Hypatia

In bringing together the central topic of Lorraine Code's new book, Ecological Thinking (2006), with that of her first book, Epistemic Responsibility (1987), I want to draw attention to the location of her topics and positions in in-between places (or in-among places, granting that there may be more than two). A clear in-between place is visible with the terms epistemic responsibility and ecological thinking. They both link epistemic with ethical (or ethical-political) concerns, producing new intersections among areas of philosophy that have often been quite separate—epistemology, ethics, and social and political philosophy. In part because of Code's earlier work, discussions about epistemic responsibility, epistemic trust, and epistemic injustice are becoming increasingly visible in epistemology, particularly in intersections among the relatively new areas of social epistemology, virtue epistemology, and feminist epistemology (including feminist moral epistemology). In her new book, Code advances these and other in-between and intersecting places in important new ways.

Ecological thinking is a term that Code uses in both literal and metaphorical senses. She grants (in chapter 1) something of a starting place in Rachel Carson's work on (literal) ecology. She draws attention to Carson's specific understandings of habitat and habitability, terms that also suggest intersecting and interacting places since they refuse or challenge certain kinds of literal or conceptual separations between parts or species of nature and between human and nonhuman nature. In addition, ecology is not just about the empirical study of the many relationships among species and habitats: in closely linking habitat with habitability, ecology carries significant moral and political as well as epistemic dimensions. It promotes understandings and knowings that are attentive to the fact that some habitats are more fragile than others, and that human [End Page 170] action informed by specific forms of knowing and unknowing have contributed, and can continue to contribute, to making habitats more or less habitable—and not just for humans. These kinds of knowing, therefore, are as attentive to ethical-political concerns about survival, sustainability, and habitability as they are to specific empirical details about how ecosystems function.

In connecting—through metaphor and analogy—thinking about (literal) ecology, about habitats and habitability, to thinking and knowing in many different areas of inquiry and knowledge, Code is arguing that thinking and knowing in these many areas must also be mindful of, and directed toward, illuminating and developing the moral and political concerns that responsible knowing involves. "An ecologically modeled conception of knowledge and subjectivity thus initiates an instituting epistemic-moral-political imaginary in which these three conjoined modes of inquiry work reciprocally, intra-actively together" (2006, 35). Concerns with habitability permeate Code's reflections on knowledge and epistemology. They include concerns—prominent in feminist and other justice-motivated projects in epistemology—with making areas or disciplines of knowledge and of epistemology habitable for the many for whom they have not been, either because they did not have access to them or because their histories, experiences, and voices were excluded from them or because they were grossly misrepresented in them or because their liberatory struggles were simply deemed misguided or irrational within them.

Code's overall argument draws together other kinds of in-between places, besides those linking epistemic and moral-political understandings. Much work in feminist epistemology, including notably, Code's (1991, 1995), has uncovered the role of various dichotomies in structuring epistemological thinking in Western philosophy. Gender as well as race and class divisions and associations not only informed the "naturalness" or "obviousness" of these dichotomies but also informed the privileging of reason over emotion, fact over value, objectivity over subjectivity, mind over body, and theory over practice in dominant conceptions of knowing and knowledge. The attainment of "true knowledge" regularly required some form of displacement or control over the second and female-coded (or "inferior race"–coded) aspects or sides of these dichotomies (Rooney 1994). Such dichotomies thus contributed to the habitus and ethos of mastery that sustained the epistemological imaginary of what Code calls "epistemologies of mastery," in contrast to which she constructs her ecological epistemological imaginary. Many feminist epistemologists have argued that simply revaluing the female...