ABSTRACT
First, the combinations of the hard sciences and human sciences that make up climate change studies – even though interdisciplinary research networks bring these sciences together – keep the disciplinary borders of various fields in place. There are, of course, some sciences – geography, psychology – that are in part both hard and social sciences, but even this division within the subject presupposes something like the idea of a human science. That disciplinary distinction, as Michel Foucault argued in The Order of Things, is not simply a division of labor that takes a single subject such as nineteenth-century natural history and then divides the same practices of gathering information into different disciplines: what counts as true or false alters dramatically, with the very idea of a distinction between hard science and social or human science creating “man” as a distinct object of knowledge.1 Foucault argues, for example, that we cannot see natural history as simply preceding biology or the science of life. Nor can we read Adam Smith’s theory of wealth as leading seamlessly to economics; nor can we see theories of grammar as similar in type to the social science of linguistics.
