
rigorously behaviorist framework would struggle to predict human action through a mechanistic description alone), I
do think folks like Rorty and Norton have provided sufficient reasons to reject such vocabularies as the basis for
policy and management. The upshot is that either these vocabularies do have significance for our policy and
management, and that they are therefore subject to pragmatic analysis, or they do not, and escape this analysis at the
expense of their relevance.

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of grammar as the set of rules that determine how to verify the truth or falsehood of statements
that use the concept. Now, Galilean vocabularies abide by very simple grammars—the terms of
these vocabularies refer to objects that can be verified by observing their presence at a given
time. This simple grammar is part of the power of these vocabularies, as the set of observations
required to investigate the world through these concepts is straightforward and capable of
garnering widespread agreement. Meanwhile, the grammar of action concepts is more
complicated. Actions refer to patterns in the behavior of agents. To verify that a person is
“sharing” is not as simple as observing an exchange, but further observing that they do not
receive remuneration (which might be better described as “selling”), that they do not lament the
delayed return of the shared thing (“borrowing”), that they are not simply discarding unwanted
goods (“giving away”), and so on. This is just what “sharing” means. That it would be difficult to
disambiguate an action as either sharing or selling or so on attests to the complex grammar of
action concepts.18

Hermeneutic methods are essentially a practice of disambiguation; the act

of “interpreting” is practically a matter of verifying the truth of statements that require that we
engage the whole field of action to validate observations about particular action statements.
Hermeneuts are correct to treat the expressions of subjects as acts too, and to find satisfaction in
the description that holds up in the face of continuous observations of physical and linguistic
acts. It is a mistake, though, to conflate grammatical complexity with ontological complexity.
What grammatical complexity achieves is a “radically different way of relating human beings to
the world” (Sellars 1963), a way that allows us to anticipate and coordinate our own actions with
the purposes and pursuits of our fellow actors.
18

The notion of “complexity” is liable to give the impression that action concepts refer to complex objects that are
composed of the simple objects to which Galilean vocabularies refer. That is an impression that is based on a bad
picture of language and one that we need to resist—actions are not reducible to movements, nor are observations of
actions reducible to observations of movements. It might be better to simply say that action concepts abide by a
different grammar, but given widespread (mis)understandings of observation, the idea of complexity is useful.

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By operating at this more complex logical level, social scientific descriptions describe
practices in the world. This is to say that the distinctively social terminology of a social scientific
theory is grammatically teleological, that locating “the will in human action” is describing, to
ourselves and to one another, our movements as actions that bring about foreseeable responses in
our interactions with one another and the world. Terms such as “logging,” or “fishing,” or
“hunting” are all concepts that require inquirers to observe patterns in the activities of
communities. No single, one-off observation can verify whether a community is logging, and this
grammar holds for all of our social terminology. Movements are called “logging” only after we
observe the norms that seem to govern those movements. This is the trouble with purely
extensional descriptions of human conduct—operationalizing action concepts as a list of
observational conditions does not explicate the rules that distinguish the right application of the
concept from the wrong. Still, observing the norms governing the use of action concepts is
observation, it is still empirical, even as it is oriented to these observations as teleologically
structured.
It is worth stressing that these patterns in human practices are not attributable solely to
the intentions of human actors. They depend on the maintenance of a social context within which
movements give rise to regular and predictable responses from others; in short, they depend on a
social reality. Following Searle (1995), we should remember that our logical commitment to the
existence of reality, social or otherwise, is not a commitment to a reality that has joints (see
Rorty 1979). Reality in this logical sense is not the commitment to there being any unique set of
objects that our statements mirror, but rather the more modest commitment that the stuff that our
statements are about makes those statements true or false independent of the investigator’s
beliefs. As Searle points out, the stability of the stuff predicated by social descriptions is

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intersubjectively maintained—we can rely on regularities in the behavior of others. It is our
participation in the norms that constitute social reality that gives meaning to our social
descriptions, both in the sense that this participation is a condition for statements being either
true or false, and in the sense that participation is a condition for descriptions to help us navigate
that social reality.
So when we investigate through the use of social terminology, we are describing
practices that depend on the actions of others in order for those descriptions to be true. When we
cite a particular practice as a cause, in other words, when we take our descriptions to be the basis
of explanations, we assume the social context within which that practice leads to the effects that
it does. We are ordinarily right to assume this—after all, social practices rarely change
overnight—but it is nonetheless important to note how reliant social inquiry is on background
normative practices. The regularities upon which social descriptions depend are owed to the fact
that individuals pursue their goals by navigating this intersubjectively maintained field of action.
This means that values are at stake twice over. In the sense expressed in Dewey’s theory of
inquiry and elaborated by Norton, valuation is necessary in analyzing a situation as a problem
and in deciding what features of that situation serve as causes through which we can intervene.
But in social scientific explanations, values are also constitutive of the level at which we describe
the situation, the level of social practices for which we can provide better or worse reasons. As
noted above, we should understand this layering as a design feature of social scientific inquiry.
We do not strip bare our vocabulary for navigating social reality to the grammatically simple,
behaviorist models of cause and effect, simply because doing so would produce interventions
that ignore the rich social contexts that facilitate our way of life. We want descriptions that

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participate in our existing social reality, because we want interventions that leave most of that
reality intact.
In the next chapter I analyze social scientific inquiry in social-ecological systems science
as a way to elucidate this chapter’s arguments. What should be clear going forward is that social
scientific inquiry is value-laden above and beyond the sense appreciated by environmental
pragmatists. Social science that is significant for environmental policy and management
mobilizes concepts that orient us to the purposive character of human action. The diversity of
disciplinary approaches in the social sciences reveals a range of value-laden methods for
describing and explaining social practices, and our choice among these methods depends on our
normative and valuational commitments. When we cite human actions as causes of
environmental change, we are making a pragmatic claim that changing particular social practices
can serve as a means for bringing about different ends. The social practices that we may change
are already value-laden, and part of providing pragmatic warrant for an explanation is
countenancing the social values that are at stake in making that change. For example, intervening
in the way that a community maintains its property rights institutions requires that we consider
the value of the consequent environmental changes as well as the value of the new social
relations that we must subsequently maintain. These are the values, absent from most discussions
of science and democracy, concerning who we are and who we are to become.
Conclusion, or Mechanism in Social-Ecological Systems
Social scientists like Bromley and Topper are correct to describe our social reality in
terms that matter to us and according to a grammar that orients us to our actions rather than our
movements. Bromley and Topper rightly resist the mechanistic accounts of human action that
they argue miss “the human will in action” (Bromley 2006, 22). But my contention is that they

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are wrong insofar as they take this will to be an ontological discovery about human nature, a
ground upon which any adequate social theory must be built. The sense that human will is “in”
action ought to be understood logically, or grammatically, as a consequence of how we are
oriented to the world when we describe it teleologically. With Sellars we should remember that
the conflict between telos and mechanism, between mind and body, is not a substantive conflict.
Rather, it is a pragmatic decision about how it is that we are oriented to the world.
When social-ecological systems scientists pursue a mechanistic account of socialecological systems, they do not escape the need to make evaluative judgments. If by mechanistic
understanding they mean something like the facts about causes and effects, they face pragmatic
decisions about where to locate interventions. If they instead mean something like a third-person
account, as contrasted with an interpretive or hermeneutic account, they still confront valuejudgments. Unless we are after a description of our social practices that strips down to mere
behavior—a description that would, in effect, alienate us from the meaningfulness of our existing
way of life—a purely empiricist or extensional vocabulary will not do. Insofar as we wish to
leave intact most of what matters to us, we must conduct our social scientific inquiry in terms
that already register within our social lives. Operating in this register means that our assertions
have implications for who we are and who we are to become, a set of values that environmental
scientists are mistaken to think they might avoid.

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WORKS CITED

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WORKS CITED

Berkes, F. and Folke, C. (1998). Linking social and ecological systems for resilience and
sustainability. In F. Berkes, C. Folke, and J. Colding (Eds.), Thinking social and
ecological systems: Management practices and social mechanisms for building resilience
(pp. 1-25). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bromley, D. W. (2006). Sufficient reason: Volitional pragmatism and the meaning of economic
institutions. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Daly, H. E., Cobb, J. B., and Cobb, C. W. (1994). For the common good: Redirecting the
economy toward community, the environment, and a sustainable future. Beacon Press.
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. New York: The Free Press.
Dewey, J. (1938). Logic: The theory of inquiry. In J. A. Boydston, John Dewey: The Later
Works, 1925-1953. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. Basic books.
James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
James, W. (1907). Pragmatism. In L. Menand (ed.), Pragmatism: A Reader. New York: Vintage
Books.
James, W. (1912). Essays in radical empiricism. Harvard University Press.
Kitcher, P. (1981). Explanatory unification. Philosophy of Science, 48(4), 507-531.
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Olsson, P., Folke, C., and Berkes, F. (2004). Adaptive comanagement for building resilience in
social-ecological systems. Environmental Management, 34(1), 75-90.
Ostrom, E. (2009). A general framework for analyzing sustainability of social-ecological
systems. Science, 325, 419-422.
Reisch, G. A. (2005). How the Cold War transformed philosophy of science: To the icy slopes of
logic. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Rorty, R. (1982). Consequences of pragmatism (Essays: 1972-1980). Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.

Sagoff, M. (1988). "Some problems with environmental economics. Environmental Ethics,
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Searle, J. R. (1995). The construction of social reality. Simon and Schuster.
Sellars, W. (1963). Philosophy and the scientific image of man. Science, perception and reality
2, 35-78.
Taylor, C. (1971). Interpretation and the sciences of man. The Review of Metaphysics, 25(1), 351.
Taylor, C. (1985). Philosophy and the human science: Philosophical papers 2. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Topper, K. (2000). In defense of disunity: Pragmatism, hermeneutics, and the social
sciences. Political Theory, 28(4), 509-539.
Walker, B., Carpenter, S., Anderies, J., Abel, N., Cummin, G., Janssen, J., Lebel, L., Norberg, J.,
Peterson, G. D., and Pritchard, R. (2002). Resilience management in social-ecological
systems: A working hypothesis for a participatory approach. Conservation ecology, 6(1),
14.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Basil Blackwell.

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CHAPTER 4
THE MEANING OF THE SOCIAL WITHIN SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL INQUIRY
Abstract: This chapter argues that the choice among social scientific theories in socialecological systems science must appeal to non-epistemic, social values. It further argues
that social-ecological systems scientists tend to describe systems in language that is
inadequate for recognizing and legitimating such non-epistemic values. I trace this
inadequacy to the early emphasis on structural or functional explanations of social
practices, which echoes the ontology of ecology, but which neglects the ways that human
agents reproduce these structures and perform these functions. Situating recent
frameworks for integrating social dimensions into Chapter Three’s categories of Galilean
and hermeneutic methodologies, I recommend Muriel Cote and Andrea Nightingale’s
approach, which calls for social sciences that are explicit about the values they advance
and the constraints they accept. I then explore a meta-study of coastal and marine socialecological systems sciences to demonstrate three interrelated claims. First, the vocabulary
in which explanations are warranted reflects the disciplinary background of the social
scientists in a collaboration. Second, different vocabularies make different valuational
and normative assumptions about the practices worth upholding and the practices open to
change. And third, this value-ladenness of social explanations has downstream and
upstream implications for how social-ecological systems scientists are accountable to
stakeholders’ objections. Through a concluding reflection on Dewey’s “Three
Independent Factors in Morals,” I recommend deontological and virtue-theoretic
vocabularies as resources for locating concepts that might inform upstream decisionmaking.
The Early Emphasis on Structure and Function
In the early years of social-ecological systems science, researchers were unsure how to
integrate the social sciences, and their reliance on ecological frameworks incorporated the social
sciences in a way that was partial and problematic. Fikret Berkes and Carl Folke’s call for a
science of people management was largely inchoate in Linking Social and Ecological Systems.
The editors characterized social-ecological systems science as a “people-oriented approach,”
and, of course, echoed the mantra that “resource management is people management” (1998, 2).
This mantra ensured that the social sciences played a particular role in inquiry. In the volume’s
early articulation of social-ecological systems, the human dimensions of the environment were

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closely tethered to resource extraction and use. Resource management provided the link between
social and ecological systems, and the primary purview of social-ecological systems scientists
was to investigate institutions that regulate resource management. Chapters considered various
social institutions that bear on resilience and sustainability, but all of the institutions considered
were right at that boundary between human and ecological dimensions. In this early agenda for
social-ecological systems science, it was our understanding of the ecological system that
provided orientation to the overall system; the social system was conceptualized only in its
relation to the ecological system. Institutions regulating transactions between human
communities and ecosystems were located in the contours of ecological systems that were
largely taken for granted. Given the expertise of Berkes and Folke, as well as the many
contributors to the volume, this orientation was hardly surprising.19 But the orientation produced
an asymmetry that is the focus of this first section—ecosystems were conceptualized from the
ground up, and the components held together as a system, but social systems were built by
adding components to the already conceptualized ecosystems, and the relations between these
added social components were much less visible.
Ultimately this methodology led social scientists of people management to try to
“reinvent the wheel” (Fabinyi, Evans, and Foale 2014, 34). The vocabulary used to describe
social systems in social-ecological systems science bears little resemblance to existing theories
from disciplines such as sociology or political science. At the conclusion of the volume, Berkes,
Folke, and Colding (1998, 418) provide a list of social mechanisms for resilience and
sustainability. The full list is worth reflection:

19

Chapters were authored by anthropologists, human ecologists, human geographers, and natural resource
economists, though more critical traditions in the social sciences such as sociology and political science were
conspicuously absent.

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2. Social mechanisms behind management practices
a) Generation, accumulation and transmission of ecological knowledge
Re-interpreting signals for learning
Revival of local knowledge
Knowledge carriers/folklore
Integration of knowledge
Intergenerational transmission of knowledge
Geographical transfer of knowledge
b) Structure and dynamics of institutions
Role of stewards/wise people
Community assessments
Cross-scale institutions
Taboos and regulations
Social and cultural sanctions
Coping mechanisms; short-term responses to surprises
Ability to re-organize under changing circumstances
Incipient institutions
c) Mechanisms for cultural internalizations
Rituals, ceremonies and other traditions
Coding or scripts as a cultural blueprint
d) Worldview and cultural values
Sharing, generosity, reciprocity, redistribution, respect, patients, humility
Two things stand out here. First, there is an obvious presence of anthropological theory in the
articulation of these mechanisms. Given Berkes’ and Folke’s burgeoning interest in traditional
ecological knowledge, as well as the involvement of a number of anthropologists who provided
case studies, this presence makes sense (Gadgil, Berkes, and Folke 1993). The second
noteworthy feature is the structural emphasis of many of the mechanisms that do not harken from
anthropology. The “Structure and dynamics of institutions” is the most populated category, and
includes characteristics such as cross-scale institutions, responses to surprises, and ability to reorganize, all of which are paradigmatic characteristics of resilient ecological systems. In trying
to reinvent the wheel, early attempts at social-ecological systems science produced social
theories that looked an awful lot like ecology.

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For those familiar with the social-ecological systems literature in the decade following
Linking Social and Ecological Systems, this dual emphasis neatly characterizes the research
agenda. On the first front, the literature on traditional ecological knowledge grew rapidly
(Berkes, Colding, and Folke 2000, Folke 2004). In part because theories of knowledge
production and distribution are clearly normative, this literature has been thoughtfully engaged
and problematized from diverse perspectives (Simpson 2004, Shackeroff and Campbell 2007).
The second front, though, is only recently receiving criticism. Muriel Cote and Andrea J.
Nightingale point out that social-ecological systems science “has mainly evolved through the
application of ecological concepts to society, problematically assuming that social and ecological
system dynamics are essentially similar” (2012, 475). By attending to the structure and dynamics
of social systems, social-ecological systems researchers set themselves apart from contemporary
critical social sciences. This is not because sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists
had not considered social systems as structures that are dynamically maintained—indeed, it is
exactly because many disciplines operated in a post-structuralist paradigm that they had little to
say about this reinvented wheel (Fabinyi, Evans, and Foale 2014, Bell 2005). For about a decade,
social-ecologist systems scientists explained social-ecological change by appealing to structural
characteristics of social systems. Instead of talking about power or coalition building, these
scientists described the political in terms of polycentric governance and decentralized decisionmaking (Folke et al. 2005, Ostrom 2010). Instead of reflecting on the social reproduction of
identity and subjectivity, they described the social in terms of the distribution of risks and the
adaptive capacity of vulnerable groups (Lebel et al. 2006). The cultural found its place in the
new social-ecological systems discourse through descriptions of connectivity and social capital

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(Brondizio, Ostrom, and Young 2009); the economic through property rights systems and
poverty traps (Anderies, Janssen, and Ostrom 2004, Holling 2001).
These conditions made it difficult for more critical social scientists to collaborate with
ecologists and other biophysical scientists. Frustrations traced the rift between Galilean and
hermeneutic epistemologies discussed in Chapter Three; on the one hand, the majority of
biophysical scientists favored purely extensional and empiricist vocabularies, while on the other
hand, the majority of social scientists favored internal analyses in research subjects’ own
language (Lele and Norgaard 2005, Rorty 1982). In an excellent article by Todd A. Crane, these
methodological disagreements are succinctly summarized:
…external analyses of a social-ecological system tend to construe it solely as a
mechanistic web of interlinking actions and outcomes. Although this may be empirically
accurate, it is likewise incomplete. In internal analyses of the same social-ecological
system, one conducted in the minds and communities of people who live within them, the
web of actions and outcomes is equally a web of interlinking socially constructed
meanings and normative values that are intimately interconnected with the material
behaviors, social institutions, and environmental outcomes. (2010, 19)
Crane is uniquely careful to avoid drawing ontological conclusions from the successes of these
disparate methodologies, but other social scientists positioned their disagreement as
fundamentally ontological. As sociologist Michael M. Bell explains, “several of the social
sciences are quite wary of systems theory, especially sociology and anthropology, still spooked
by the ghosts of structural-functionalism and its effort to chart the ‘social system’” (2005, 472).
As Bell tells it, any social scientist who had suffered through an introductory social theory course
had the errors of systems approaches drilled into them, and saw in such systems approaches the

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denial of power and agency that they now knew to be fundamental to system maintenance and
change.
The difficulties in integrating social and ecological sciences can be summarized as
follows: early social-ecological systems scientists strove for a mechanistic account of social
institutions that would allow researchers to straightforwardly extend their models of ecological
structure and function to include human practice and culture. Most of the well-developed
disciplines in the social sciences did not lend themselves to this sort of integration, so socialecological systems scientists faced the daunting challenge of reinventing a social science in their
preferred extensional and empiricist terms. Not unsurprisingly, this innovation produced
structuralist and functionalist accounts of social systems that drew skepticism if not cynicism
from traditional social scientists. Far from providing a lingua franca to integrate our
understanding of both the social and ecological dynamics of complex systems, the socialecological approach further privileged biophysical explanations and silenced critical
contributions from social scientists (Bell 2005). At least for the first decade of social-ecological
systems research, the social entered into research only through the novel theoretical notions such
as “geographical transfer of knowledge” and “incipient institutions” (Berkes and Folke 1998,
418). This focus on structuralist and functionalist explanations led researchers to neglect the
ways that human agents reproduce structures and perform functions, leading to a partial and
problematic integration of social dimensions.20

20

Structuralist and functionalist frameworks are incomplete in precisely the sense that worried folks like Rorty and
Norton; while they may successfully predict the variables of concern to a particular model, they have little bearing
on our pragmatic deliberations over how to act in the world. Variables of concern to traditional social scientific
disciplines, such as power and agency, inherit vocabularies in which we can deliberate about the ethical implications
of different management and policy options. Structural or functional characteristics, such as “cross-scale
institutions,” do not benefit from what Crane called “a web of socially constructed meanings and normative values”
(2010, 19). Vocabularies impoverished in this way make it immensely difficult to deliberate about whether it would
be ethical to foster cross-scale institutions toward building resilience, or whether we should prefer to foster coping
mechanisms, or perhaps instead incipient institutions.

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Frameworks for Integrating the Social
More recently, the epistemological and ontological barriers separating social-ecological
systems science from the more critical social sciences have met new efforts to integrate across
disciplines and create frameworks for cross-disciplinary collaboration. Here I want to consider
three proposals that I take to be emblematic of the types of efforts that may characterize this new
frontier, and which fall neatly into Chapter Three’s categories of hermeneutic, Galiliean, and
pragmatist methodologies. The first proposal, from Michael Fabinyi, Louisa Evans, and Simon J.
Foale (2014), diagnoses these barriers as a matter of inadequate theory. They propose a new
social science of social-ecological systems that carries the torch of social anthropology and
political ecology and that replaces the structural-functional emphasis with a power-agency
emphasis. The second proposal, from Maja Schluter and colleagues (2017), offers a framework
for choosing among rival social scientific theories on the basis of their empirical fit with the
social context of inquiry. Far from taking issue with the extensional and empiricist epistemology
of past efforts, they provide a survey of behavioral sciences in the hope that collaborators can
choose the most predictive option. Finally, I consider a slightly earlier proposal from Cote and
Nightingale (2012) that suggests a pragmatic approach that differentiates between rival social
sciences on the basis of the valuational assumptions that each makes about human action and
social relations. This approach best recognizes the role that values play in inquiry, and it gestures
toward considerations that I later argue to be at the core of choosing between social theories. The
dialectic between the three proposals should be familiar; the hermeneutic approach
misunderstands its warrant as ontological, the Galilean approach misunderstands inquiry as
purely empirical, and the pragmatist approach offers a middle path grounded in a more holistic
account of inquiry.

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Fabinyi, Evans, and Foale’s (2014) proposal can be summarized briefly, as it traces the
same critiques of social-ecological systems science discussed above. In light of “a growing
recognition that the emphasis on human relations with the environment has led to a weak
theorization of the ‘social’ in the SES model,” the authors offer lessons from social anthropology
and political ecology as an alternative theorization (28). These more critical social sciences
depart from the structuralist and functionalist commitments of earlier social theories, and thus
offer a rehearsal of the transformation necessary to more strongly theorize the social in socialecological systems. Chief among their criticisms is that the reductionism of fields like ecological
anthropology, which anticipates social-ecological systems science, so emphasizes the ecological
consequences of social institutions that it neglects the role of these institutions in maintaining
social hierarchies and power (29). Institutions often serve multiple purposes, and when
researchers focus only on the role of institutions in managing natural resources, they ignore the
ways that those same institutions can perpetuate unjust social relations. A stronger and more
complete theorization of the social would help us to understand social mechanisms that do not
immediately pertain to the management of natural resources.
Though Fabinyi, Evans, and Foale provide valuable insights into the sorts of truths that
social anthropology and political ecology offer (as distinct from ecological anthropology), they
occasionally wax philosophical about the reasons why these critical fields provide better
theories, full stop. They argue
The wider, fundamental point that is made in much of this literature is that the ways in
which an environment (or an SES) is managed is not something that can be reduced to a
matter of objective analysis. It is a value-laden exercise that is contested by groups with
different power, who employ a range of strategies that include debating and negotiating

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the very ways in which environmental issues are commonly understood and represented.
(33)
This echoes the dispute between Taylor, Rorty, and Topper detailed in Chapter Three; according
to Fabinyi, Evans, and Foale’s proposal, the shortcoming of prevailing social-ecological systems
theories is that it falsely assumes that human behavior can be characterized in objective terms,
despite hermeneutical methods that (on their view) prove that human behavior is just not that sort
of thing. Instead of a social science in objective terms, they recommend drawing concepts from
social anthropology and political ecology, which address some of the biases of prevailing
conceptualizations of the social. The trouble here is that the notion of “bias” is unclear in this
proposal, and the authors’ give the impression that prevailing conceptualizations are biased
because they overlook the real role played by social diversity and power. Once this sort of bias is
acknowledged and taken as a reason to pursue another theory, the methodological discussion is
directed toward a pursuit of the social theory that includes everything that we know about social
reality.21 This, as noted in Chapter Three, is a misguided pursuit, for we shouldn’t strive for a
social vocabulary that “mirrors” the really real, nor should we warrant our social theories by
appealing to supposed ontological truths.
This philosophical pursuit compromises an otherwise promising proposal for crossdisciplinary collaboration that concludes the social scientists’ argument. The authors realize that
the quest for a “theory of everything” or “overarching ‘grand narrative’ that describes the nature
of reality” is too ambitious of a goal (33-34). They instead propose a more humble commitment
to reflexive social theory and cross-disciplinary collaboration. As I go on to argue in Chapter
21

We need “bias” in these discussions to be a remark about the social values that are upheld by describing the world
in one social theory rather than others. Theories cannot be biased without reference to social values, and by using the
term without such reference, we are liable to give the impression that there is some social theory that is unbiased,
full stop. The alternative it seems to me is that all social theories are biased, which is going to undercut the inference
we wish to draw in preferring one theory to another in light of its bias.

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Five, I believe this is the correct response to the diversity of irreducible social and ecological
theories. By privileging social anthropology and political ecology because they recognize
particular social truths, however, Fabinyi, Evans, and Foale intimate that this cross-disciplinary
inquiry finds its foundation in the way the world is. Despite their protestations that there are
serious issues with the idea of “the nature of reality,” they offer no other basis for adjudicating
between rival theories.
Meanwhile, Maja Schluter and colleagues (2017) advance a Galilean proposal where
different social theories are compared according to their predictive accuracy in a given context.
They too recognize that “knowledge is fragmented across disciplines and disciplinary languages”
and aim “to provide a tool and common language for mapping, describing, organizing,
comparing, and communicating theories of human decision-making” (22). This lingua franca
would help identify the appropriate behavioral science for a particular social-ecological system,
allowing modelers to locate the true causal relationships in the system (23). The proposal
mobilizes a framework that attempts to render commensurable diverse behavioral sciences
according to a schematic framework they take to be implicit to all. Specific behavioral theories,
such as rational choice theory or descriptive norm theory, are categorized according to states of
the agent (goals, values, knowledge, and assets), perceptions, behaviors, and feedback loops by
which perceived and evaluated behaviors influence subsequent states of the agent. This
categorization is offered as a contribution to an integrated social science for social-ecological
systems, and nearly twenty years after Linking Social and Ecological Systems, scholars such as
Schluter and colleagues still espouse that “managing natural resources is managing people” (29).
Ultimately, I agree that some sort of common framework is necessary to reasonably
compare different disciplinary languages. The trouble here is that Schluter and colleagues

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advocate for theory choice according to exclusively epistemic values; this commitment, as
argued in Chapter Two, is based on an inadequate theory of inquiry. Their argument for theory
choice champions formalization and completeness, in addition to a fairly opaque
recommendation that the behavioral theory describe in detail those aspects “critical” or “crucial”
to the management context (33). Formalization is valuable because it makes explicit assumptions
regarding causality so that these assumptions can be subjected to empirical scrutiny; the authors
go so far as to suggest that theories which are not explicit about causal relationships may be
inappropriate to social-ecological systems science (33). Completeness is valuable because
theories that cover a wider range of behaviors provide more information about the causes and
consequences of environmental behaviors. Both are fairly standard epistemic values cited for
favoring one theory over another, though they are certainly in the mold of values like
“simplicity” that have been shown to privilege particular social values (Longino 1995).22
The concern for “critical” or “crucial” aspects of behavior is promising, because we may
be able to have an open deliberation about the goals for, and constraints to, social scientific
inquiry. Unfortunately, the authors do not clearly unpack these ideas, and in their final remarks,
offer sensitivity analysis as a way of locating critical causal mechanisms. Sensitivity analysis is a
way of determining what independent variables in a model have the largest influence on
dependent variables; if a dependent variable is highly sensitive to a particular independent
variable, then small changes in the value of that independent variable can have dramatic effects
on the dependent variable. If such sensitivity is what they mean by ‘critical’ and ‘crucial’, their

22

Longino offers the example of simplicity justifying the preference for rational choice theory and several
methodological commitments in economics (e.g. treating heads of household as the main economic actors). In this
case, the appeal to simplicity functions to maintain patriarchy in economic studies and the policies based on these
studies. For Longino, examples from economics show how simplicity leads us “to suppose the social world is
composed of just one or a few kinds of basic entity…eras[ing] the difference among persons that are fundamental to
how they act” (1995, 393).

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meanings are too narrow; the sensitivity of a social-ecological system to particular interventions
is hardly a sufficient reason to choose a theory. After all, we might reasonably choose to
intervene in a system according to a mechanism to which the system is less sensitive, but that is
more consistent with our non-epistemic values. Perhaps introducing property rights is an
immensely efficacious way of producing particular management practices; we could still
reasonably prefer an alternative system of coordinating resource management because of
legitimate worries over the sorts of interpersonal relationships characteristic of privatization.
There is another reason why choosing a social or behavioral theory should not be a purely
epistemic decision. As Schluter and colleagues carefully elucidate, different behavioral theories
develop in different observational and experimental contexts, and hence locate causal
mechanisms that operate in those particular contexts. When the authors talk about choosing a
theory, they recommend choosing the theory which makes assumptions about the context that
more or less fit with the social context of a given inquiry. For instance, rational choice theory
assumes that agents have all relevant information available to making decisions that maximize
their individual utility, whereas bounded rationality theory attempts to grapple with decisionmaking for agents with limited information and varied cognitive capacities (26-27). As they note
at the onset of the paper, the assumptions characteristic of rational choice theory are notoriously
idealized, and rarely characterize a particular social system. This might lead us to prefer theories
such as bounded rationality theory that do not make such idealized assumptions, especially when
these theories are more descriptively accurate with respect to agents’ decisions in a given
context. But this is not the only conclusion that we could draw from such an understanding of
social mechanisms. We might have good reasons to intervene according to the mechanisms
understood in rational choice theory, and strive to create a context wherein these mechanisms

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become descriptively accurate. In this highly streamlined case, we can imagine providing full
information and building cognitive capacity so that the assumptions of rational choice theory
come to fit the social context. Indeed, Schluter and colleagues point out that the range of
behavioral theories that they consider all neglect the possibilities of learning and institutional
change (32). We may have good reasons for limiting our analysis to the behavioral theories that
they consider, but these reasons are definitely pragmatic, not purely epistemic. They are reasons
regarding the sort of social reality we hope to collectively maintain, and thus the sort of social
reality about which we desire truths.
It is Cote and Nightingale’s (2012) account of the social sciences that best wrestles with
pragmatic and especially ethical questions at the heart of choosing a social scientific theory.
They offer a similar historiography of the emergence of the social in social-ecological systems,
accusing the field of “problematically assuming that social and ecological system dynamics are
essentially similar” (475). “More specifically,” they write, “The reliance on ecological principles
to analyse social dynamics has led to a kind of social analysis that hides the possibility to ask
important questions about the role of power and culture in adaptive capacity, or to unpack
normative questions such as ‘resilience of what?’ and ‘for whom?’ when applied to the social
realm” (479). This way of problematizing past social theories teeters toward the hermeneutical
convictions of Fabyini, Evans, and Foale. But Cote and Nightingale do not appear committed to
the idea that particular social theories better track the really real, or even that there is any
fundamental social ontology to discover. Instead, they advise that asking normative questions
such as “resilience of what?” and “for whom?” renders visible researchers’ own orientation to
the objective features of social-ecological systems. Recognizing the role of power and culture is
not a matter of adding more objective features, or replacing the wrong objective features with the

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right ones, but instead entails a more radical shift in our theory of inquiry. Objective inquiry, and
its paradigmatic social-ecological models, becomes situated in the pragmatics of our way of life.
Cote and Nightingale recommend a shift in the methods and subject matters of the social
side of social-ecological systems science. They charge that there is a
need to go beyond an emphasis on ‘rules’ and institutional designs that reflect logics of
economic maximization, and to broaden our consideration to subjective identities and
affective relationships, through gender, class and ethnicity, for example, that shed light
on the role of multiple, complex, and contested rationalities in ecological decisionmaking processes. (483-484)
Meeting this need, though, isn’t merely a matter of producing empirically adequate explanations
of social-ecological resilience and change. By attending to the normative stakes of social inquiry,
they argue, researchers move “firmly out of the science of description and prediction as it is
understood today and into moral and ethical terrain” (484). We need truths about subjective
identities and affective relationships, in large part, because these truths register within moral and
ethical deliberations. What sorts of subjects we should cultivate, and what sorts of relationships
are moral and ethical, is precisely the sort of information that democratic citizens need when
deliberating over the goals for, and constraints to, environmental management and policy. While
we can enroll existing theories from the social and behavioral sciences to better understand our
own norms, Cote and Nightingale also locate a lacuna in our normative inquiries. They argue
that our conversations about what ought to be would gain tremendously from investigations of
our “cultural commitments and political relations,” but that we so far do not understand how
these bear on social-ecological systems or even the framing of social-ecological systems as
problems. This begins to address what it would mean to “use social science methods to develop

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more comprehensive evaluative tools, tools that will allow us to move toward an articulation of a
particular community’s sense of identity, including who the community, collectively, really
wants to be” (Norton 2005, 302-303). It encourages us to see our science as presupposing values
about who we are and who we want to become, and to legitimate these values through
democratic deliberation.
As social-ecological systems science matures, it is gradually moving beyond its original
emphasis on structuralist and functionalist ontologies that echo ecology. Social scientists are now
free to study social practices in ways that recognize agents’ participation in reproducing
structures and performing functions. How we study these social practices, though, should not be
bound to pre-existing ontological commitments characteristic of hermeneutic methodologies as
in Fabinyi, Evans, and Foale’s (2014) proposal. Nor should we choose our social science based
solely on epistemic values like empirical adequacy and completeness, as recommended by
Schluter and colleagues, since non-epistemic, pragmatic considerations are ineliminable from
theory choice. It is Cote and Nightengale’s attention to the how social sciences presuppose
normative and valuational commitments that opens up social-ecological inquiry to stakeholders’
non-epistemic and pragmatic concerns. Inquiry requires that we orient ourselves to an initially
indeterminate situation, and our choice of a social scientific theory and its characteristic
vocabulary provides much of this orientation.23 Warranting our orientation to an indeterminate

23

Several social-ecological systems researchers have recognized that different social scientific disciplines owe their
differences to the diverse disciplinary languages that they bring to bear in describing the system. In the absence of a
more pragmatist theory of inquiry, however, this insight has not led to a normative conversation about what these
diverse disciplinary languages mean for describing a situation as a problem and evaluating actions as ameliorative.
Fields like sociology and political science are often taken to offer rival theories of individual and collective action,
and the task of a cross-disciplinary collaboration is to resolve which of these two fields offers the true theory (Lele
and Norgaard 2005). On the view here, however, both theories may be true in terms of what they set forth to
describe and explain, and the difference between the theories is a pragmatic difference regarding what these theories
let us do.

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situation requires that we deliberate over the value of our subjective identities and affective
relationships.
Values in Coastal Social-Ecological Systems Science
In this section I want to consider how different social-ecological systems scientists make
different normative and valuational assumptions, assumptions difficult to recognize and subject
to critical scrutiny. Concretely, this amounts to answering the following sorts of questions: How
do the various social sciences presuppose different goals for, and constraints on, inquiry? How
do the various social sciences make normative assumptions about the different features of a
social reality that we collectively reproduce and maintain? Ultimately, I want to support the
following three interrelated claims. First, the vocabulary in which explanations are warranted
reflects the disciplinary background of the social scientists in a collaboration. Second, different
vocabularies make different valuational and normative assumptions about the practices worth
upholding and the practices open to change. And third, the value-ladenness of social
explanations has downstream and upstream implications for how social-ecological systems
scientists are accountable to stakeholders’ objections.
The ideal way to investigate these sorts of questions and support these three claims would
be to compare how different social theories describe the same social-ecological system, and
subsequently to compare the sorts of policy proposals and management strategies that followed
from these descriptions. Unfortunately—and perhaps in part because we do generally assume
that some social theory does truly represent the social dimensions of a given system—multiple
studies of the same social-ecological systems, conducted by different collaborations with
different disciplinary compositions, are rarely commissioned. In lieu of this ideal method, I
instead consider the diversity of social mechanisms identified in the more narrow field of coastal

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and marine social-ecological systems. Though this study summarizes studies of social-ecological
systems from across the world, its attention to only coastal and marine systems allows for easier
comparison of the various mechanisms available for explaining social-ecological change. These
mechanisms were systematized in Ferrol-Schulte and colleagues (2013) review article of the
coastal and marine social-ecological systems literature, and offer insight into how multiple
mechanisms are available to truthfully describe and successfully intervene in these complex
environments. I argue that differences in how these systems are described are due in large part to
the different orientations of researchers wielding different, often disciplinary, languages. In other
words, it was the structures of different inquiries that account for different explanations of socialecological change; as Dewey put it, “the genius of language, reflecting a vast network of social
traditions and purposes, enters quite as much as the thing told about in deciding whether what is
told is a truthful representation” (1911, 103).
Like the open-access forests discussed in Chapter Three, coastal and marine
environments are a paradigm ecosystem investigated by social-ecological systems scientists.
These habitats are frequently subject to external shocks such as storms or pollution from human
activities, and these external shocks create important test conditions for the resilience of coastal
and marine social-ecological systems (Adger et al. 2005). Resilient systems are able to maintain
core functions in spite of perturbations like hurricanes or disease epidemics, and socialecological systems scientists have studied the social and ecological mechanisms through which
these systems are able to adapt to and learn from these perturbations. Beyond the experimental
value of coastal and marine systems, human dependence on these environments renders them
especially significant on ethical grounds. At the turn of the millennium, researchers estimated
that 1.2 billion people lived within 100 kilometers of a shoreline, and that number is expected to

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have increased due to migration, development, and globalization (Small and Nicholls 2003,
Ferrol-Schulte et al. 2013). Overexploitation of global fisheries and eutrophication due to human
activities produce acute pressures that exacerbate ongoing vulnerabilities due to climate change
(Ferrol-Schulte et al. 2013). Given our dependence on coastal and marine environments,
researchers study ways to build and maintain these systems’ resilience in order to ensure that
communities can sustain their way of life in the face of disasters (Gaillard et al. 2009, Pomeroy
et al. 2006).
The coastal and marine social-ecological system literature is illuminating for one
additional reason: it widely relies on a framework for evaluating social-ecological systems
known as the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach. The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach
emerged in the mid-1980s and early-1990s as development organizations adopted a more holistic
approach to food aid and security (Food and Agriculture Organization 2000). The approach
reflects a concerted effort to govern natural resource challenges in ways that are aligned with the
goals and values of communities that use and depend on those resources. This accords with
Norton and fellow environmental pragmatists’ insistence that environments be studied,
described, and managed in ways that speak to stakeholder values. For our purposes, it simplifies
at least one way that researchers might differ in explaining social-ecological change; we can be
reasonably assured that studies of coastal and marine social-ecological systems share a similar,
though context-sensitive, explanandum, even when they recommend different explanantia for
how the system sustains desirable livelihoods. These studies have taken to heart the importance
of conducting environmental science in value-laden vocabularies that are aligned with
community values and commitments. However, they have not to this point considered the values
that are at stake in explaining environment change according to different social mechanisms.

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In Daniella Ferrol-Schulte and colleagues (2013) review of the coastal and marine socialecological systems literature, social mechanisms bear much of the explanatory burden for
resilience and, conversely, vulnerability. They note that these systems differ from their terrestrial
counterparts in part because the social institutions that govern human-environment interactions
are much more tenuous. Paradigm institutions such as resource access and ownership are
complicated by the inherent lack of firm boundaries, and this has a tendency to produce
contestations between local communities, private industry, and governments. This emphasis on
social dimensions is paralleled by the emphases on the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach, which
is prominent in this literature. The approach “emphasizes the capabilities and potentialities that
exist within resource user communities and grants a necessary focus on social relations,
government processes and institutions in contributing to livelihoods” (254). The authors stress
that the approach is dedicated to explaining all aspects of wealth and poverty, exploring why it is
that some people are poor and some ecosystems are overexploited and degraded. The goal of this
research is to provide a complete picture of the mechanisms that support or impede the
development of institutions that sustainably manage the use of natural resources in coastal and
marine environments.
Ferrol-Schulte and colleagues expect that coastal and marine social-ecological conditions
would encourage the development of institutions regulating land use and tenure, as observed in
Ostrom’s studies of Swiss cowherders discussed in Chapter One. However, they note that
“social, economic, and political factors have been shown to undermine rather than support
bottom-up management strategies even where enough biological data and motivation exist”
(2013, 254). In passages like this, we can start to elucidate the structure of more recent socialecological systems science. Scientists can no longer assume that social institutions, such as

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shared-contract arrangements or patron-client systems, will organically evolve in response to
ecological conditions. Such social institutions, as long maintained by more critical social
scientists, are also shaped by existing social institutions, with power and agency exerting their
own pressure on the sorts of institutions that are developed and sustained. Still, the development
of bottom-up management strategies, especially strategies that are decentralized and adaptive, is
widely assumed as a goal of social-ecological management and the research that informs it.
When these strategies are articulated through stakeholder deliberation, as is characteristic of the
Sustainable Livelihoods Approach, social-ecological systems scientists are right to seek an
understanding of the conditions under which these strategies can succeed. The social dimensions
of this research are still closely tethered to the ecological conditions of the systems, though.
Social, economic, and political factors are understood in light of their significance for achieving
management strategies that foster resilience and sustain livelihoods; some broadly social factors
support resilience, while others are taken to be obstacles.
Four types of social mechanisms are diagnosed by Ferrol-Schulte and colleagues:
stakeholder conflicts, corruption, lack of local capital assets and capacity, and weak institutional
structures (255-256). Stakeholder conflicts occur when ecological, social, and political
boundaries are blurred, and multiple stakeholders claim some right over natural resources such as
coastal fisheries. Corruption, when perceived by resource users, can discourage compliance with
environmental regulations; the authors note that even small-scale bribery can compromise the
authority of environmental managers and jeopardize the resilience of social-ecological systems.
Lack of local capital assets and capacity can impede environmental management even when
stakeholders agree over the rightful use of resources and trust authorities to enforce
environmental regulations; if communities lack information about social-ecological dynamics, or

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lack the finances and resources to act on the knowledge they do have, then resource use can
become unsustainable and the overall social-ecological system can become vulnerable. Finally,
weak institutional structures can complicate efforts to manage social-ecological systems even
when stakeholders and managers are otherwise capable. Governments and funding agencies can
withhold power or resources from local actors who are in a better position to adaptively manage
the social-ecological system. Decision-makers further removed from the local context may be
suspicious of the uncertain terms of adaptive management, but the end result is less investment in
the style of management that has a demonstrated record of achieving sustainability and
resilience.
Ferrol-Schulte and colleagues’ study provides rich ground for thinking about the
valuational and normative commitments at stake in social-ecological systems science. First, I
want to marshall some evidence that the terms in which social dimensions are described often
reflects the disciplinary training of the social scientists participating in an interdisciplinary
collaboration. In other words, recruiting a scientist with particular disciplinary expertise will
produce a disciplinary description that makes particular normative and valuational assumptions.
Ferrol-Schulte and colleagues’ four types of mechanisms are broken down into more specific
examples, and it is at this more specific level that we can see a link between the researchers’
orientation and the mechanism diagnosed. Many of these studies were conducted by
interdisciplinary collaborations primarily composed of fisheries scientists but also including a
few social scientists. Of interest here is whether the disciplinary training of the few social
scientists on a study makes a difference for how the study explains resilience or vulnerability; for
any particular situation, we might expect a range of viable social explanations.

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Under stakeholder conflict, Ferrol-Schulte and colleagues include “conflicts between
socio-political and ethno-linguistic groups over resource scarcity in Indonesia,” a mechanism not
unsurprisingly studied by a team including an anthropologist and rural sociologist (Reichel,
Fromming, and Glaser 2009). Here different occupational and ethnic groups contested the use of
resources of a lagoon undergoing a transformation from fisheries to wetland agriculture. Under
corruption, the reviewers include “corruptibility of authorities undermines willingness to comply
with fisheries regulations,” here investigated by a political scientist (Sundstrom 2012). Under the
heading of “lack of local capital assets and capacity,” it was a geographer who explored how
“locality, or [the] unique set of geographical conditions of a place at a particular time” bears on
the vulnerability of a social-ecological system and a team including a development scholar who
explored how “lack of skill, labor, and/or capital prevents livelihood diversification for risk
management in East Africa” (Eriksen, Brown, and Kelly 2005, Myers 2002). An anthropologist
and natural resource economist participated in an interdisciplinary study that explained how the
“failure to include local stakeholders in MPA [marine protected area] design and implementation
leads to socio-economic shortcomings” (Ferse et al., 2010), one example of Ferrol-Schulte and
colleagues’ broader mechanism of weak institutional structure.
This quick review of authorship is merely suggestive, and it is complicated by the
prevalence of authors with interdisciplinary training that is common among social-ecological
systems scientists. Still, if you choose a mechanism that hearkens to a particular social theory, it
is likely that the researcher who discovered the significance of that mechanism is a student of
that particular social theory. This is not wishful thinking on the part of these researchers; socialecological systems really do admit of myriad theoretically-laden descriptions. Anthropologists
who describe a system in terms of conflict between ethno-linguistic groups provide an

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understanding of how such social relations bear on social-ecological vulnerability; political
scientists who describe a system in terms of the corruptibility of authorities provide a different
understanding. The task is figuring out which of these understandings is appropriate given the
goals and values of stakeholders to the inquiry.
In order to warrant reliance on a particular social scientific discipline, it is important to
recognize how different scientific vocabularies bear on our non-epistemic, pragmatic values;
such an analysis supports this section’s second claim that different social theories presuppose
different normative and valuational assumptions. These presuppositions are built into social
theories that take for granted a social reality in which practices regularly produce social
outcomes. This “taking for granted” is not something that social-ecological systems scientists
could easily avoid; explaining environmental change in terms of social institutions necessarily
adopts a “grammar” (in the sense discussed in Chapter Three) that orients us to the world as a set
of rule-governed, intentional practices. Take for instance the concept of “corruption”, which is
already meaningful within ordinary conversation—and, incidentally, already meaningful within
moral and ethical deliberation. We can readily analyze the concept of “corruption” like we
deconstructed the concept of “sharing.” For instance, no behavior counts as an instance of
“small-scale bribery” absent background social norms that attach different meanings to that
behavior than, for instance, tipping a regulator out of appreciation, or purchasing quotas to
rightfully fish a particular habitat. In studies that explain social-ecological vulnerability by
attending to the prevalence of corruption, these social norms are taken for granted. Insofar as the
community does uphold these norms and maintains the assumed social reality, social-ecological
systems scientists can truthfully describe the system in terms of corruption or legitimacy. Some
communities may uphold different norms where the behavior of paying regulators is not an

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instance of bribery; they might, for instance, believe that paying regulators for access is perfectly
fair, or that paying regulators produces more efficient use of the fishery. In such cases, it is
simply not true that bribery is causing social-ecological vulnerability, because bribery is not part
of the social reality of that system.
This simplified grammatical investigation is meant to highlight the structure of social
scientific inquiry, because this structure can be much more difficult to trace in concrete
situations. The grammar of concepts such as “stakeholder conflict,” “lack of local capital assets
and capacity,” and “weak institutional structure,” is further removed from day-to-day
conversation, and this makes it more difficult to remember what must be true in order to
appropriately apply these concepts. Take “lack of capital assets and capacity”. More generally,
this notion gets disaggregated into household factors related to market access, migration, and
technology. More specifically, it is disaggregated into an array of conditions such as low social
cohesion and asset inequalities in Zanzibar; lack of skill, labor, or livelihood diversification in
East Africa; low perceptions of assets on Rodrigues Island; lack of alternative livelihoods in
Bangladesh, (Ferrol-Schulte, 256). For any of these more specific conditions to explain socialecological degradation, the following sorts of claims must be true: social cohesion can increase
in Zanzibar and this would be followed by better resource management; small-scale fishers in
East Africa could acquire more diverse skills, find employment for those skills, and sustain their
livelihoods in the face of external perturbations; community members on Rodrigues Island can
more accurately assess their and others’ capital assets, and these more accurate perceptions
would lead to more sustainable behavior; and so on.
Valuational commitments, evident in notions such as “better resource management,” are
desirable features of social explanations; if we explained social-ecological systems in terms

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unrelated to our values, then our social-ecological findings would provide no guidance for how
we should manage those systems and what sorts of policies we should prefer. This is a main
insight from Norton’s theory of adaptive ecosystem management. Normative commitments are
undertheorized in Norton’s theory, but normative commitments are just as essential to the
development of social theories that intervene in the production and maintenance of social
institutions and norms. Acquiring diverse skills, or finding employment for such skills, are
possible only within particular social systems where community members uphold the norms that
enable these actions (Searle 1995).
These normative commitments are laden with non-epistemic, social values, and such
values ought to be explicated and subject to democratic deliberation. Citing low capital assets
and capacities as a condition for social-ecological vulnerability amounts to a claim that
increasing capital assets and capacity is one mechanism for buttressing the resilience of the
system, and that decreasing capital assets and capacity would exacerbate the system’s
vulnerability.24 This is a pragmatic claim about the kind of social-ecological system we can
produce. Any number of these pragmatic claims are true of a particular social-ecological
system—following Cote and Nightingale, we should remember that the choice among social
explanations is, in part, a reflection of our values, which requires a moral and ethical deliberation
about what we cherish or admonish (2012, 484). We could be confident that increasing capital
assets and capacity would increase resilience while also being confident that strengthening the
institutional structure would also help, or that fighting corruption would help, or mitigating
stakeholder conflict. The right choice is not simply a matter of locating the true mechanism, or

24

Though I don’t pursue this framing here, these pragmatic features also come to light when we consider that social
scientific explanations hold ceteris paribus, or other things equal. Harold Kincaid (2011) provides an excellent
overview of ceteris paribus in the social sciences, demonstrating that social sciences share this with many if not all
of the physical and biological sciences, and that this hardly disqualifies social science from offering explanations.

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even of locating the mechanism to which the overall system is most sensitive; it is a much more
involved consideration of the consequences of various interventions and their alignment with our
non-epistemic, social values.
When critical social scientists insist that researchers attend to the social significance of
institutions, they are in part directing our attention to the broader consequences of these various
interventions. Fighting corruption is not merely a mechanism for more sustainable extraction of
natural resources; it is also, perhaps, a way of instilling confidence in shared institutions, or a
way of combatting pernicious social hierarchies. Increasing capital assets and capacity may
provide workers with more opportunities on the labor market, and this might lead to better
nourished diets, but it might also compromise traditional harvesting practices and the social
systems that they sustain. These are all consequences that we should consider when warranting
pragmatic claims. It is not just the statement of facts that is at stake when assessing descriptions
of social-ecological systems; it is also the vocabulary in which the description is issued—
“reflecting a vast network of social traditions and purposes”—that is up for debate.
Because social explanations are laden with valuational and normative commitments,
social-ecological systems scientists are accountable to stakeholders’ objections both downstream
and upstream from experimentation. Downstream, it should be reasonably clear that stakeholders
can object to claims about social mechanisms because they do not accord with those stakeholders
non-epistemic values. Social-ecological researchers might demonstrate beyond doubt that a
particular intervention would produce resilience, and yet stakeholders can still deny that this is
an appropriate way to describe the system, because they may reject the assumptions that these
researchers made about which social practices were negotiable and which weren’t. For instance,
researchers may claim that a system lacks resilience because local regulators have too little

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leeway to implement adaptive management schemes, yet stakeholders could object that the strict
accountability of local regulators to regional decision-makers is a legitimate constraint on
environmental management. This is not an objection to the truth of the scientists’ statements, at
least not the truth of whether the mechanism cited would produce the consequences predicted. It
is an objection to whether scientists have cited the appropriate means, among many, that would
produce the desired effect, and on this view, scientists are accountable to such pragmatic
concerns.
Attention to the pragmatic character of explanation should help to ward off the following
sort of philosophical objection: Stakeholders are not reasonably objecting to the description of
the system, even if they are well within their rights to object to management practices that are
prescribed based on the description. In other words, scientists might insist that stakeholders
should only object to the policies and management strategies that are based on their science, but
they should not object to the science itself. The trouble with this sort of philosophical objection
is that it ignores the pragmatic character of vocabularies, the sense in which vocabularies
represent the world in the service of our navigating that world toward particular goals.
Philosophers, and researchers who share these philosophers’ intuitions, want to assert a factvalue dichotomy according to which scientists first describe the world and then policymakers
decide what to do about it. But there are no value-free or even value-neutral ways of just “telling
it how it is”; to describe anything is to situate it within a system of significance according to
which we draw inferences and warrant beliefs and actions. Another way of arriving at the futility
of this philosophical objection is to imagine the many ways that we might describe the system
scientifically, each of which able to locate truths in its own terms. Now, if researchers preface
their description as simply one of a large number of true descriptions, they may seem off the

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hook for implicating social values, but at this point it’s no longer clear that the description means
anything at all. Scientists should want their descriptions to mean something for value-laden
management and policy, because otherwise, their descriptions cannot provide reasons for
collective social action.
Upstream, then, we would want to ensure that the vocabularies in which we describe a
social-ecological system, and locate mechanisms for intervening in that system, reflect our
values as a community. For environmental pragmatists, this has amounted to negotiating the
terms in which we describe the objective features of an environment so that the consequences of
alternative policies are immediately meaningful for democratic deliberation. Here, though, we
want a vocabulary that describes the intersubjective features of the social dimensions of socialecological systems. We want to understand these systems in ways that reflect on our “cultural
commitments and political relations” and that “broaden our consideration to subjective identities
and affective relationships” (Cote and Nightingale 2012, 484). Terms like ‘corruption’, which do
reflect on our political relations, provide part of a vocabulary that inherits the ordinary
significance of corruption from our existing moral and ethical language. Terms like ‘stakeholder
conflict’, ‘lack of capital assets and capacities’, and ‘weak institutional structures’ require that
we integrate these notions into our existing language. Fortunately, the agentic or dispositional
grammar of these terms, through which they describe characteristics of people and how they act,
does offer some hope for weaving them into moral deliberation where we are accustomed to
discussing such matters. Upstream, when we are conceptualizing a study before investigation,
our deliberations are not constrained to the vocabularies already operative in the inquiry of
social-ecological systems researchers. When Cote and Nightingale call for new research that
explores the role of cultural commitments and political relations, they correctly open the door for

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new inquiries that describe the intersubjective features of social-ecological systems in ways that
already matter to us. By describing social mechanisms in these terms, social-ecological systems
scientists can provide us with an understanding of these systems that we need in order to
legitimately intervene in “people management.”
A quick summary of this section is in order. The coastal and marine social-ecological
systems literature demonstrates the ways that scientists with different disciplinary training will
locate different mechanisms relevant to the dynamics of social-ecological systems. These
disciplinary diagnoses are hardly rivals in the sense that only one social theory provides the true
representation of the system. Rather, different social theories differ with respect to the
valuational and normative commitments that they inevitably make by deploying a grammar
attentive to the rule-governed, intentional structure of human action. Explaining environmental
change in terms of particular social institutions involves the pragmatic decision to understand
these institutions as means to effecting valued ends. Scientists who make these decisions are
accountable to objections both downstream and upstream of investigation; in both contexts,
stakeholders can reasonably assert that the values that inform the choice of means or ends are not
their values, and that scientists should locate different means for producing the same (or
different) ends.
Conclusion, Plus Three Independent Factors in Moral Deliberation
When social-ecological systems scientists first attempted to reinvent a social science of
people management, they theorized social dynamics in structuralist and functionalist terms that
echoed the ontology of ecology. More critical social scientists pointed out that these efforts
succumbed to the previous folly of reducing social dynamics to ecological dynamics, and that
this reduction missed the uniquely social significances of human behavior and institutions. These

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critics were split, though, on exactly how to integrate contemporary social theories within socialecological systems science. More hermeneutically inclined researchers maintained that fields like
social anthropology and political ecology provided a truer representation of social ontology, and
therefore that we must describe social dynamics in ways that attend to power and agency. More
Galilean researchers instead maintained that purely extensional vocabularies were on the right
track, and that social scientists should not deviate from the epistemological convictions of their
ecological counterparts.
On a pragmatist theory of inquiry, we should give up the idea that our choice among
social sciences amounts to finding the theory that best mirrors reality, or finding the theory that
is most predictive given the social context. Rather, we should orient ourselves to the social
dimensions of environmental problems through a reflection on who we are and who we want to
become. These non-epistemic, social values provide structure to inquiry by subjecting particular
practices to doubt, so that we can explore how changing these practices might help us realize our
social and environmental goals. When social-ecological systems scientists investigate the role of
corruption or ethno-linguistic conflict in producing resilience or vulnerability, they allow us to
know how changes in our practices will shape the environment. In order to fully warrant these
descriptions, however, we must also attend to how changing our practices will shape our
identities and our communities. The mere achievement of social-ecological resilience is not
sufficient justification for reconstructing our social practices.
I want to close with a parting remark about the vocabulary in which we might conduct
legitimate social scientific inquiry. In the aforementioned upstream deliberations, a priority was
placed on describing social practices in ways that immediately register within ethical and moral
deliberations about who we are and who we want to be. This chimes with Cote and Nightingale’s

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call for social-ecological studies of how our cultural commitments and political relations bear on
environmental change. What is notable about these sorts of variables is the sense in which a
conversation about cultural commitments is in part a conversation about rights and
responsibilities, while a conversation about political relations is a reflection on individuals’
character and their virtues and vices. This reflects an interesting turn in the ways that
environmental pragmatists have encouraged scientists to integrate facts and values; by and large,
philosophers like Norton have mobilized a consequentialist ethical theory where we compare the
costs and benefits of policies and management strategies (2005).
Environmental pragmatists do recognize the importance of deontological and virtuetheoretical approaches to ethics—Norton stresses that environment science must be accountable
to community commitments, and Thompson stresses the virtues that constitute sustainable
agrarian societies (Norton 2005, Thompson 2010). Dampening the emphasis on costs and
benefits, and amplifying the emphasis on rights and virtues, opens stakeholder deliberation to
more vocabularies for exploring the moral and ethical significance of our environmental
decisions. Following John Dewey’s 1930 essay, “Three Independent Factors in Morals,” I would
advance that drawing on all three of these ethical theories improves our moral and ethical
deliberation and the inquiries legitimated through deliberation. As Dewey writes,
good and right [he later adds virtue] have different origins, they flow from independent
springs, so that neither of the two can derive from the other, so that desire and duty have
equally legitimate bases and the force they exercise in different directions is what makes
moral decision a real problem, what gives ethical judgment and moral tact their vitality.
(316)

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It is this vitality that sustains communities’ growth (Dewey 1916). The goal of this chapter is not
to resolve which ethical theory takes priority over others, so that we might enter deliberations
with the conviction that virtuous social practices will justify undesirable social-ecological
consequences, or that desirable social-ecological consequences will justify skirting our duties
and responsibilities to one another. Rather, the goal is to create space for interlocutors to appeal
to any of these three independent factors in deliberating over the terms of social-ecological
inquiry. So far, techniques for facilitating stakeholder deliberation have focused on the
ecological costs and benefits of various management options. As we begin to consider the
various social mechanisms to implement these management options, we should also ask whether
these mechanisms exemplify our virtues and uphold our moral commitments.

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CHAPTER 5
INTERDISCIPLINARY INTEGRATION AS ETHICAL INQUIRY
Abstract: After summarizing the previous chapters of the dissertation, I consider one
remaining question that confronts the integration of facts and values in social-ecological
systems science: the question of interdisciplinarity. Theories of interdisciplinarity revolve
around their own challenge of integration, though in this case the task is one of
integrating different academic disciplines. Common approaches to interdisciplinarity
make use of linguistic metaphors like "pidgins" or "Creoles" to make sense of integration;
I argue that these metaphors are on the right track when they stress the pragmatic
character of meaning-as-use, but on the wrong track when they stress the semantic
character of meaning-as-reference. Drawing from Robert Brandom's and Wilfrid Sellar's
analysis of the inseparability of description and explanation, I show that the meaning-asuse account of language is the better basis for understanding interdisciplinarity. Meaningas-use foregrounds the pragmatic character of inquiry, raising questions about what we
do value and what we should value. I take these to be ethical questions that have so far
been underappreciated in the theory and practice of interdisciplinary integration. This
ethical view of interdisciplinarity provides an alternative understanding of integration: an
interdisciplinary response to a problem is integrated insofar as it answers questions
relevant to what we value, and provides an account of the problem that guides us in
weighing tradeoffs among our values. I close by extending Philip Kitcher's ideal of wellordered science to the practice of interdisciplinary collaboration, arguing that
interdisciplinary integration should work outward from the disciplinary vocabulary that
speaks to what we value the most. Beginning with a disciplinary description that attends
to only some of what's at stake in a complex problem, interdisciplinary integration
proceeds by considering in turn the remaining problems as described in the vocabularies
of additional academic disciplines.
One Last Occasion for Philosophy
In the opening passages of this project, I suggested that social-ecological systems science
represented an occasion for philosophical investigation (Thompson 2002). Scientists from the
field confronted seemingly innocuous questions—which social scientists should we recruit for
our interdisciplinary collaboration? How should we coordinate diverse and sometimes rival
explanations from different social sciences?—but the trouble with these questions was that it was
wholly unclear what should count as an answer. Figuring out what counts as an answer to these

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questions requires a philosophical inquiry into what these questions mean. And a question about
meaning, on the pragmatic account here recommended, is a question about how the practices
(especially the discursive practices) of the social sciences work to orient and reorient us to the
social and biophysical environments within which we find ourselves.
It’s important to remember that all philosophical occasions must come to a close.
Philosophers are commonly bewitched by a host of confusions that often extend philosophical
inquiry beyond the limits of its coherence. With Ludwig Wittgenstein, we must appreciate that
“The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The
one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself
into question” (1953, §133). Part of doing occasional philosophy is recognizing when the time
for philosophy ends and the time for other forms of inquiry begins. Here I want to briefly
summarize our investigation in order to locate the instants where philosophical inquiry gives us
momentary peace and where other forms of inquiry find their occasion. This summary stresses
the symmetry between Bryan G. Norton’s account of environmental pragmatism, with which we
began our journey, and my own account, but it highlights the departures from this tradition that
navigate the unique geography of social-ecological systems science. The summary uncovers one
last array of philosophical questions, though, that revolve around the challenges of
interdisciplinary inquiry. Conceptual confusions continue to afflict the theory and practice of
interdisciplinarity, in which we find one last occasion for philosophy.
Norton’s environmental pragmatism arose in response to a particular pernicious problem
for the practice of environmental management and policymaking (2005). Well-intentioned
managers and policymakers wanted to base their prescriptions on objective scientific evidence.
Such objective evidence supposedly reported “just the facts,” barring ecologists from employing

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any terms in their vocabulary, such as ‘ecosystem health’ or ‘integrity’, that are imbued with
values. Economists would provide value-neutral appraisals of the various ecological
consequences of available management and policy alternatives; these appraisals owed their
neutrality to the systematic methods that economists deployed to consistently price
environmental goods and services as valued by a hypothetical market. Norton’s insight is that
this procedure, deeply invested in a dichotomy between facts and values, hardly delivers on its
promise for value freedom or value neutrality. Indeed, unless we describe the ecological
consequences of our management and policy alternatives in a vocabulary that integrates facts
and values, the descriptions provided by our best scientists will be at best partial, and at worst
irrelevant, for the decisions that we make collectively. The only way to infer management and
policy prescriptions from the environmental sciences is to ensure that the language in which such
science is conducted is a language that already means something for how we should act toward
one another and the habitats we share. Instead of a procedure that wrests values from scientific
vocabularies, we require a procedure that imbues these vocabularies with the values of an
inclusive and deliberative community, one which legitimates rather than expunges the values at
stake.
This version of environmental pragmatism is right, as far as it goes. But the rise of socialecological systems science reflects a lacuna in how folks like Norton have articulated such a
procedure. Though few environmental philosophers are guilty of forgetting that human beings
are embedded in their environment, the mainstream version of environmental pragmatism
emphasizes the language in which we describe the environment external to us (Norton 2015).
The mark of social-ecological systems science is to stress that our social practices and
institutions are in fact internal to environmental systems and to therefore demand a science of

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people management that understands the mechanisms governing human-environment
interactions. As social-ecological system science has matured, it has drawn on a wider diversity
of social scientific theories to discover the range of mechanisms by which human institutions
cause environmental changes and by environmental conditions cause changes in human
institutions. Social-ecological systems scientists, by and large, assume a fact/value dichotomy
according to which their job is complete when they provide an empirically adequate explanation
of these mechanisms. They find themselves in precisely the situation about which Norton warns,
where they strive for a value-neutral vocabulary for describing social practices and institutions,
and assume that policymakers can infer policy prescriptions from those descriptions.
The philosophical investigations of the middle chapters of this book chart several
arguments that demonstrate how we must warrant descriptions of social practices and
institutions. Following Dewey’s account of organism-environment interaction, I argued that
inquiry is fundamentally a form of problem-solving and that such problem-solving is structured
by the vocabularies in which inquiry is conducted. The ultimate aim of inquiry is explanation,
according to which we cite causes of a problem. What Dewey shows, though, is that citing
causes is an essentially pragmatic endeavor rather than a clear cut ontological discovery. Every
explanandum is the effect of myriad explananda, and the task of locating causes is a task of
assigning responsibility to particular explananda, according to which they can be taken as the
basis of intelligent interventions. Dewey’s discussion is meant as a clarification of what we mean
by explanation—though we are captivated by certain ontological pictures of causality like that of
one billiard ball “causing” another to move, our actual practices of explanation show a much
more practical activity. A metaphysically mistaken assumption of a world comprising causes and
consequences yields to an open deliberation about our values and the interventions warranted

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according to our values. Correcting this mistake gives us momentary peace, and initiates the
empirical inquiry of deliberative valuation.
This pragmatic account of explanation informs the third and fourth chapters. In the third
chapter, I caution against a philosophical conviction that human beings are simply not the sort of
thing that admits of mechanistic explanation. This conviction is central to hermeneutic
approaches to the social sciences, which champion the ways that human beings create meaning
in non-mechanistic ways. When explanation and mechanism are detached from ontological
pictures of causality, though, hermeneutic approaches cannot find justification in a rival
ontological picture that they take to be better warranted by their empirical success. They instead
find their justification in the priority that we typically place on explaining human action at the
grammatically complex level of norms. This alone does not resolve which social sciences should
inform a “science of people management,” however, as we have available an array of social
theories that recommend different interventions according to the vocabularies with which they
structure inquiry. Deliberations over how to describe the social dimensions of a social-ecological
system, for instance in terms of corruption or in terms of local capital assets, is a pragmatic
decision about whether we would prefer to combat corruption or bolster local capital assets. This
in turn requires a broader conversation about the social and ecological consequences of either
intervention, and an even broader conversation about our cultural commitments, political
relations, and subjective identities (Cote and Nightingale 2012).25
The trouble with this account is that it suggests that we settle on one social science, one
vocabulary to provide structure to our social-ecological inquiries. This might give the impression

25

It is important to “stop doing philosophy” once we understand the meaning of social
explanation—philosophy cannot resolve, in advance of deliberation and through reflection on the
meaning of candidate social theories, the right vocabulary for social explanation.
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that what we mistakenly took to be ontologically rival social theories remain rivals, but that their
rivalry is really owed to their different valuational assumptions about who we are and who we
want to become. This, though, neglects the obvious possibility that we can, and perhaps ought to,
draw from multiple disciplines in the social sciences, and that we don’t so much as choose one
discipline as we weave together the best insights from each. This possibility is, of course, the
possibility of an interdisciplinary approach to the social dimensions of social-ecological systems
science. Interdisciplinarity distinguishes itself from the more multidisciplinary instincts of the
middle chapters by promising its own brand of integration; whereas environmental pragmatism
keys on the integration of facts and values, interdisciplinary theory and practice attends to the
integration of disciplinary perspectives or languages.
The integration of facts and values offered our first occasion for philosophy, and the
integration of disciplinary perspectives or languages offers our last occasion. Here I maintain that
scholars and practitioners of interdisciplinarity make a philosophical error in grounding
integration in either epistemology or ontology. Such interdisciplinarians assume that disciplinary
perspectives or languages stand in a correspondence relationship with a world that is independent
of our projects and purposes. Guided by this assumption, the seductive allure of interdisciplinary
integration is a comprehensive representation of reality. I argue that this assumption is misguided
and that careful attention to the way that we use languages reveals the ineliminable pragmatic
character of description and explanation. Attention to this pragmatic character shifts our focus
from representation and reality to the challenge of prioritizing our diverse projects and purposes.
I take such prioritization to be first and foremost an ethical deliberation about which values we
hold dearest, and I recommend Philip Kitcher’s proposal for well-ordered science as a procedure
for organizing disciplinary contributions to an interdisciplinary project.

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Making Sense of the Metaphors of Interdisciplinary Integration
Common approaches to interdisciplinarity make use of linguistic metaphors like
"pidgins" or "Creoles" to make sense of integration; in this section, I argue that these metaphors
are on the right track when they stress the pragmatic character of meaning-as-use, but on the
wrong track when they stress the semantic character of meaning-as-reference. I consider Rick
Szostak’s recommendation for breaking complex concepts down to more basic concepts, which e
believes will help collaborators know what one another mean, but which I argue will actually
impede mutual understanding. Following Brandom and Sellars, I argue that understanding what
one another mean is a matter of understanding the rules that govern a concept’s use.
Interdisciplinary collaborations seeking to learn one another’s language, then, must attend to the
way that concepts are used—not just in what Sellars’ calls “labeling,” but in the rich practice of
description, in the service of explanation, and ultimately in the service of action (pragmatics).
Interdisciplinary research is commonly contrasted with merely multidisciplinary research
(Klein 2010). Like social-ecological systems science, theories of interdisciplinarity and
multidisciplinarity find common motivation in the need to solve complex problems that go
beyond the scope of a single research expertise. In multidisciplinary research, specialists from
various disciplines provide solutions rooted in their own disciplines for addressing the problem
(Holbrook 2012). Interdisciplinary research is marked by the effort to combine disciplinary
contributions in a way that weaves together the best insights of each participating discipline.
Whereas multidisciplinary projects might bring to bear an anthropological understanding of
cultural identity along with an economic understanding of property rights institutions, the
interdisciplinary project might strive to understand the relationships between cultural identity
and property rights institutions. This is clearly a laudable goal if we are going to follow the

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recommendations from Chapter Four and anticipate the interactions between myriad components
of the social system.
Prominent theorists of interdisciplinarity—William Newell, Allen Repko, Julie
Thompson Klein, and others—take interdisciplinary integration to be the key challenge and goal
of interdisciplinary collaboration (Klein 2012, Repko 2007, Newell 2001, O’Rourke, Crowley,
and Gonnerman 2016). As careful readers of the literature point out, however, the enthusiasm for
integration in the interdisciplinary studies literatures has produced neither clarity nor agreement
about how integration is accomplished or even what integration is (O’Rourke, Crowley, and
Gonnerman 2016). In 2001, Newell lamented that “No one I have talked to or read (including my
own writings) has been able to explain clearly how to integrate disciplinary insights into a
comprehensive understanding. We are not even clear on exactly what is meant by integration”
(18). Repko echoes that “the lack of clarity on precisely what to integrate and how to integrate”
has been the “Achilles’ heel of interdisciplinarity” (2007, 7). Nearly a decade after these
proclamations, theorists and practitioners still debate the meaning of interdisciplinary integration.
Interdisciplinarity theorists have made extensive use of metaphor to provide guidance
about what integration means. As Veronica Boix Mansilla chronicles, “A striking array of
metaphors have been deployed to describe the nature of interdisciplinary intellectual activity—
from working at ‘crossroads’ and in ‘trading zones’ to engaging ‘boundary objects’ and
‘bridges’” (2010, 289). Boix Mansilla laments, though, that these metaphors have failed to
inform systematic accounts of the theory and practice of interdisciplinary research. Of particular
interest here, a particular suite of metaphors are widespread in discussions of interdisciplinarity:
metaphors that liken integration to the learning or creating a new language, such as a pidgin or
Creole (Klein 1996). A pidgin or Creole is a language developed by speakers of different

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languages to facilitate communication; the new language is a hodgepodge of neologisms and
crucial terms or phrases that suffice to coordinate exchange between these different cultures.
Given my attention to the way that language (or the smaller unit, vocabularies) structure
inquiry, I take these linguistic metaphors to be on the right track toward understanding how
different disciplinary perspectives could inform an interdisciplinary project. And it is definitely
the case that linguistic metaphors provide a dominant starting point for theorizing
interdisciplinary integration in this literature. Newell asserts that, “since every discipline has its
own vocabulary expressed as concepts, it is sometimes necessary for the interdisciplinarian to
create a common vocabulary” (2008, 284). David Stone writes that for the dominant,
epistemological approaches to interdisciplinarity, “the central barrier to effective
interdisciplinary collaboration boils down to language, to our inability to communicate concepts,
theories, and methods across disciplines in interdisciplinary contexts” (2013, 87). Commonly,
this inability is cashed out as the inability of collaborators to know what one another mean by the
terms that they use; sometimes, collaborators simply have no idea what a specialized term or
piece of jargon means, but more worrisomely, collaborators often mean different things by the
same term. Miscommunication abounds, and interdisciplinary collaborators face an uphill battle
in piecing together a comprehensive understanding of the complex problem.
An example here is helpful. One characteristic recommendation for forging a common
vocabulary is to break complex concepts into more basic concepts; the idea is that the meaning
of complex concepts is difficult to trace, whereas the meaning of basic concepts is ordinarily
shared among collaborators. Rick Szostak is one advocate among interdisciplinary theorists for
analyzing complex concepts into basic concepts “whose meanings are fairly clear”, and he offers
examples of collaborators using the same word in different ways (2013, 41). In one example,

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economists attach a fairly rigid meaning to a term like “investment” while the economists’
collaborators interpret investment in a more ordinary, non-technical sense. In another example,
various researchers assume different definitions for a complex concept such as globalization. In
these situations, according to Szostak, “the key lies in breaking down complex concepts—those
that lend themselves to different interpretations across disciplines (or cultures)—into basic
concepts that can be understood similarly across disciplines” (35). The goal of this analysis is to
separate ideological, methodological, and theoretical assumptions from what Szostak takes to be
the actual meaning of these terms, which is the relationship between the term and states of
affairs to which it refers (Szostak 2016). The fear among interdisciplinarians is that these
assumptions are often times subjective, a vestige of the interpretive lens adorned by researchers
who train in a particular academic discipline. On this view, real knowledge is knowledge of the
facts that exist independently of our lenses, or conceptual frameworks. The key to
interdisciplinary integration is to shed our disciplinary perspectives, which helped us know
where to look for these facts, but which now color our representation of them.
It should be clear that these wide-ranging epistemological and metaphysical
commitments are fairly standard in contemporary society, shared by Norton’s colleagues at the
EPA and the social-ecological systems scientists surveyed throughout the book. I want to focus
on a particular commitment: the idea that meaning is a matter of reference, or what I’ll call the
meaning-as-reference account of language. In opposition to the meaning-as-reference account of
language, I’ll recommend the meaning-as-use account.
The meaning-as-use account positions itself against the meaning-as-reference account by
asking the following question: What would a person have to do in order to count as
understanding the meaning of a term? On the meaning-as-reference account of language,

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understanding the meaning of a term amounts to being able to label the features of the world to
which the term applies. For instance, knowing what globalization means to the economist on an
interdisciplinary team is understanding the set of conditions under which she applies the term:
we might think of conditions such as international trade agreements (Szostak’s main example is
the flow of foreign investments into the globalizing nation), technology and information
transfers, and transnational corporations. Per Szostak, if breaking globalization down into these
sorts of parts does not expedite conversation, then these parts should be broken down into even
more basic concepts; in especially difficult cases, interdisciplinary collaborators may need to
point to a feature and announce “this is what I mean.”
On the meaning-as-use account of language, this sort of definition doesn’t do justice to
what we are up to when we describe the world. The trouble is that the meaning-as-reference
account of language takes its cue from the idea of labeling, where labels provide a name for the
objects in experience. There’s a world of difference, though, between labeling and describing,
and it is describing but not labeling that allows us to develop explanations. As Wilfrid Sellars
reminds,
Although describing and explaining (predicting, retrodicting, understanding) are
distinguishable, they are also, in an important sense, inseparable. It is only because the
expressions in terms of which we describe objects, even such basic expressions as words
for perceptible characteristics of molar objects, locate these objects in a space of
implications, that they describe at all, rather than merely label. (1957, §108)
We can think of mere labeling like we think of naming a pet. I have a pet cat with the eminently
common name, “Luna.” As friends and colleagues visit, they learn the cat’s name, and (for most)
become adept labelers of this cat, referring to her reliably by her name “Luna.” What

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distinguishes “Luna” as a mere label, rather than a description, is that no implications follow
from her being named “Luna.” Descriptions of Luna include her being a pet, and more broadly
domesticated, or her being a cat, or more broadly a mammal, or even more broadly an animal.
Falling under a description, though, does locate Luna in a space of implications. We can be
reasonably assured that, as a pet, she is looked after and doted over, as domesticated, she lives
alongside human beings, as a mammal, she would give birth to a litter of kitten that would nurse,
and so on. (As cat owners are quick to point out, it is not clear that we can safely infer anything
from something being a cat.)
Now, how does this differ from the meaning-as-reference account of language? The
contrast with Szostak’s extensional version of the account of meaning is especially pronounced.
On his version of the account, the meaning of ‘cat’, or of ‘pet’ or of ‘mammal’, is the set of
objects in the world to which that word, understood as a label, refers. For a purely extensional
definition, the sorts of implications that we draw from something falling under a category are not
constitutive of (or, as Sellars says, inseparable from) the meaning of the category. Szostak
groups these sorts of implications under the ideological, methodological, and theoretical
connotations of concepts. His recommendation for interdisciplinary practice is for collaborators
to set aside those connotations and get to the scientific business of discovering which objects
exist as part of a given situation. When they disagree about whether to apply the term
“globalization” to such a situation, they should break it down into terms where they can agree,
and then apply these more basic concepts.
Though this recommendation is suggestive, Sellars and fellow pragmatists like Robert
Brandom would deny that this sort of labeling counts as understanding the concepts in question
(Brandom 2015). Their critique is slightly different than the one founded on the naturalism

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discussed in Chapter Two, where we take language and meaning to be functional adaptations of
organisms, consonant with a metaphysics of organism-environment interaction and problem
solving. Instead these analytic pragmatists point out that, according to the empiricist tradition
where the meaning-as-reference account of language is at home, we must be able to verify that
collaborators understand one another through some sort of observations. And following folks
like Quine, whose arguments I won’t rehearse here, they underscore the difficulty of verifying
that understanding on the basis of an individual uttering a word in the presence of that word’s
supposed object. Instead, in order to verify that another individual has learned the meaning of a
term, one has to observe the use of that term in a variety of situations. This echoes the
grammatical remarks from Chapters Three and Four; there are rules that govern the use of a
concept, and understanding the meaning of a concept involves observing (as Dewey puns, in
both senses of the word “observing”) those social conventions.
The idea of rules governing the use of a concept provides a helpful way to think about
Sellars’ notion of a space of implications. Things that count as cats would, by rule, reproduce by
giving live birth to a litter of kittens and nursing them when young; if an organism that looks like
a cat nonetheless builds a nest and lays a clutch of eggs, it will be undeserving of the description
‘cat’. But the cat example is much too simplistic to locate the failing of someone like Szostak’s
recommendation for interdisciplinary practice. If two collaborators disagree about the application
of the term “globalization,” and break it down into more basic concepts, they are no closer to
understanding one another. Szostak prefers more basic concepts because such concepts more
easily garner agreement (this is why they are considered more basic), but what is at stake is not
agreement about the basic concepts, but agreement about which basic concepts the complex
concepts breaks down into. For if the development economist tries to teach an anthropologist the

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meaning of globalization by breaking it down into international trade agreements, technology
and information transfers, and transnational corporations, part of understanding the economic
meaning of these supposedly more basic concepts is to infer, on the basis of these concepts
truthfully applying, that globalization is in full swing. The anthropologist simply does not know
what the economist means by these supposedly more basic concepts if they do not locate these
descriptions in the same space of implications. New speakers of economics need to know that, if
a nation enters into international trade agreements, then that nation is globalizing, or if
transnational corporations increase their presence in a nation, then the nation is globalizing, and
so on. Shedding such theoretical connotations of contested concepts does not make those
concepts easier to learn; it makes them impossible to understand.26
I believe this suffices to discourage an account of interdisciplinary integration that invests
heavily in the meaning-as-reference account of language use. Drawing on the meaning-as-use
alternative developed throughout this dissertation, I recommend a pragmatic account
interdisciplinary theory and practice. The basic contours of such an account are that
(1) description and explanation are importantly inseparable,
(2) we describe the world in the vocabularies that we do because we are interested in the
implications of these descriptions, e.g. what such descriptions allow us to explain,
(3) different disciplines provide different descriptions in the service of different uses, and
(4) drawing descriptions from different disciplines is a matter of deciding which
descriptions are best suited to address a complex problem, where

26

I find Szostak’s bans on methodological and ideological assumptions to be relatively opaque, and don’t pursue
them here. Presumably methodological assumptions are assumptions about how one studies the system in question,
but it is difficult to know how one can know whether a given term applies without appreciating the method, or
procedure, for assessing its truth. I suspect that ideological assumptions are something akin to valuational
assumptions, and for reasons mobilized throughout this book, very much doubt that those assumptions can be
separated from concept use.

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(5) the best suited descriptions are those that coordinate our practices to help us realize
our values, so:
(6) an integrated, interdisciplinary understanding of a complex problem is an
understanding that uses descriptions to ameliorate a complex problem in a way that
correctly prioritizes among, and weighs tradeoffs between, our values.
This section is meant to establish (1), and previous chapters (especially Chapter Two) establish
(2) and (3) (see also Piso 2015). In the next section, I justify and further elaborate (4) and (5),
which I believe establish interdisciplinary integration as an ethical project. In the final section, I
draw connections between the conclusion of this argument and Phillip Kitcher’s ideal of wellordered science, which reframes interdisciplinary integration as well-ordered interdisciplinary
science.
From Pragmatics to Ethics
Though the previous section argues for an account of language that understands meaning
as use, this only suffices to foreground the pragmatic character of interdisciplinary inquiry. I am
here interested in foregrounding the ethical character of interdisciplinary inquiry. This character
is brought to light by exploring the types of reasons that can count for or against action, and by
noting that ethical reasons, qua ethical, overrule other sorts of practical consequences. In other
words, someone would be wrong to act in a way that is practical, or effective, if that act were
also unfair, or vicious, or otherwise unethical; the only sort of reason that could excuse the
unethical act is another ethical reason, one that shows that our initial judgment was shortsighted.
Here I illustrate this ethical character by carefully considering a case of environmental
conservation in Menabe, Madagascar. The case study allows us to reflect on how ethical reasons

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would provide a basis for favoring particular disciplinary vocabularies in issuing an
interdisciplinary description of a complex problem.
The first move in appreciating the ethical character of inquiry is by stressing that part of
the meaning of a description is the actions (linguistic and otherwise) for which that description
can serve as a reason. This is easier to forget when engaging later pragmatists like Brandom, who
is prone to place too much emphasis on linguistic meaning (Margolis 2009). It’s crucial to
understand that the meaning of a concept is its use in a vocabulary, or that much (but not all) of
understanding a concept is being reliable disposed to express a word under appropriate
conditions. Brandom offers a careful argument for how concept use involves (1) using a concept
correctly in making an observation and (2) using a concept correctly when carrying out a
conversation. In both settings, he is careful to conceive of concepts as actions, and thus to think
of concept use as bottoming out in a form of know-how (2015). The trouble with
overemphasizing linguistic meaning, though, is the sort of linguistic idealism that I cautioned
against at the opening to Chapter 2. There is a third setting where concept use is normatively
governed, and that is in our embodied re-actions to making an observation or carrying out a
conversation that go beyond further language use. For Sellars, these “language-exit transitions”
offer a vital connection of word to world, without which language loses its grasp of reality
(1963). For pragmatists in general, the movement from correct observation, through correct
implications, to correct action is the basic system for using language to coordinate and achieve
one’s goals. On this view, semantics is in the service of pragmatics; it is only within a practice of
coordinating goal-oriented action that concepts can mean anything at all.
When language-exit transitions are ignored, we are liable to take description to be an end
in itself. Confronted with the meaning-as-use alternative to meaning-as-reference, Szostak very

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much endorses description as an end in itself, championing as the goal of interdisciplinary
integration the twin ideals of “representational clarity” and “comprehensive understanding”
(2016, 211-212). This endorsement amounts to a half-hearted concession to meaning-as-use,
where the empiricist-leaning philosopher admits that the meaning of a concept is its use, but then
offers “representation of reality” as that use. Szostak is hardly alone here among theorists of
interdisciplinarity. Allen Repko also analyzes interdisciplinary integration as the epistemological
project of representational truth, while William Newell pursues the ontological side of the coin in
striving for a comprehensive account of reality (Repko 2012, Newell 2001).
Wholeheartedly embracing meaning-as-use requires that we give up the notion of
“representation of reality.” That ideal is unintelligible, not least because we could never be in a
position to evaluate whether we have indeed correctly represented reality (only that our
descriptions “work”). Better to take on the more modest goal of ameliorating problematic
situations, where an embodied sense of doubt spurs inquiry, and the calming of that doubt brings
inquiry to a close. On this view, scientific disciplines provide resources for ameliorating
problematic situations in the form of descriptions-explanations that provide rules for moving
from observation, through the space of implications, to action. What observations are relevant to
this inquiry, and what actions count as warranted, depends on our orientation to the situation as a
problem for which we can mobilize better or worse responses. Recall that explanation is the
“ultimate objective of any existential inquiry” and that description is “inseparable” from
explanation (Dewey 1938, 454; Sellars 1957, §108). Because explanation is intelligible only as a
means-end relation, then description is also in the service of diagnosing particular means to
particular ends. A scientific study provides a good description of a system if it allows us to
explain the workings of that system in ways that matter to us and allow us to realize our goals.

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Now, I want to propose that appropriately appealing to specialized scientific
vocabularies, as we do in the recruitment of a particular discipline to describe and explain a
social-ecological system, ultimately rests on ethical grounds. The basic picture is as follows:
Different disciplines provide different tools for describing a situation as a problem and locating
mechanisms for ameliorating that problem. In other words, disciplinary descriptions offer
alternative accounts of ends (explanantia) as well as competing accounts of means (explananda).
Choosing between ends is necessarily a question of valuation, as is choosing among means. The
extent to which we should value one situation over another is a matter for ethics, understood as
inquiry into the set of practices that produces the most desirable outcome. To say that ethics is
the ground for settling on practices is to point out that ethical reasons—for example, that an end
would be unjust, or that a means of realizing an end vicious—are prima facie sufficient to rule
out the proposed practice. Our desired ends or means can adapt through inquiry, though, as we
may learn that our values have unanticipated consequences or are unsustainable. For Dewey, this
learning was a matter of distinguishing desirable consequences from merely desired
consequences (1939). In these cases, the full array of values that we hold can justify revising
particular values that prove troublesome. What ethical inquiry strives for is a configuration of
practices that allows us to realize most of our values, most of the time.
Let me draw on one last case study to illustrate this idea. The case study is drawn from an
example of environmental management in Menabe, Madagascar, where an interdisciplinary team
of researchers studied deforestation (Sommerville et al. 2009, 2010). The central region of
Menabe is home to a 100,000-ha dry deciduous forest that Madagascar has identified as one of
its highest conservation priorities, but rural development around the forest continues to encroach.
Early on in the project, the problem was framed as an underprovision of ecosystem services (i.e.

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the benefits of preserving, conserving, or restoring ecosystems, such as water purification or
carbon sequestration) (Sommerville et al. 2010). The interdisciplinary team also decided early on
that the appropriate means for rectifying this underprovision was through what’s known as a
payment for ecosystem services (PES) management approach, and that this PES management
approach would favor community-based management. PES management mobilizes economic
research to identify the true value of ecosystem services, according to which local stakeholders
are paid to leave these services intact rather than engage in more extractive land uses (e.g.,
agriculture or poaching). This incentive is meant to encourage sustainable behavior; if the
incentive is properly priced, then stakeholders will refrain from extractive uses when their value
is less than conservation, and engage in extractive uses when their value is more than the
services compromised. Though different from the institutional economics approaches surveyed
earlier in Ostrom and Bromley’s work, PES management approaches represent a standard
approach to environmental conservation (Pagiola, Bishop, and Landell Mills 2012, Kinzig et al.
2011). Indeed, Sommerville and colleagues provide two studies attesting to the success of
implementing a PES management approach in Menabe (Sommerville et al. 2009, 2010). At least
with respect to their stated goal of encouraging sustainable behavior, their complex PES
management approach achieved its desired effect.
Now, we do not know the values of the stakeholders affected by the decision to study this
social-ecological system in order to understand the efficient provision of ecosystem services via
a PES management approach. We would need to know these values in order to criticize the
approach as unethical, and as thereby unwarranted; the only standard against which we can judge
the approach unethical is the standard to which the community would agree through a fully
inclusive democratic deliberation (Norton 2005). What the interdisciplinary team did provide

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was an admirably reflexive report of the challenges that they confronted in taking a PES
management approach, in which they took care to acknowledge potentially problematic
outcomes. Such a report allows us to imagine the sort of conversation that would have to happen
in order to warrant the interdisciplinary team’s orientation to the problem. In other words, was it
right to conceive of deforestation in Menabe in terms of the underprovision of ecosystem
services, and was it right to investigate the mechanism of PES? I want to consider these two
questions in turn, beginning first with the legitimation of the goals of interdisciplinary socialecological systems science, and then turning to the legitimation of particular mechanisms for
achieving those goals.
The researchers are explicit that the goal of their study was “to encourage community
forest associations to actively manage [Menabe] forests for biodiversity and sustainable benefits”
(Sommerville et al. 2009, 1263). A number of goals are implicit to this articulation, most
obviously the goals of biodiversity conservation and sustainability. It’s worth noting that neither
biodiversity nor sustainability fall under the myopic approaches to ecosystem valuation that
Norton criticizes in his Sustainability; both biodiversity and sustainability are difficult to
measure through market-based valuation, as neither qualifies as the sort of excludable, rivalrous
goods that markets price efficiently.
Now, some context about the Menabe case locates additional goods that are at stake in
social-ecological systems science. Encroachment on Menabe’s dry deciduous forest is driven
mostly by agricultural expansion and by poaching lemurs and tenrecs. Though the study is meant
to establish payments that incentivize conservation and disincentivize agricultural expansion and
poaching, it (rightly) acknowledges this tradeoff and counts agriculture and poaching as
preliminary goods. Further, the study notes “the inequitable distribution of the costs and benefits

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of biodiversity conservation,” where “the costs of protected areas are born locally, frequently by
poor rural communities,” and requiring “international conservation programs to consider poverty
alleviation” (Sommerville et al. 2009). Though we do not know the full range of values at stake
in managing the Menabe forests, we can include both poverty alleviation and the equitable
distribution of costs and benefits as preliminary goals of understanding the social-ecological
system.
The framing of the goal of this study also provides some initial guidance into the sorts of
means that the interdisciplinary team countenanced. Most obviously, the provision of ecosystem
services under a PES management approach is focused on economic mechanisms for achieving
the goals stated above. Ordinarily, these mechanisms take the form of payments to stakeholders
who engage in sustainable behavior—when local residents refrain from clearing forest and
cultivating crops, they forego the opportunity costs of farming, and are thereby compensated for
their trouble. The study notes, though, that its goal is to encourage community forest associations
to handle management. It is explicit throughout that distributing PES at the community forest
association level can help leave local customs intact. Sommerville and colleagues (2009) explain
In community-based conservation schemes, where local institutions control the
distribution of incentives, the distribution structure and ultimately fairness may not be
clear a priori. Monitoring social indicators is thus a critical, if rarely performed,
component of conservation and development projects. Failure to consider distributional
and fairness issues can undermine the impact of a PES or the long-term success of
conservation interventions. (1269)
By handling management at this level, the researchers sought to strike a balance between
incentivizing sustainable behavior and disrupting local social relations. Additional context about

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Menabe reveals some alternative routes for understanding the system; prior to the
implementation of a PES management approach, authorities discouraged unsustainable behavior
by issuing fines and, in the case of illegal agricultural expansion, prison sentences. Enforcement
of the relevant laws, though, was limited or non-existent. Again, there are certainly additional
mechanisms for achieving the goals of conservation, poverty alleviation, and equitable
distribution of resources, but direct payments, community-based payments, and consistent
enforcement of laws offer three initial alternatives to consider.
Now we can ask: What sort of conversation is required to legitimate the ends assumed by
the study and the means recommended by the study? Let’s imagine this conversation as a
dialogue between an emerging interdisciplinary team of scientists and the stakeholders who are
affected by the management and policy inferred from the team’s reports. Now, a conservation
biologist may suggest that Menabe, Madagascar faces a conservation crisis, and that the
community requires a better understanding of local biodiversity and ecological sustainability.
Indeed, we should assume that the conservation biologist is correct about these challenges, and
that it is true that biodiversity is decreasing and natural resources running low. Local
stakeholders could still object that these conservation goals are not nearly as important as
economic development, or that curtailing poaching would unacceptably place the largest burden
on the economically worst off. At this point the conservation biologist is likely to point out that
economic development will be unsustainable if funded by agricultural expansion, or that there
are means of discouraging poaching that would be less burdensome on impoverished
communities. One upshot of this exchange is the recognition of the need to include a
development economist on the interdisciplinary team, as a development economist should
provide expertise in promoting economic growth for these stakeholders. Perhaps the team should

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also include a rural sociologist to provide expertise on the burden of management strategies on
the rural poor.27
Now, the details of Sommerville and colleagues’ study indicate that the primary goal of
understanding the system was to strike a balance between conservation goals and economic
development, and to determine the appropriate balance by allowing communities to freely trade
sustainable practices (and the opportunity costs of not farming or poaching) for payments. Still
other goals informed the preference for community-based management instead of regulatory
authorities paying stakeholders directly. This is not because the only true description of this
social-ecological system is in terms of community-based PES management. Rather, the warrant
for describing the social-ecological system in these terms is because these terms strike a balance
between the plurality of goods at stake in the system’s management.
A similar conversation is necessary for legitimating the mechanisms considered in the
pursuit of this plurality of goods. Because Sommerville and colleagues monitored social
indicators, we have some evidence that community-based PES management produced some
discontent among the stakeholders. The first sort of objection concerns the fairness of PES
management approaches, which can marginalize particular types of resource users. In the
Sommerville case, some stakeholders reported that they were not fairly compensated for
refraining from farming. What can often happen with the implementation of PES management
approaches is that some stakeholders claim property rights that were previously unenforced or
contested, cutting off other stakeholders from previously open-pool resources on which they

27

I focus here on the legitimacy of valuational and normative assumptions like those discussed in Chapter Four, but
as Michael O’Rourke has pointed out to me, the Menabe case study is also rich with social epistemic assumptions.
In particular, the case study assumes that the scientists leading the study are legitimate experts, i.e. that their
expertise is recognized and authorized by the stakeholders to the study. I follow Jordan, Gust, and Scheman (2005)
in appreciating the role of truthworthiness in the construction of expertise, and recommend trust-building practices
in cases where the legitimacy of experts is in question.

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depend (Corbera, Kosoy, and Tuna 2006). The study also took for granted gender-based
inequalities that tend to afflict PES management approaches (Kerr 2002, Pagiola, Arcenas, and
Platuas 2005). Sommerville and colleagues (2009, 2010) focused on land uses traditionally
performed by men and interviewed women with difficulty and only with respect to foraging
tubers. Understanding these dynamics requires more critical social scientists to inquire into the
ways that management schemes such as PES produce inequality with respect to social categories
that are not within the purview of every development economist. In this case, we can imagine
stakeholders asserting a principle of assisting the worse off, so that the landless poor are not
victim to the PES management approach, or principles of fairness and equality, such that women
are compensated no worse than men. This could require mechanisms to compensate stakeholders
who are negatively impacted by an otherwise desirable management approach, but it could also
require starting from a different approach without a history of privileging wealthier, male
stakeholders.
So far, the imagined conversations consider broadly consequentialist dialogue, where
stakeholders weigh plural goods as goals, and broadly deontological dialogue, where
stakeholders assert rights or principles that constrain rightful conduct. I want to lastly consider a
broadly virtue theoretic dialogue. By favoring community-based management approaches,
Sommerville and colleagues placed a priority on maintaining social relations, and social relations
are grammatically well-suited to be evaluated with respect to virtues (i.e., social relations
produce consequences, or violate principles, but simply are or are not virtuous or vicious). In the
Menabe case, community-based payments were intended to support cooperation and flexibility,
encouraging stakeholders to work together to find creative ways to provide ecosystem services.
Community members expressed their solidarity through their preference for in-kind, non-rival

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goods such as bicycles and generators. Distributing compensation at the individual level, or even
at the family level, may have produced less virtuous social relations, with Sommerville and
colleagues warning that “in many rural communities, it may not be possible explicitly to direct
incentives to the relative poor without upsetting local social structures” (Sommerville et al. 2009,
1268; Agrawal 2001). Yet distributing payments at the community-level raised issues of
corruption and discrimination, with board members reporting the highest level of net benefits and
non-members expressing reservations (Sommerville et al. 2009). In the previous chapter, we saw
that interdisciplinary teams including political scientists offered an understanding of how
corruption operates as a mechanism compromising the resilience of coastal and marine socialecological systems. Here too there is a need to understand the ethical consequences of various
management approaches, to be able to anticipate the rise of corruption and the sustainability of
virtues like cooperation, flexibility, and solidarity.
Why should these ethical consequences provide the ground for integrating disciplinary
vocabularies and warranting explanations of social-ecological systems? Mainly, it is because an
ethical objection to a proposed action, or the description-explanation from which that action is
inferred as a language-exit transition, can only be overruled by another ethical objection. If
stakeholders propose that biodiversity is a primary environmental good, and that an ecological
description of the social-ecological system is necessary, researchers cannot counter that a
hydrogeological description is easier to formalize or to quantify (cf. Piso et al. 2016). At the
stage of deciding between disciplinary vocabularies as tools that we use, the truth of these
candidate descriptions is yet to enter the picture.28 Researchers, or fellow stakeholders, can point

28

I assume here that disciplinary vocabularies serve as a reliable basis to truthfully describe social-ecological
systems, e.g. that there are anthropological truths to be told, or meteorological truths to be told, and so on. Since
each vocabulary can be the basis of true descriptions, then the fact that we’ve produced a true description in one
vocabulary is not a reason to prefer that vocabulary.

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out that description in an ecological vocabulary is likely to overlook rival goods such as
economic development, and recommend a study that integrates ecology and development
economics. That requires an understanding of the economic consequences of ecological
conditions like biodiversity, and the ecological consequences of economic conditions such as
development, and there is a tendency to think that this coupled understanding is the mark of
integration (cf. Hirsch and Brosius 2013). But unless this coupled understanding is in terms that
matter for action, that are laden with values that the community deems significant, there is
simply no way for that community to evaluate the alternatives. And evaluating the alternatives is
necessary for meaningfully describing the social-ecological system. The situation gets even
trickier as more values are diagnosed in the amelioration of a problem; how should we weigh the
provision of ecosystem services against principles of gender equity against virtues of cooperation
and solidarity? There is no easy answer to this—ethical inquiry is inquiry, and we cannot settle
on the relative merit of these values from the purview of the ivory tower. In the final section I
will recommend an ideal for interdisciplinary integration following Kitcher’s notion of wellordered science. Here the intermediate conclusion is as follows: interdisciplinary integration
requires that we understand disciplinary vocabularies as tools for realizing different sorts of
values, and the key to interdisciplinary integration is to understand the priorities among, and
tradeoffs between, this plurality of values.
One last remark: I earlier commented that this ethical construal of interdisciplinary
integration is a proposal. I offer it as a proposal for two reasons: first, ethical inquiry is in an
important sense empirical, in that settling on a configuration of practices is not the sort of thing
that philosophical reflection can achieve on its own. Indeed, ethical inquiry commences once the
occasion for philosophy comes to a close; careful attention to the meaning of the use of concepts

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like description and explanation point toward the need for ethical inquiry, but careful attention to
the meaning of ethical terms like ‘justice’ and ‘virtue’ will not settle the empirical questions
concerning what concrete practices best realize a plurality of values. The second reason is that a
key method for ethical inquiry is deliberation, through which community members propose ways
of improving their lot in life. We are committed to deliberation insofar as we are committed to an
egalitarian community where fellow members have equal standing in evaluating the value of
proposals and their alternatives. Given the plurality of values that exist in any community, it is
vital that our method for valuing proposals is dialogical, as no one is in a position to solely
determine the truth of value claims.
An Ideal for Integration: Well-Ordered Interdisciplinary Science
In Chapter One, I suggested that philosophy can trace a series of moves from the practical
question, “How should we compose an interdisciplinary team of scientists?” to the practical
question, “By what procedure can we legitimate the use of particular social scientific
explanations as the basis for environmental management?” In this final section, I want flesh out
an earlier proposal to answer this second question (Piso 2016). My proposal appeals to Philip
Kitcher’s notion of well-ordered science, a notion he mobilizes in his investigations of science in
a democratic society (2011). Here I extend his notion to serve as an ideal for interdisciplinary
collaboration, arguing that interdisciplinary integration should work outward from the
disciplinary vocabulary that speaks to what we value the most. Beginning with a disciplinary
description that attends to only some of what's at stake in a complex problem, interdisciplinary
integration proceeds by considering in turn the remaining problems as described in the
vocabularies of additional academic disciplines.

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Much of Kitcher’s investigation is dedicated to dismantling the value-free ideal, which
Kitcher locates as a problematic foundation for how contemporary society understands its
relation to science. When we think of science as value-free, we tend to think of scientific inquiry
and democratic decision-making as wholly separate businesses, and we tend to support lines of
scientific inquiry independent of their relevance to public problems. This division of labor,
however, can get us into trouble when we suppose that the truths to which scientists testify are
the truths upon which we found policies. Kitcher’s key argument is that science in a democratic
society must distinguish between truths, of which there are many, from significant truths, of
which there is a more manageable set. He reminds
virtually all of the ‘whole truth’ lacks any interest for anybody (think, for example, of the
large infinity of truths about the areas of triangles whose vertices are three arbitrarily
chosen objects). Supposing that Science aims at the complete true story of the world is as
misguided as the suggestion that geography seeks to draw a universal map, one revealing
every feature of the globe. (106)
As careful observers of science in society have noted, the abundance of truth hardly resolves
political controversies, as competing factions simply marshal different facts in support of their
preferred policies (Sarewitz 2004). The issue is not that competing factions disagree about the
truth of different scientific statements—though they almost certainly do—but that they
problematize situations differently in light of different values, and hence appeal to different facts
relevant to these different orientations. Kitcher points out that a prior deliberation is required
before science can inform policymaking. It is in this prior deliberation that citizens work out
their scientific priorities, charging scientists to inquire into explanations of shared public
problems.

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Kitcher proposes that the ideal for this prior deliberation is well-ordered science, which is
effectively the prioritization of scientific problems and projects that the fuller democratic
community would endorse through deliberation. He elaborates
A society practicing scientific inquiry is well ordered just in case it assigns priorities to
lines of investigation through discussions whose conclusions are those that would be
reached through deliberation under mutual engagement and which expose the grounds
such deliberation would present. (113)
Lines of investigation are more or less scientific programs that explore a range of intersecting
scientific questions pertinent to a public problem. For instance, space travel might be one line of
investigation, while cancer research might be another. Our reasons for prioritizing one line of
investigation over another have to do with the relative value we place on the public problems that
investigations promise to ameliorate or the public projects that investigations promise to
advance. Kitcher appreciates that participation in a democratic deliberation is not merely a matter
of voting on the lines of investigation that address one’s personal projects or problems. Rather,
deliberation abides by conditions of mutual engagement, which Kitcher breaks down into
epistemic conditions (truthfulness, sincerity) as well as affective conditions. Affective conditions
involve taking the perspective of fellow deliberators and regarding their values with equal
consideration to one’s own. Now, these conditions are always subject to criticism and revision,
so deliberation should be transparent about these conditions as a contingent ground for
adjudicating among diverse value claims. Initially, though, conditions of mutual engagement
allow democratic deliberation to embark in reason giving and taking through which a diverse
community can work toward collective flourishing.

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Kitcher is interested in lines of inquiry at the societal scale, but his analysis provides a
sound basis for the practice of interdisciplinary integration. When we encounter a complex
social-ecological problem, we cannot set forth to comprehensively describe the situation or to
provide the “whole truth” of the matter. But we do not need this “whole truth” to decide which
management strategy or policy is appropriate; we need only those truths upon which our action
hinges. Anticipating what those truths might be requires that we order the lines of inquiry
significant to the community confronting the social-ecological problem. The highest priority
lines of inquiry will be those in which the community invests the greatest significance. Provided
that an interdisciplinary collaboration studies the dimensions of the problem in the order
prioritized by the community confronting that problem, then that interdisciplinary inquiry is
well-ordered. This ordering is not as simple as first describing, say, the ecological dimensions,
then setting this description aside and next describing the economic dimensions, and then the
political, and so on. That would be multidisciplinary collaboration, and we are after
interdisciplinary collaboration. Rather, ordering is a process of first describing (in a particular
disciplinary vocabulary) the dimension(s) of the problem most significant to a community,
understanding the actions that would ameliorate the problem under that disciplinary description,
and then in turn considering the problems that remain (or are caused) according to other
disciplinary descriptions (Figure 1). Rather than an order of considering each disciplinary
understanding in turn, it is an ordering that starts with the most significant understanding, and
works “outward” through additional disciplinary understandings.

169

Figure 1: A schematic of ordering interdisciplinary inquiry,
with a parallel example from the Menabe case study
Step 1: Deliberate with stakeholders to
determine what values are at stake in
managing the system, and how
stakeholders prioritize these values

Step 1: Deliberate with community
members in Menabe about the values
at stake in rainforest deforestation, and
how to weigh these plural values

Step 2: Describe the system in terms
that matter most to stakeholders.
Consider actions that are justified by
this initial description.

Step 2: Biologists describe the system
as an underprovision of ecosystem
services. Consider market and state
regulations to increase provision.

Step 3: Anticipate problems caused
by, or unaddressed, by the actions
justified in Step 2. Elaborate the
description to include these problems.

Step 3: Anticipate economic harms
caused by increased provision.
Economists describe in terms of
efficient provisioning of services.

Step 4: Repeat Step 3 until
stakeholders are satisfied that the
values at stake in managing the system
are balanced.

Step 4: Anticipate social harms caused
by PES. Anthropologists describe in
terms of fair compensation through inkind payments.

Step 5: Periodically return to
deliberation to reflect on values.
Changes in their weight/priority may
require redescription of the system.

Step 5: Survey communities about
satisfaction with PES project. Attend
to remaining fairness concerns, e.g.
gender inequity and corruption.

We can consider the Menabe case study as an example of starting with the most
significant description and working outward through additional descriptions provided by a
diverse interdisciplinary team. The study operates under the assumption that the primary problem
facing the Menabe community is an underprovision of ecosystem services. It then describes the
practices of community members in terms of their consequences for deforestation and biological
conservation. Now, if this disciplinary description from conservation biology were sufficient,
then environmental managers could infer a range of consistent management approaches. Instead,
the interdisciplinary team posed another set of significant scientific questions that would speak to
the proper pricing of ecosystem services to balance conservation with economic development.
Note that these scientific questions are much more focused than the lines of economic inquiry

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that would address the broader questions about economic development; there are all sorts of
mechanisms that would be relevant to promoting economic development that do not figure in an
interdisciplinary study that prioritizes conservation.
Now, armed with an interdisciplinary description of Menabe in terms of conservation
biology and development economics, the team posed another set of questions aimed at
understanding community-based payments as opposed to direct payments to stakeholders. Again,
this is a much more focused line of inquiry than one might pose if more broadly interested in
promoting social relations that bind Menabe communities. Eventually, the team considered
mechanisms like providing in-kind, non-rival compensation to communities. The general arc of
the research is one of prioritizing biological conservation and moving outward through additional
disciplines as they prove relevant to the values at stake in the complex problem. As long as the
order through which the interdisciplinary collaboration considered these problems accords with
the priority that stakeholders placed on these various stakes, then we should embrace the study as
well-ordered interdisciplinary science, and therefore warranted interdisciplinary science.
It’s important to appreciate that this ordering could not proceed without the sort of
coupling discussed in the previous section with respect to the tradeoffs between conservation and
development. We would not know to follow inquiry into biological conservation with inquiry
into economic development without discovering the consequences of conservation for
development. The same holds for the consequences of development for local customs. But while
a coupled understanding encourages deliberators to consider the plurality of values at stake in
social-ecological systems science, this coupled understanding is not yet the mark of integration.
Certainly, the consequences of ecology for economics, and vice versa, are endless; perhaps there
are not as many truths as the truths pertaining to the areas of triangles whose vertices are three

171

arbitrarily chosen objects, but there are still too many truths to be helpful. Add these to the
consequences of either discipline to anthropology, or political science, or any other discipline
with something to say on the matter, and we find ourselves rife with truth but short in
significance. If we set forth on the impossible task of locating all of these truths, we would
depart from the prevailing meaning of interdisciplinary integration, where integration marks the
very possible success condition of interdisciplinary inquiry. Instead, I suggest we think of an
integrated understanding of a complex problem as the understanding that is warranted in light of
how we prioritize among, and weigh tradeoffs between, the values at stake in the situation.29 This
preserves the sense in which integration marks the highest achievement of interdisciplinary
science, and frees interdisciplinary science from the Sisyphean task of producing a
comprehensive representation of reality.
One final remark is in order here. This approach to interdisciplinary social-ecological
systems science must be adaptive. Community members may prioritize particular goods,
principles, or virtues at the onset of deliberation that they may then revise on the basis of
subsequent experience. It may seem appropriate to prioritize economic development over
biological conservation until agricultural expansion proves unsustainable, or it may seem
appropriate to favor community-based management until its consequences for women or the
rural poor become apparent. Scientists can help testify to these tradeoffs when they participate in
deliberations. Now, certain values will remain the ground for deliberation; in order to weigh
tradeoffs between economic development and biological conservation, one must appeal to shared
values like security, sustainability, and opportunity. But inquiry can discover that the weight we

29

For Hirsch and Brosius (2013), integration is a matter of understanding the tradeoffs between different responses
to a problem. In effect, my proposal pushes integration one step farther; not only must we understand these
tradeoffs, but we must also understand how to correctly weigh these tradeoffs, and hence we must know how to act
given our particular priorities as a community.

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placed on various values was mistaken, and that we ought to reprioritize our values. Ultimately,
we are striving for a constellation of practices that sustains our plurality of values, and we must
constantly return to experience to test these practices.
Conclusion
Environmental pragmatists recommend democratic deliberation as a procedure for
legitimately integrating facts and values when engaged in environmental science, policy, and
management. Through such a procedure, we recognize the instrumental quality of scientific
descriptions. Most of the dissertation is dedicated to clarifying this instrumental quality in the
social sciences, so that we can recognize the normative and valuational assumptions implicit to
social theories from diverse disciplines. This chapter is concerned with a remaining challenge;
once we recognize how facts and values are integrated in various social sciences, how do we
then integrate these social sciences through interdisciplinary collaboration. My tack is hardly
surprising—once again, we must attend to the values implicit to these social sciences, and then
organize disciplinary contributions according to how we prioritize the values at stake in
ameliorating a problematic situation.
The case study from Menabe, Madagascar serves as a model of how a complex socialecological system admits of an interdisciplinary description that attends to the plurality of values
at stake in describing the system. Because it is how we prioritize these values that structures how
scientists and stakeholders correctly describe the system, I take interdisciplinary collaboration to
have a fundamental ethical dimension. In other words, ethical reasons provide the ground for
justifying what disciplinary vocabularies should be included in the project and, from those
included, which vocabularies should initially frame the situation as a problem. Interdisciplinary
collaboration should work outward from the disciplinary vocabulary that speaks to what we

173

value the most, then proceed by considering in turn the remaining problems as described in the
vocabularies of additional academic disciplines. This procedure is fallible, and must be adaptive,
but it has the benefit of focusing on the significant truths that should serve as a basis for action.
There are simply too many true ways to describe a social-ecological system, and settling on the
right description requires a rich dialogue about the consequences, principles, and virtues at stake
in issuing a description that provides reasons for action.

174

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