ABSTRACT
The complexity of policymaking itself can promote polarization. Underestimating that complexity or hoping to escape it, participants take shortcuts. Policy discussion usually involves several seemingly different kinds of pronouncements. Critics of conventional agriculture have often focused their criticisms on the values it appears to represent. The crisis of modern large-scale agriculture is rooted in the crises of modern science and economics, particularly in their disregard for the wholeness of nature. The wrongness of conventional agriculture then, lies in its failure to adopt the right values. An argument frequently raised against the viability of organic agriculture is that it is impossible to change the values consumers express in their shopping decisions: a greater concern with price, appearance, and convenience than with flavor or nutrition. Strident defenses of conventional agriculture are often underlain by assumptions about the nature and worth of science that are rarely made explicit and even more rarely critically examined by agricultural scientists.
