Nature - autonomous learning

strange natures 17physical play in gardens and parks.Yet, persuasive as these examples mightseem, I’d make two counter-arguments. One is that even the practisingfarmer and the developing child learn about nature, in some measure,through knowledge passed down to them by their families, parents orwhat have you.The other is that much of the nature we think we know abouthas, in fact, rarely been seen, touched, heard or experienced by us. Rather,we’ve been told what it’s ‘really like’ by all those knowledge-producinginstitutions and professions mentioned above. For instance, personallyI’ve never visited a glacier. How, then, do I know what a glacier is and howit moves? The answer is that I only know through a mixture of my geographicaleducation and the occasional television documentary. I simply take iton trust that the knowledge fed to me is a fair representation of what ‘realglaciers’ are like. My understanding of glaciers is, in other words, derivedfrom ‘second-hand non-experience’.In a broad sense, then, knowledges that are inherited, assimilatedand learned act as a filter that mediates between ourselves and nature– whether the nature in question be the non-human world or our ownbodily natures (see Figure 0.1 again). However, it’s worth noting thatknowledges of nature (and indeed all knowledges) come in three forms.Cognitive knowledges make claims about what is (and is not) natural; theyseek to describe and explain those things we call ‘nature’. Moral (or ethical)knowledges, as the name suggests, entail value judgements about the proprietyof what is (and, again, is not) done to those things we consider to be natural.Finally, aesthetic knowledges seek to instruct us on what is beautiful, upliftingor otherwise pleasurable about what we call ‘nature’.Aesthetic knowledgesare less about what is ‘good’, ‘right’ and ‘just’ (this trio is the domainof moral knowledges) and more about what is edifying and sensuallysatisfying. It’s important to note that moral and aesthetic knowledges comein two forms: descriptive knowledges and normative knowledges. The former arecurrently existing moral and aesthetic knowledges that have some purchasein society.The latter are suggestions about the kind of moral and aestheticknowledges we should adhere to in the future. Normative knowledges areusually critical of descriptive knowledges and the practices they licence.Weshould also note that moral knowledges (and to a lesser extent aestheticones) are sometimes ‘read-off’ by people from cognitive claims. Forinstance, in the case of the story about ‘Daniel’, he and his mother deemedhis father’s claims to parenthood ‘illegitimate’ because of the lack of a bloodtie.All this is summarised in Table 1.2.