Nature - autonomous learning

16 strange naturestake a British case once more, the early 1990s saw the outbreak of BSE incattle, an infectious neuro-degenerative disease that has a human form(Creutzfeldt-Jakobs Disease). By 1993 some 100,000 farm animals wereaffected. Animal biologists working in universities and for the Britishgovernment were fairly confident about the causes of, and remedies for,these two diseases. They were equally confident that BSE-infected meatposed no public health risk, although measures were taken to remove suchmeat from the food chain. Drawing upon the authority of science, theBritish government devised a policy to manage and eliminate BSE. By 1996it turned out that this policy may have been founded on mistaken beliefs.Hitherto ignored or marginalised scientific research suggested that as manyas half a million people could have CJD because of eating meat from BSEinfectedcattle.The British governments’ attempt to legitimise its policydecisions by depicting scientific knowledge as ‘reliable’ and ‘true’ backfired.The result was not just a collapse in the British cattle industry, but also apublic loss of faith in the ability of professional researchers to deal incertainties rather than merely supposition and conjecture. 8This brings me to the second reason for emphasising the multipledomains in which knowledges of nature are produced. It’s important not toconfuse knowledges of nature with the ‘natural’ things those knowledges are about. Therelationship between knowledge and the world it depicts has preoccupiedgenerations of philosophers. For now, we simply need to recognise thatwithout knowledges of nature we can never really come to know the natureto which those knowledges refer.This is not say that we only comprehendnature by means of formal statements about, and mental understandingsof, it.Touch, sound and smell matter immensely too. But it remains the casethat we use tacit and explicit knowledges to organise our engagements withthose phenomena we classify as ‘natural’.There is, in short, no unmediatedaccess to the natural world free from frameworks of understanding.Theseframeworks organise the way that individuals and groups view nature anddelimit where the natural ends and the unnatural, non-natural or artificialbegins.Some readers might object that many understandings of the naturalworld are relatively direct and unmediated – untroubled by any ‘detour’through inherited frameworks of understanding. For example: they mightcite the farmer whose intimate knowledge of soils and crops comes fromyears of practical experience. Equally, they might cite the child whosegrowing understanding of what their body can do comes, in part, from