The Apparency of Evidence
It cannot be said that the matters of science are uncertain just because they abound with quarrels and controversies.
— Spinoza, Ethics, 1677
This essay considers how the ethical and
epistemological confusions apparent in the private reflections of European
naturalists of the nineteenth century suggest an alternative history of
colonial science and its long-presumed positivist trajectory. By attending to some
lesser-known letters, exchanges, notebooks, and ephemera found among the
well-ordered annals of natural history, our aim is to delineate a minor history of uncertainty. This
attempt is not simply a matter of correcting the historical record, nor is it
an effort to
exonerate those responsible for developing or implementing typically violent
programs of colonial expansion, whether by way of cartography, collections, or
other means of empire and publicity. Instead, by mapping a minor history of
uncertainty throughout the Indonesian archipelago, and by traversing the torrid
zone alongside several figures in pursuit of new knowledge to bring back to Europe,
our aim is to trouble an image of science which continues to obstruct environmental justice in the present.1 Simply put, we believe
that the enduring image of science as an enterprise committed to a positivist
clarification of knowledge through the elimination of any ethical friction or moral
doubt subverts contemporary climate change science and related inquiries into
biodiversity loss, mass extinction, and planetary toxicity.