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.