Has science ever been normal? On the need and impossibility of a sustainability science

Futures 43 (2011) 627–636

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Has science ever been normal? On the need and impossibility of a sustainability science Gert Goeminne * Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation, Flanders (FWO), Centre Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Centre for Sustainable Development, Ghent University, Krijgskundestraat 33, 1160 Brussels, Belgium

A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Article history: Available online 19 April 2011

In this article, I develop a constructive critique of ‘post-normal science’ by challenging the underlying conception of ‘normal science’. Invoking Bruno Latour’s constructivist approach, I change focus from a representationalist understanding to a practice-inspired account of science in which the composition of a matter of fact necessarily implies a politically significant differentiation between internalities and externalities. Contending that science has never been normal in that it has always already been political, I further elaborate on this political dimension by connecting Latour’s concepts of matters of fact and matters of concern with Rudolf Boehm’s distinction between logical and topical truth. Whereas logical truth is a measure of the validity of matters of fact, topical truth is a measure of the relevance and adequacy of scientific knowledge regarding a particular matter of concern. This allows me to argue that any attempt to install a new ‘post-normal science’ with a higher topical truth visa`-vis sustainability issues neglects the irreducible political moment situated at the point of determining who and what we should be concerned about. Finally, I draw on the notion of ‘forms of life’ to suggest a ‘politics of the imaginable’ that takes socio-material practices as primary matters of a concern for sustainability. ß 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction: the appeal of a post-normal science for sustainability The idea that science should somehow play a prominent, if not the leading role in addressing environmental issues is of course nothing new. Indeed, a crucial ingredient in the growth of environmental awareness in the 20th century has been its reliance on a scientific approach in framing and representing what are thought to constitute the root problems. Science being regarded as the mirror of nature, environmental concerns have been typically framed in terms of hard natural science issues and their soft social consequences. Basically, the argument goes, our lifeworld is threatened by too much CO2 in the atmosphere, too much nitrates in the water, too little biodiversity, etc. However, actual environmental problems are much more complex, repeatedly cutting across this nature/society boundary. Climate change, for example, while from the perspective of natural science is primarily a matter of atmospheric CO2 concentrations is also, and arguably as much, a matter of the machinations of the automobile industry, the politics of the Kyoto Protocol, the evolutions in climate modelling, the imminent flooding of the Maldives as well as the multiple ordinary socio-material practices through which we live our carbon-intensive lives. With the arrival of ‘sustainable development’ as a more integrated approach in tackling deeply intertwined global environmental problems and development issues such as climate change, the undifferentiated view of science as

* Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0016-3287/$ – see front matter ß 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2011.04.001

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constituting the starting point in conceiving solutions got challenged: increasingly, science has been viewed as part of the problem.1 Here, I am not so much hinting at a fairly common and longstanding critique of science in terms of its technological products having caused the major environmental issues we are confronted with (nuclear waste, carbon emissions. . .). Rather I am pointing towards a critique levelled at the way science is performed and in particular its incapability to frame and address sustainability issues in an adequate way. Since the late 1980s, the idea that science is not responding adequately to the challenges of our times and in particular those posed by the quest for sustainability has gained increasing acceptance with scientists and policy-makers. This is for instance reflected in the groundbreaking work on ecological economics by Costanza and Daly in 1987 [3] and in the inaugural post-normal science paper by Funtowicz and Ravetz in 1993 [4]. The now widespread appeal for reconsidering science is well voiced by Gallopı´n et al. who ‘‘believe that it is timely and fruitful to consider how appropriate current mainstream science, both its method and its practice, is as a guiding tool for the pursuit of sustainable development’’ [5]. Amongst others, Kates et al. advocate the development of a ‘sustainability science’, which should ‘‘differ to a considerable degree in structure, methods and content from science as we know it’’ and that will require ‘‘fostering problem-driven, interdisciplinary research’’ complemented by ‘‘participatory procedures involving scientists, stakeholders, advocates, active citizens, and users of knowledge’’ [6]. In this article, I want to develop a constructive critique of these pleas for a ‘new kind of science’, be it ‘sustainability science’ or ‘post-normal science’ by challenging the common conception of ‘normal science’ that underlies them. In elaborating my critique, which is essentially epistemological–philosophical in nature, I will mainly focus on the arguments that have been developed by Funtowicz and Ravetz (F&R) under the umbrella of post-normal science (PNS), as the latter contains the most philosophically elaborated assessment of normal science’s alleged failure in addressing sustainability issues. For the sake of my argument, it is first of all important to note that, in adopting the term ‘post-normal science’, F&R at the same time pay their debts as well as express their discontent with ‘normal science’. F&R are indeed anything but antiscience: they cherish normal science as ‘‘having been enormously successful in enabling our unprecedented understanding and control of the world around us’’ [7] and still see the scientific enterprise, albeit in a modified fashion, as the pre-eminent source of useful knowledge for policy-making in the ‘postnormal times’ we find ourselves in today [8]. In a recent article, Ravetz explicitly states that PNS was indeed put forward in an attempt ‘‘to help maintain the health and integrity of science under the new conditions in which it now operates’’ [9]. Here, he also emphasizes that their original discontent with the ‘normality’ of normal science should be understood in terms of Kuhn’s account of paradigm-driven science [10]. Starting from a Kuhnian perspective, I want to focus here on what I believe are the two main features of their discontent. First of all, it refers to the puzzle-solving and autonomous character of normal science. In Kuhnian terms, it is the paradigm to which scientists are committed that defines the legitimate problems (‘puzzles’) and prescribes the rules and standards to solve them [11]. The advocates of PNS now claim that sustainability issues are intrinsically different from these puzzles prescribed by the scientific paradigms. F&R argue that while normal science is ‘‘designed for controlled experimentation, abstract theory building and full quantification’’ and may be very useful in producing a picture of reality that ‘‘reduces complex phenomena to their simple, atomic elements’’ [12], it is not suited in dealing with contemporary sustainability issues where ‘‘facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent’’ [13]. In terms of Kuhn’s paradigmatic conception of normal science, sustainability issues can indeed be viewed as ‘non-legitimate’ problems. Based on this reasoning, F&R argue that post-nomal science, quite contrary to normal science where the paradigm sets the research agenda, should be issue-driven and problem-oriented. Secondly, the alleged ‘normality’ of science refers to the general idea that mainstream normal science – ideally – delivers universally valid and value-free knowledge, which is commonly regarded as the most adequate base for decision-making. In F&R’s view, this still holds for ‘normal problems’ in the Kuhnian sense, that is to say problems that lend themselves to investigation under controllable conditions such as optimizing the energy-efficiency of technologies that reproduce stable and controllable external conditions for their working.2 This logic breaks down though for sustainability issues, PNS advocates argue, as these are intrinsically value-loaded typically dealing with complex intertwined environmental and development problems of real people in real places. In this case, the ‘normal’ knowledge basis of value-free, universal matters of facts is considered as no longer sufficient for decision-making and what is needed, they argue, is a knowledge basis of ‘‘extended facts’’ produced by ‘‘extended peer communities’’ [14]. The latter consists of ‘‘all those affected’’, that is to say ‘‘not merely of persons with some form or other of institutional accreditation, but rather of all those with a desire to participate in the resolution of the issue’’ [15]. It could be argued that, whereas normal science is about stripping humanly produced knowledge as much as possible of value-loadings and in this way elevating a particular perspective to a universal status, F&R somehow want to re-inject values and a plurality of perspectives into the scientific process to arrive at a post-normal science that now deals with particular problems through ‘‘the management of uncertainties and value-loadings’’ [16]. For F&R, this further implies that science can no longer be assessed in terms of true and false, as value-loadings and uncertainties make up

1 This is not to deny the existence of multiple – often problematic – interpretations of the concept of sustainable development including that of neoliberal status quo (See e.g. Paredis for an illuminating overview of the different positions in sustainability discourse [1]). In retrospect, however, the Brundtland report [2], which coined the notion of sustainable development, still stands as a historical marker in highlighting the critical relationship between human development and the environment. 2 As will become clear in this paper, I am also inclined to argue that normal science still serves as an adequate basis for such ‘normal problems’. Contrary to F&R however, who call upon normal science being value-free and neutral, I would argue this still holds because both the ‘normal problems’ as well as the ‘normal science’ pertain to the same set of values and concerns.

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an essential constituent of post-normally produced knowledge. Rather ‘quality’, ‘‘understood as a contextual property of scientific information,’’ should serve as ‘‘a more relevant and robust guiding principle’’ for sound science [17]. In the following sections I will challenge F&R’s account of normal science by elaborating on a constructivist inspired conception of science that builds on a close examination of actual scientific practice. This will illuminate the normativepolitical3 character of science that is always already present in scientific practice, whether normal or not. From this it should become clear that, while I tend to agree on the first point of critique levelled at normal science as being intrinsically incapable of dealing with sustainability issues, I fundamentally disagree on the second point.4 I will indeed argue that it is not because normal science lacks certain characteristics such as multiple perspectives and values, but quite contrary because it is always already, and necessarily so, full of specific values that it is not up to the task of addressing value-loaded sustainability issues. Contending that science has never been normal in the sense that it has always been and will always be political, I will call for a further thematisation and explicitation of this political dimension rather than a smoothing-out through the installation of new scientific procedures (extended peer communities) or new scientific standards (quality). 2. Has science ever been normal? In the following I want to challenge F&R’s central idea that sustainability issues have to be addressed through the ‘management of uncertainties and value-loadings’ by arguing that it relies on a faulty presupposition conceiving values as secondary, contextual characteristics of normal scientific practice. I will do so by elaborating on a constructivist account of science that, rather than conceiving of knowledge in terms of representations of the world, emphasises the socio-material practices from and within which scientific representations arise. In arguing for a closer examination of the socio-material basis of scientific knowledge construction, I am actually on the same line as F&R. I too think that it is timely and necessary to change our focus from the dispute over the truth of scientific answers to a discussion about the way science frames its issues, a discussion that cannot be settled in terms of true and false [18]. It is indeed important to note that the raging environmental controversies we are experiencing today regarding the validity, objectivity and correctness of the answers science provides, leaves the scientific questions, i.e. the way science frames environmental problems and solutions, unquestioned. In such a scientifically conditioned context, there is no legitimate stance from which to judge, the only possible attitude left vis-a`-vis science and technology being a dichotomous ‘take it or leave it’. The latter became very clear during the so-called ‘climategate’ scandal that erupted in late November 2009: the ensuing discussion on the status of climate science took place in a onedimensional discursive space, spanned by the terms false and true. In my view, this circularity is accommodated and even aggravated by a great deal of work in philosophy of science. Philosophical debates between realists, constructionists, antirealists, empirical realists and the like indifferently deal with the answers of science: the status of scientific knowledge is heavily debated, leaving aside the discussion whether this knowledge is relevant. Also here, there seems to be no room to put science itself into question. So, rather than questioning the validity of the scientific answers, I would like to question the scientific question itself, drawing on Bruno Latour’s constructivist account of science as a major source of inspiration.5 In connecting the Latourian concepts of matters of fact and matters of concern with the distinction between logical truth and topical truth made by Rudolf Boehm, I will prepare the ground for a political re-conceptualisation of science that allows revisiting the issue of PNS from a philosophically refined conceptual framework. 2.1. When matters of fact become matters of concern and vice versa In developing an adequate perspective on the relation between science and sustainability, I thus argue for a closer examination of scientific practice. This has also been Latour’s initial focus. Through ethnographic studies on scientists working in their laboratories and field sites, Latour has indeed taken his entry through what he himself calls ‘‘the back door of science in the making, not through the more grandiose entrance of ready made science’’ [22]. Along this anthropological path, Latour has developed a constructivist account of how scientific facts emerge in what he will later call an actor-network. Here, an actor or socio-technical entity is conceptualised as an emergent and increasingly stabilising network of associations between different human and non-human elements (artefacts, humans, concepts,. . .). In this view, society and nature are both constructed, ‘‘since it is the dual result of one single stabilisation process’’ [23]. This also leads to the claim that a well-

3 For reasons that should become clear throughout this paper, I prefer not to define what I mean by ‘political’ right away. Rather, the reader is invited to follow me into the world of scientific practice and see how my understanding of the political emerges out of Latour’s constructivist account of science. As a preliminary point of departure, it suffices here to mention that I use the adjective ‘political’ to indicate all aspects of human existence that are related to the question of the good life, which I thus regard as the ultimate political question. In the ensuing discussion and relying on the very foundations of Latour’s constructivism, I will try to convey an image of the political as something that is constituted by a struggle over what is to be taken into account and that is ultimately based on the idea that every construction, including a scientific one, divides and separates. 4 While this paper presents a (constructive) critique on PNS, it should not imply a denial of the importance of PNS’ endavour, in particular when viewed in a historical perspective. In putting forward the ‘mantram’ ‘‘facts uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decision urgent’’, PNS has contributed to a great extent in debunking the modern idea that science can provide a neutral ground upon which solutions to societal issues can be developed and evaluated. 5 It is remarkable that, in their 1993 paper [19], Funtowicz and Ravetz also draw on Latour, albeit only on one of his earlier works, i.e. The Pasteurisation of France [20], in sketching their view of ‘normal science’ as the study of isolated pieces of nature that is kept unnaturally stable and reproducible. As I argue further on though, a thorough reading of Latour’s work on what he calls the ‘Politics of Nature’ contradicts the idea of a ‘post-normal’ policy approach that is predicated upon scientific facts [21].

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established fact loses its meaning when divorced from its context or, read the other way around, that scientific practice is constitutive of the observed fact. As I have extensively argued elsewhere, drawing on my own experience in the world of ‘science in the making’, this is convincingly illustrated by the requirement of reproducibility that ascertains the validity of a scientific observation and of the way the latter is reported in the literature: one can only speak of what is observed by specifying a valid procedure of observation [24]. Scientific investigation is thus not so much a matter of applying established experimental rules and procedures but rather a matter of specifying, in new circumstances, what counts as a valid procedure of observation and thereby specifying how the observed phenomena are to be interpreted as matters of fact [25]. Anything that can be constructed is susceptible to destruction. In a recent article, Latour laments on the fate of constructivism and in particular how a relativist appropriation has been aimed at debunking the idea of truth and he asks: ‘‘Is it really the task of the humanities to add deconstruction to destruction’’ [26]?6 With respect to environmental issues such as climate change, Latour painfully observes how deconstructionist argumentations are now employed by policy strategists to artificially maintain a controversy concerned as they are that the acceptance of climate change as a fact would lead to government regulation. However, as Latour argues, constructivism was never supposed to be about debunking the idea of truth, but about ‘‘trying to detect the real prejudices behind the appearance of objective statements [29]’’. Indeed, already in Laboratory Life, which focuses on the emergence of the peptide TRF as a scientific fact, Latour and Woolgar state that ‘‘to say that TRF is constructed is not to deny its solidity as a fact. Rather, it is to emphasise how, where, and why it was created [30].’’ In countering the idea of constructivism as a mere debunking exercise and connecting constructivism to the political, Latour reverts to the double meaning of representation in the context of science [31]. Intuitively, one understands representing nature as showing what it is like in reality, either by itself or to us. But the notion of representation also refers to the processes whereby scientists are legitimated to do so, i.e. to speak on behalf of non-humans. More in particular, by juxtaposing matters of fact with matters of concern, Latour wants us to recognize the inherent political dimension of scientific representation as the non-neutral ways in which science composes its issues. And he asks: ‘‘Can we devise another powerful descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import then will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care. . .’’ [32]. With respect to the argument of this paper, it is important to see that in playing with the notions of matter of fact and matter of concern, Latour has a double effect in mind. First of all, Latour refers to his constructivist argument to claim that scientific matters of fact are always also matters of concern, that is to say compositions, gatherings, assemblies, issues of some sort [33]. It is also along these lines that I claim that science is political. However, Latour also uses the concept of matter of concern (in parallel with the notion of ‘hybrid’) to point towards the complex interdependencies between nature and society that make up environmental issues [34]. In Section 1, I already hinted at the hybrid natural-social character of climate change when the latter is understood as a matter of societal concern. Crucial to my argument here is that both modes of using Latour’s notion of matters of concern are ultimately connected through a question of concern: ‘‘what is it that we should be concerned about?’’ Both in the societal sphere, as well as within the disciplinary contours of science, the notion of matter of concern points towards the particular ways in which people are concerned with an issue or topic of consideration.7 With respect to ‘post-normal’ sustainability issues, it is indeed important to realise that 400 years of Western ‘postscientific-revolution’ history have turned the scientific attitude into the pre-eminent way of thinking about societal problems and solutions: matters of concern are – in our scientific culture – always already framed in matters of fact. Such a scientific framing process typically results in a theoretical model of the system of interest couched in terms of matters of fact, which, in our Western culture, gets disconnected from its genesis granting its validity a universal status: the model is regarded as delivering a true representation of the problem at stake and serves as the first and preeminent basis for policymaking. This disconnection however, blinds us for the inherent political dimension of scientific representation. Considering a model as emerging from a situated practice however, its representational content – what and how the model represents – is inseparable from that very practice. Within the context of its construction, a model aims to fulfil a certain function, and the choice of function depends on the scientist’s concern: What kind of knowledge is aimed at? What is the model supposed to account for and to take into account? Beyond construction and representation, I want to appeal to the notion of ‘composition’ to convey the idea that a scientific fact is not chosen or given; rather, it is ‘concernfully’ composed as a ‘matter of concern’.8 In the context of climate modelling, Wynne is clearly on this compositionist thread when he argues that ‘‘woven into the disciplined scientific attempt to understand what nature is saying to us about changing climate processes are always ancillary but constitutive concerns and commitments [36].’’ In his latest book, A Vast Machine, Edwards convincingly

6 Although Latour himself often abstains from using the notion constructivism for these reasons, I still prefer to characterise his approach as constructivist. As also illustrated in here, Latour has defended his constructivist position on numerous occasions, often in opposition to the relativist stance of social constructivism. In this respect, it is noteworthy to see that Latour still calls himself a ‘‘full-blooded constructivist’’ [27]. For a more detailed engagement with the epistemological realist – anti-realist debate involved in this long-standing discussion on (social) constructivism, the reader is referred to Pickering (1992) and the so-called ‘epistemological chicken’ debate [28]. 7 This crucial notion of concern, both in a scientific as well as a societal context is further elaborated in the next section, drawing on Boehm’s notion of topical truth. 8 While writing this article, I came across one of Bruno Latour’s most recent articles entitled ‘‘An attempt at a ‘‘Compositionist Manifesto’’, in which he argues that after all the critique, deconstruction and debunking of postmodernism, it is now time to compose again. Very similar to how I try to elaborate the notion of composition in a way that conveys the idea of going beyond mere representation and construction, Latour argues that compositionism should ‘‘take up the task of searching for universality without believing that this universality is already there, waiting to be unveiled and discovered. It is thus as far from relativism as it is from universalism’’ [35]. Although I have developed my notion of composition independent of Latour’s explicit use of the term, our common use is of course no coincidence as Latour’s work has always been one of my main intellectual resources.

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demonstrates that what it means to observe ‘global climate change’ is intrinsically intertwined with the concerns that have guided climate modellers in their daily practices [37]. Conceptualizing such a thing as the global climate is indeed preconditioned on a concern for homogeneity, which Edwards shows to have played a crucial role in constructing reliable climate knowledge out of a vast array of disparate information by means of modelling techniques. Demeritt, on the other hand, argues that a concern for simulation and prediction constitutes another crucial ingredient of the history of climate modelling by showing how atmospheric scientists in the 1970s deliberately tapped into growing public concerns about human impacts on the environment to secure funding for basic modelling research [38]. Environmental ‘matters of fact’ such as anthropogenic climame change are thus always also ‘matters of concern’, that is to say the results of a work of composition governed – in this case – by a concern for homogeneity, simulation and prediction. This radically different ways of understanding the work of science as a work of composition rather than of representation makes convincingly clear how the practice of producing and applying knowledge is inherently linked to political thinking and acting or how, following Jasanoff, natural and social order are co-produced [39]9. Science, conceived as a situated work of composition, is necessarily political separating what is taken into account from what is not, that is to say internalities from externalities. The natural order that is institutionalised by science is thus through and through political because it is based on some form of exclusion, as is the case with every political order [40]. With respect to climate modelling, Demeritt has for instance argued that it is only by excluding the messy social relations that drive greenhouse gas emissions and by focusing narrowly on their universal physical properties that atmospheric scientists, concerned as they were about homogeneity and predictability, have been able to compose the issue of climate change [41]. At this point, it should already be clear that a differing interpretation of the ‘situatedness of science’, that is to say the awareness that science is a human and therefore necessarily perspectival and value-loaded endeavour, lies at the crux of differentiating my constructivist, or better yet ‘compositionist’, account of science from that of F&R. The latter – negatively – understand the situatedness of science as resulting in a restricted, suboptimal knowledge of the problem at stake that gets increasingly ‘contaminated’ by uncertainty and value-loadings the more ‘situated’ the issues get, leaving value and riskjudgement as something to be dealt with by policy. Once again, it should be noted here that F&R still hang on to the possibility of universal, value free knowledge – albeit as an asymptotic ideal – in the case of normal problems that lend themselves to investigation under controllable conditions. A compositionist account of science however, positively understands the situated, perspectival character of science as being truly constitutive of the knowledge composed and as inevitably resulting in a political division between what has been taken into account in the composition and what not, even so in ‘normal circumstances’. Here, science is to be understood as always already contaminated by values and concerns and necessarily so. To put it briefly, science has never been normal. 2.2. Matters of concern and their topical truth At this point I want to suggest a conceptual connection between, on the one hand, the Latourian concepts of matters of fact and matters of concern, and, on the other, the distinction between logical truth and topical truth made by Rudolf Boehm in ‘Topik’ [42]. I will do so by digging deeper into the historical emergence of logical truth as a constitutive criterion for matters of fact, which I will trace back to the figures of Descartes and Galileo. With regard to the central topic of this paper, the political aspect of this story is to be found in the proliferation of one perspective, that of matters of fact and their logical truth, elevating itself above all others, and moreover, in the fact that this one-dimensional perspective on truth claims political neutrality as illustrated by the omnipresent calls for ‘rational decision making’ presenting the latter as a valueneutral activity. Since ancient philosophy we are told to think within three classical categories namely logic, aesthetics and ethics. In this categorization, logic has to do with the truth of a sentence whereas aesthetics refers to the beauty of things and ethics categorizes things as good or bad. Within this paradigm, reasoning about truth is one-dimensional: there exists only one truth, logical truth, which is exclusively graspable by means of the sciences. In the formal sciences, e.g. mathematics and logic, the logical truth of a sentence A is asserted if it is derivable from the accepted axioms through a stepwise deduction process using the correct deduction rules. Within the empirical sciences, the logical truth of a sentence A is asserted by referring to the correspondence between sentence A and a reality out there, the latter most of the time created in an experimental set-up. From a historical point of view, this brings us back to the beginning of the 17th century when the Italian physicist Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) and the French philosopher Rene´ Descartes (1596–1650) laid down the foundations of Modern Science and in particular its focus on the logical truth of matters of fact. In this respect, it is illustrative to follow Rudolf Boehm’s account of the emergence of modern science evolving around gravitational theory with as protagonists Aristotle and Galileo [43]. Whereas Aristotle tried to explain why heavy bodies fall faster than light ones in terms of the nature of their substance, Galileo tried to describe the way bodies fall in terms of mathematical equations. Based on his famous inclined plane experiments, some 400 years ago, Galileo formulated a mathematical universal law for falling bodies, i.e. s = 1/2gt2, which says that the distance covered (s) by a free-falling object is proportional to the elapsed time (t) squared, the proportionality given by one half of the gravitational constant (g). On the basis of this law, Galileo claims that all bodies,

9 Although Jasanoff may not want to buy into a compositionist discourse as brought to my attention by an anonymous referee, her notion of coproduction does bear a lot of Latourian imprints.

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whatever their weight or their substance, fall equally fast. The point I want to make here is that Aristotle and Galileo were differently situated in the world revealing the world in different ways to them. Whereas Aristotle saw bodies moving towards their natural place according to the nature of their substance, Galileo saw objects obeying a universal law. Adhering to different paradigms, the two had differing concerns: Aristotle’s ‘topic’ was the movement of naturally falling objects in our daily lifeworld whereas Galileo was looking for falling objects in artificial experimental conditions in order to reveal a mathematical law. Now, according to Aristotle, heavier bodies fall faster than light ones, whereas Galileo claims that all bodies, whatever their weight, fall equally fast. The obvious question here seems to be: who is right, Aristotle or Galileo? If one simultaneously drops a piece of paper and a book, as Rudolf Boehm himself often did in front of his students, he will conclude that Aristotle was right. However, one might object that Galileo postulated the validity of his law only for free falling bodies, i.e. bodies falling in a vacuum. Stripping them from their earthly conditions, Galileo produced falling objects in an artificially controlled set-up, which eventually yielded him the matters of fact expressed in the mathematical laws of his gravitational theory. At this point, I refer back to Latour’s constructivist viewpoint, which leads him to speak about the production of truth rather then about scientific results being true or false. Indeed, I have already argued how the assertion of a correspondence between a model and reality is not so much a matter of passively observing if the correspondence holds under different experimental tests but rather of concernfully composing reality – which was never a human-independent entity out there to begin with – as a matter of fact, the latter’s representational content being inseparable from that very composition practice. The question remains open, however, if the results of this composition, the matters of fact, are interesting or uninteresting, that is of high or little interest, importance and relevance. At this point, we touch upon Boehm’s question of topical truth. The crucial point Boehm wants to convey is that the choice between the paradigms of Aristotle and Galileo cannot be decided in terms of logical truth, i.e. who is right?, but only in terms of ‘topical truth’, i.e. what issue is at stake [44]? The topical question does not question the truth of an answer to a question. It rather questions the truth of the question in terms of its thematic as well as its methodological approach, that is to say, its relevance and adequacy with regard to what is considered to be at stake, that is the matter of concern. In adopting the concept of topical truth I thus want to stretch the normative space: whereas science is commonly ruled by the norm of logical truth, topical truth questions the interest and relevance of that truth. It follows from this that such a questioning must be relational: just as the dispute between Aristotle and Galileo can only be decided in terms of relevance and adequacy, so will a topical questioning of scientific truth be dependent on what is regarded as being the issue at stake. With regard to the dialectic coming-into-being of method and content in scientific practice for instance, the topical question is mainly concerned with an a-posteriori laying bare of the concern that was constitutive for the resulting objective knowledge. Here, typical topical questions include: what are the internalities that are taken into account and what are the externalities that fall out of view in a particular scientific paradigm? How are these internalities represented and what does such a representation enable and constrain in terms of human action? At this point it becomes possible to discuss, for instance, the topical truth of CO2-concentrations with regard to climate change, the latter now considered as a matter of societal concern. I will come back to this point in the next section where I challenge the idea that the global climate change issue, and particularly the workings of the IPCC, can be viewed as a successful case of PNS [45]. 2.3. Post-normal science revisited Equipped with the Latourian notions of matters of fact and matters of concern complemented by Boehm’s distinction between logical and topical truth, we are now in a better position to assess the call for a post-normal science for sustainability. Indeed, whereas logical truth is a measure of the answers of science in terms of the correspondence between matters of fact and a reality out there, topical truth can be thought of as a measure of the questions of science in terms of the relevance and adequacy with regard to what is considered to be the matter of concern. For this reason, topical truth is a very apt concept to frame and assess the aspirations of PNS as an issue-driven and problem-oriented endeavour. It indeed allows us to reframe the first critique of PNS regarding the puzzle-solving character of normal science (see Section 1, for an extensive account of this critique) as follows: normal science’s matters of fact often have a low topical truth with respect to sustainability issues. Indeed, I have argued that matters of fact are always also matters of a particular concern (such as a concern for homegeneity, simulation and prediction in the case of climate modeling - see above) making normal science inadequate to deal with matters of a concern for sustainability. In my view, the way in which climate change is addressed within the intertwined institutional and scientific contours of the UN climate treaty serves as a pre-eminent example. Reflecting on the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit, I have recently argued that the scientific focus on CO2 in addressing climate change, which is first and foremost a matter of political concern for an environmentally sustainable and socially just society, has resulted in a one-sided approach of CO2-efficiency: human action is no longer weighed against the question of the good life but instead is weighed against the question how much CO2 we emit in this way [46]. I am thus suggesting here that CO2-concentrations have a low topical truth with regard to climate change as a matter of societal concern. Although going almost unnoticed, actual CO2-based climate policy paralyzes the political struggle in the sense that it does not allow contesting and discussing alternative visions of society. Rather than questioning the reigning socioeconomic order by imagining and formulating alternatives, a one-sided CO2 reduction strategy is organised within the existing neo-liberal order. It is indeed telling that CO2 is now a tradable commodity. Swyngedouw draws a similar conclusion, although not putting it in terms of the low topical truth of CO2-concentrations, when he states that ‘‘the

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undisputed matters of fact (except by a small number of maverick scientists) are, without proper political intermediation translated into matters of concern’’ [47]. In reframing the first critique of PNS in terms of the topical truth of normal science I have also expressed my agreement on this point. At the same time, however, I have begun to challenge the second critique of PNS on the normality of science (see Section 1, for an extensive account of this critique). In the conceptual language developed here, I take it that PNS-advocates would argue that normal matters of facts have a low topical truth vis-a`-vis sustainability issues because such universal facts do not incorporate the perspectives and value-loadings relevant to the real problems of real people that are at stake. I, on the contrary, contend that their topical truth is low due to the very particular values that such normal facts necessarily incorporate and that are incommensurable with the real issues at stake. In this respect, it is once again crucial to see that, whereas F&R see values as contextual, secondary characteristics of facts, I see them as constitutive. As a consequence, PNS argues for the necessity to address matters of concern through an extended scientific procedure that produces extended facts with a higher topical truth. The latter are obtained by contextualising normal matters of facts through the injection of the relevant values and multiple perspectives. Indeed, as I have mentioned at the very beginning, F&R still see science as foundational in framing and addressing matters of concern, something that is made visibly clear in their well-know diagram consisting of concentric circles with normal science at the very heart [48]. The conception of PNS is thus predicated on normal science: although all stakeholders are invited to participate in PNS, it is normal science that still sets the stakes. Here, my critique on PNS takes full shape. Indeed, I contend that any attempt to install a new ‘post-normal’ science with a higher topical truth vis-a-vis sustainability issues neglects the irreducible political moment that is situated at the point of determining what ‘the issue at stake’ is or should be. However neutral the invocation of the term ‘science’ in PNS may sound, one cannot and should not try to smooth out the non-neutral and very political struggle that underlies the decision on what it is that one should be concerned about. Neither can or should one smooth out this struggle by invoking consensual ideas about ‘extended peer communities’ as I have argued that the boundaries of such a post-normal negotiation space are preconditioned by science.10 In a very profound way, PNS is still caught in a deterministic logic of rational-decision-making leading from science to policy by gradually extending matters of fact into matters of concern. Pleading for a ‘politics of the imaginable’, I will argue further on that this order should be reversed, starting off with the topical, that is to say political question of what we should be concerned about. This is not to say that matters of fact should not play a role in raising a matter of concern, like CO2 has done in raising concern about climate change. But as I have argued, matters of fact are always also matters of concern and thus always already political on their own terms: when matters of fact do raise a matter of societal concern, they do so in a truly political, that is divisive way, separating internalities from externalities. This necessarily implies that the matter of concern raised in such a scientific way cannot be dealt with adequately through a consensual procedure that is predicated on that scientific basis. Otherwise the political question of what we should be concerned about is already decided on by science. This is what the climate change issue, and in particular the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit, should have learned us by now [52]. No matter how extended or politicized the IPCCcommunity is, matters of fact still set the terms of the debate, leaving no room to get an adequate grip on the ultimate political question of the good life and on how the latter is predicated upon the actual daily socio-material practices through which we live our carbon-intensive lives. In the next section, I will draw on the notion of ‘forms of life’ to suggest a ‘politics of the imaginable’ that takes socio-material practices as primary matters of a concern for sustainability.

3. Sustainable ‘forms of life’: towards a politics of the imaginable In elaborating my critique of PNS, I have departed from epistemological-philosophical grounds to argue that any approach that is predicated on a scientific way of framing what we should be concerned about will not allow us to address the current unsustainable socio-environmental formation and the actual socio-material practices it embraces. In a recent article, Healy has developed a similar critique of PNS taking his starting point – quite the other way around- in the central notion of ‘forms of life’ [53]. The latter, according to Healy, refers to ‘‘the complex interdependencies between culture, the specificities of everyday life, and the technoscientific achievements that result from (extended or otherwise) factual claims’’ [54]. Healy gives the example of air-conditioning as such a ‘form of life’ to show how it ‘‘not only conditions the air but also bodily dispositions, clothing habits and the form and content of built environments, in addition to displacing more traditional adaptive approaches to thermal comfort, while also significantly adding to rising energy consumption’’ [54]. Realizing that current ‘forms of life’ such as automobility, air-conditioning and showering are highly techno-scientifically conditioned, a full ‘topical’ appreciation of the concept should give equal attention to the ways in which ‘forms of life’ and the socio-material practices they embrace are shaped by human action, as well as to how ‘forms of life’ themselves give shape to the range of available options for human action. As such, ‘forms of life’ implicitly incorporate normative ideas in the sense that they co-determine what is perceived as the normal way to live the good life [55]. In the context of personal hygiene for instance, Shove has extensively illustrated how the introduction of the shower has changed our ideas of what a ‘normal’ level

10 In this sense, my critique on PNS could be connected to Swyngedouw [49], Mouffe [50] and Rancie`re [51] who invoke the term ‘post-politics’ to lament the evacuation of antagonistic notions such as exclusion, adversary and contestation from the political sphere reducing politics to a mere instrumental conception focused on the consensual administration of environmental, social, economic or other domains.

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of cleanliness is and how this (e.g. the habit of taking at least 1 shower a day) in turn can have a huge environmental impact (e.g. huge levels of water and energy consumption) [56]. Departing from the idea that ‘forms of life’ play a constitutive role in co-shaping concrete answers to the question of the good life, Healy seems to argue that ‘forms of life’ should serve as a central notion in determining what should be at stake in sustainability politics, that is to say ‘forms of life’ should be our primary matter of concern. Indeed, he writes: ‘‘While an emphasis upon ‘forms of life’ is discontinuous with the ongoing tendency to privilege science in accounts of decision-making it resonates with, the implicit dimensions of, political practice. This is not to condone this practice, however, but rather to argue for the reinstatement of effective societal oversight by making the implicit in political practice, explicit’’ [54]. And although he grants PNS to have provided a corrective to the implicit privilege the model of rational decision making grants science ‘‘through licensing non-expert involvement in the characterisation of current conditions and in deciding the ‘optimality’ of selected ‘solutions’’ [57], he maintains that PNS will never get an adequate grip on ‘forms of life’ as ‘‘PNS reproduces the traditional logic which assumes that superior outcomes rest upon the quality of ‘facts’ informing them’’ [58]. He concludes that, beyond PNS, ‘‘another step, entirely removing the implicit privilege granted science, is required’’ [57]. Similar to my reversal of the priority of matters of fact over matters of concern and of science over politics, Healy grants priority to ‘forms of life’ as that what should constitute the core of political debate: ‘‘our current ‘form of life’ is the primary problem’’ which ‘‘requires a fundamental rethinking of the kind of societies we aspire to and then abstracting from this which technologies, which science, which economics might best serve this purpose, rather than the other way around’’ [57]. This brings me to my plea for moving from a ‘politics of the knowable’ to a ‘politics of the imaginable’. Politics of the knowable, of which I have argued PNS still makes part, is founded upon ‘what can be known’. Within the contours of such a politics, sustainable futures are typically conceived of in terms of techno-scientific parameters such as CO2-emissions and other matters of fact. The latter then set the boundaries of societal debate which subject is now limited to the technologies and market mechanisms that should be deployed to reach these criteria. In such a scientifically preconditioned context, societal debate is easily reduced to a negotiation of technological risks and (economic) interests, neglecting the very concrete ‘forms of life’ and socio-material practices that should eventually constitute a sustainable future. A ‘politics of the imaginable’ however, is founded upon ‘what can be imagined’, conceiving of alternative ‘forms of life’ that can be contested and discussed in terms of the good life. To illustrate how such a ‘politics of the imaginable’ may differ from the reigning ‘politics of the knowable’, I refer to the widespread enthusiasm surrounding the development of the electric car as being one of the spearheads of the transition to a low carbon economy. Here, the electric car is typically promoted within a matter-of-fact based discourse revolving around carbon efficiency; a clear case of ‘politics of the knowable’. In this respect, it is noteworthy that the public debate mostly focuses on those aspects in which the electric version still falls short when compared to the classical gasoline and diesel cars: a smaller range, limited acceleration power and a lower top speed. Removing these so-called shortcomings is then put forward as the evident challenges for an innovative economy. Apparently, innovation has to bring more of the same. However in thinking about this from a ‘form of life’ perspective, the electric car could be ‘imagined’ within a new kind of rationality, turning these alleged shortcomings into societal blessings. Not only could its lower top speed and acceleration power be embraced as a way to establish a safer and less stressful traffic situation, its limited range could moreover be seized upon to question the desirability of an unlimited automobility in terms of ‘the good life’ and could constitute a concrete starting point in conceiving alternative ways of organising our daily life.11 This example further shows that my notion of a ‘politics of the imaginable’ does not have to be associated with revolutionary ideas, calling for the radically new. Rather, a ‘politics of the imaginable’ takes its point of departure in what is already there, thereby arguing for a recomposition of already existing elements within a new logic beyond the allegedly neutral criterion of efficiency. Once again, it is important to see that a full appreciation of the technoscientific embeddedness of our contemporary lives implies due attention for the ways in which science and technology co-shape human practices in non-neutral ways [60]. It is only by seeing how human existence is always already interweaved with science and technology within existing ‘forms of life’ and by imagining new ways of interweaving them within new ‘forms of life’, that we can begin to conceive of a ‘politics of the imaginable’ that is capable of addressing the question of the good life in our contemporary world.

4. Conclusion In conclusion of my plea for a politics of the imaginable, I want to revert once more to Bruno Latour who has argued for a similar move from ‘Realtpolitik’, the classical political activity of assembling around an already composed fact (whether extended or not), to ‘Dingpolitik’, thereby referring to the etymological meaning of the word ‘Ding’ or ‘Thing’ as the issue around which a public is concerned: As every reader of Heidegger knows, or as every glance at the English dictionary under the heading ‘‘Thing’’ will certify, the old word ‘‘Thing’’ or ‘‘Ding’’ designated originally a certain type of archaic assembly. (. . .L)ong before designating

11 In this respect, the approach suggested here bears resemblances with Andrew Feenberg’s theory of demcoratic rationalisation, the latter focussing on transforming technological regimes through users re-appropriating a technological artefact within a new regime [59].

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an object thrown out of the political sphere and standing there objectively and independently, the Ding or Thing has for many centuries meant the issue that brings people together because it divides them. The same etymology lies dormant in the Latin res, the Greek aitia, and the French or Italian cause [61]. The key move from Realpolitik to Dingpolitik thus lies in the transition from matters of fact to matters of concern. It is to make all definitions of politics turn around the issues or the topics of consideration instead of having the issues enter into a ready made political sphere of rational decision-making, whether post-normally revised or not. Understanding the task of raising and addressing matters of concern as a work of composition however, is the true political heritage of constructivism, conceiving politics as an adversarial struggle over who and what is to be taken into account. Such a struggle presupposes the openness towards alternative ‘forms of life’, the composition of which constitutes the genuine task of a politics of the imaginable. Acknowledgments A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 11th Conference of the International Society for Ecological Economics (Trento, September 2010) in the special session on ‘Sustainability Science and Transdisciplinarity’. I would like to thank Joeri Gerlo, Filip Kolen and Michel Lavrauw for early discussions underlying this paper and the anonymous referees for valuable remarks and suggestions. My research is supported by a postdoctoral fellowship of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO). References [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

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