ABSTRACT
In the previous three chapters, I’ve presented an analytical vocabulary that allows us to make sense of how others make sense of the world for us. Nature and its collateral terms, I’ve argued, are ‘concepts we live by’, such is their pervasiveness in our collective discourse. 1 They are, I have suggested, a major terrain upon which myriad epistemic communities operate. A metaphorical contest occurs between these communities over how the terrain is to be demarcated, partitioned and understood. In other cases, communities share and rework the epistemic products of others as part of their own practice. However, in almost all cases audiences of various kinds are invited to consume representations whose creation they know little about. These representations, operative across the full range of communicative genres, become the raw materials out of which people understand both themselves and the wider world we all inhabit. They inform our habits of action and inaction. They are part of the incessant socio-material process of ‘governing’ individuals, in the broadest sense of that term. They are, in other words, a key ingredient in achieving both sociocultural stability and various forms (and degrees) of change.
