Redesigning Animal Agriculture

12 R. Bawden
takes the opposing view and rejects the idea
that explanation and prediction are ever
symmetrical. Finally, where truth is seen to
‘reside out there’ in the traditional paradigm,
from a realist perspective the source of truth
is neither ‘out there’ nor within the self, but
in the dialectical relationship between the
knower and the known. This latter position
is therefore more likely to admit to normative
influences where the former, traditional
epistemology of science, eschews that.
While all of these distinctions are significant
in one manner or another, perhaps
the most constraining element of traditional
science, with respect to its role in development
at least, is the rejection of the normative
dimension, for, as Goulet (1995) submits,
development is above all else a question of
human values and attitudes. And as he further
posits, it is about the self-definition of
goals by societies and the collective determination
of criteria ‘for determining what are
tolerable costs to be borne, and by whom, in
the course of change’. There is little doubt
that this situation presents a significant epistemic
challenge to those who would accept
the need for the systemic development of
animal agriculture but who have traditionally
been captives of positivistic science.
The next challenge is, in many ways,
even more difficult to reconcile, for it relates
not directly to science or to scientists but to
the manner by which society has adopted
scientific rationality to the apparent exclusion
of virtually all other ways of knowing
and all other epistemologies. In this manner,
as Norgaard (1994) suggests, very significant
constraints are being imposed on the process
of development through the ‘narrowness of
accepted patterns of thinking in the modern
world’, with the instrumentality of technoscience
thoroughly embroiled at the heart of
the matter. So it is not so much how scientists
go about their work of understanding
the natural and social worlds, but how the
citizenry have come to abdicate their own
responsibilities for judgements about the
way they live their lives in those worlds in
deferring to the authority of scientists. This
phenomenon extends beyond instrumental
knowledge into the process of moral judgement.
As Busch (2000) argues, we have
spent several centuries now, secure in the
abdication of our individual moral responsibilities
to the care of what he refers to as
‘one Leviathan or another’ such as ‘science’,
or ‘the state’, or ‘the market’. We have been
seemingly content, he submits, to place our
trust respectively in scientists, authoritarian
monarchs, or the market to tell us what
is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Similar arguments can
be made for organized religion, with individuals
abdicating their individual moral
responsibilities to one ‘church’ or another
whose dogmas have led to the loss of the
will and/or the capacity for critical reflexivity.
That which is ‘right and proper’ will be
found in ‘the good book’ or will be revealed
in some other spiritual manner, and a moral
life then becomes that which is led under
guidance of such revelations. The call for
transformation in this context is based on
the premise that there would seem to be too
many instances where faith appears ‘blind’
to contemporary circumstances or where
it is being lost without the resumption of
moral responsibilities by individuals.
The instrumentalist dominance has thus
been accompanied by the elevation of scientists
to positions of social dominance as ‘public
decision makers’ by virtue of their status
as ‘experts’. Regrettably there is little doubt
that some scientists have exploited what
Gadamer (1975) has called ‘this peculiar
falsehood of modern consciousness’. And
regrettably, as Wynne (1996) has claimed,
there are ample examples of situations
where ‘experts’, including animal scientists,
have ‘tacitly and furtively’ imposed prescriptive
models of development upon lay
people which have subsequently often ‘been
wanting in human terms’. This has all led,
as some see it, to the establishment of what
Yankelovich (1991) calls a ‘culture of technical
control’ and to an epistemic climate of
‘cognitive authoritarianism’, where the rationality
of thinking for oneself diminishes as
the knowledge-gathering activities within
societies expand beyond their capacities to
deal with all they gather (Fuller, 1988).
And so to the matter of what can and
should be done in the face of these epistemic
challenges to the systemic development
of an animal agriculture, which both