The Problem of Representational Adequacy, or How to Evidence an Ecosystem

Abstract

Environmental action, i.e., acting for the sake of the environment, requires for its justification both evaluation and cognition with respect to organisms, habitats, and ecosystems: how they evolve, how they work, how they languish, how they change, how they flourish, and how they die. The present investigation is generally confined to cognition. Cognition is believing justified by evidencing. Along one dimension, such justification can be prima facie or critical; along another dimension, justified believing can be in various degrees relative or non-relative; along a third dimension it can be certainly or probably positive or negative; and along a fourth dimension it can be pre-predicative or predicative and, in the latter case, it can also be called knowledge.

Earlier versions of this essay have been presented to the Departments of Philosophy at the Universities of Waterloo, Jadivpur, Poona, and South Florida and I am grateful to colleagues for their responses on those occasions. Related work by the present author includes Lester Embree, “The Phenomenology of Representational Awareness,” Human Studies 15 (1992), 301-311; “Phenomenology of a Change in Archaeological Observation,” in Metaarchaeology: Reflections by Archaeologists and Philosophers, ed. Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992); and “Representation and the Historical Sciences,” in Phenomenology East and West: Festschrift for J. N. Mohanty, ed. F. M. Kirkland and D. P. Chattopadhyaya (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993).