Rolfes, J. D. (2026) Classifying Power: The Anthropocene, Scientific Authority, and the Politics of Geological Time. [Preprint]
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Abstract
In March 2024, the Anthropocene Working Group’s proposal to formalise the Anthropocene as an official Series/Epoch-level unit in the Geological Time Scale was rejected by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy. The rejection was formally procedural: the Working Group's chosen boundary stratotype at Crawford Lake, Canada, failed to meet the evidentiary standards required by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. This paper argues that the procedural account is incomplete and that the Anthropocene debate cannot be adequately understood without attending to the structural dynamics it exhibits: dynamics continuous with the mechanisms of dominance and reform resistance identified in the companion papers to this series. The paper makes three claims. First, the Anthropocene debate is a case in which the authority to classify reality is contested along precisely the structural lines that the companion analysis predicts. Second, the debate exemplifies the production of non-knowledge through the application of dominant disciplinary standards as universal quality criteria, deflating the force of convergent evidence from earth system science, ecology, and climate science by treating chronostratigraphic formalisation as the privileged form of admissible evidence. Third, the case raises a philosophically important question: when the object to be classified is a planetary-scale transformation produced by the operations of industrial civilisation, the authority to name it is not merely a technical matter of stratigraphic methodology but a question about the distribution of epistemic and political authority. Procedural validity within one disciplinary authority structure does not, by itself, settle the broader epistemological question of classificatory adequacy. The present work is the third in a compendium of three independent publications; it applies the structural framework of reform resistance developed in the first companion paper (Rolfes, 2026a) and the account of structural epistemic injustice developed in the second (Rolfes, 2026b) to the Anthropocene dispute as a case of classificatory authority.
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| Item Type: | Preprint | ||||||
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| Keywords: | Anthropocene; geological classification; scientific authority; epistemic injustice; Quaternary Stratigraphy; earth system science; classification and power | ||||||
| Subjects: | General Issues > Evidence General Issues > Science and Policy General Issues > Social Epistemology of Science General Issues > Values In Science |
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| Depositing User: | Dr. J. D. Rolfes | ||||||
| Date Deposited: | 22 Jun 2026 19:29 | ||||||
| Last Modified: | 22 Jun 2026 19:29 | ||||||
| Item ID: | 30233 | ||||||
| Subjects: | General Issues > Evidence General Issues > Science and Policy General Issues > Social Epistemology of Science General Issues > Values In Science |
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| Date: | 18 June 2026 | ||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/30233 |
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