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Paul Grobstein's picture

Making sense of inquiry? Sciences/humanites/social sciences/art

Maybe some of our problems with understanding the relation between sciences, humanities, etc have to do with the relations being evolving ones? How about the following as a way to bring things together, both in terms of objective and in terms of time?

Open-ended transactional inquiry = the process of continually generating new understandings, individually and collectively, a common objective of all human creative activities

Strategies/tactics

  • Presume a common internal reality, try and describe the human experience - classical arts
  • Presume a common humanity/relation to the world, try and infer it from human artifacts - classical humanities/social sciences
  • Presume a common external reality independent of humans, try and describe it in a way independent of a human perspective - classical science
  • Explore ways people have tried to describe internal realities and use them to create new ways of doing so - contemporary art
  • Explore ways people have tried to describe a common humanity/relation to the world, notice their context dependences, use them to create new ways of doing so - contemporary humanities
  • Explore ways people have tried to describe a common external reality independent of humans, notice their similarities, differences, and context dependences and use those to create new ways of doing so - contemporary science
  • Deny the significance of a single common internal or external reality/humanity/relation to the world, describe one's own idiosyncratic vision - romantic/anarchistic arts/humanities/social science/science
  • Give up the presumptions of a single common internal or external reality/humanity/relation to the world but make use of the products of such presumptions and the drive to achieve them. Look around at the stories that exist, come up with new ones that in turn will provide the grist for future revisions - future arts/humanities/social science/science

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