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Hi All,

I appreciate the discussion we had last week about what science is and why the question is important to us. 

I’m glad the conversation has continued on Serendip and I appreciate the opportunity to join it here. 

When it comes to the consideration of a question at once so basic and so abstract, it’s useful to use stories and propositions/arguments as communication tools. So I am going to write in both registers, and ask others to consider doing likewise. Our own personal, idiosyncratic connections to this question are part of what is in play as we converse -- not as hurdles to overcome or as touchstones, but important nevertheless in ongoing, changeable ways. Coming to know one another, and ourselves, better is entwined with sharing an inquiry into the nature of science.

I’m pretty sure that my fidelity to postmodern ideas -- about the contingency of thought, the multiplicity of identity, and the nonfoundational character of knowledge -- is a consequence of their offering relief from and an alternative to modes knowing and living that struck me in my coming of age as frustratingly and at times dangerously rigid and impermeable. Postmodern perspectives also offer richer conceptions of authority beyond the “master narratives”  -- and masters -- that hurt and limit so many people, and so much learning, insofar as they distort, discount, control and erase experiences of human life. 

It’s from a postmodern perspective that I question terms:

What is evidence? Is it something everyone can see from whatever their perspective is? Are “data” found or created? Does the natural world include humans? What is natural? 

What are values? Are they fully separable from knowledge? What might we see if we imagine that it is not possible fully to disentangle the ways we know from the ways we live (Parker Palmer), or love and action (Rich) or making things work and changing things? What if this impossibility is not a limit but a condition of science, and of life?

What is identity? Can people be and believe a lot of different, and at times contradictory, things? What kinds of education could foster such multiplicity is ways useful to individual and social growth, including the growth of science?

What is progress? What if it’s not a single narrative? From whose perspective is progress measured and justified? At what cost?

It’s also from a postmodern perspective that I am interested in blurring boundaries between categories as another thinking tool, as demarcation is. Feminist post-structuralists have long shown that categories in the West are often understood in oppositional terms:  science and religion; “basic” and “applied” research; teaching and learning; ideal and real; academic and practical. To my mind, there is freedom and possibility in unfixing boundaries between such terms and seeing what happens when we let them run. I think this interest in loosening the ascribed meanings of categories also arises from my interest in words, how they work, how they move and change, how they shape as well as name our worlds.

A power-sensitive approach to knowledge generation made up an important part of my doctoral studies and I continue to believe that it is a useful lens -- one among many -- on learning and discovery. Rather than think of power struggles or academic politics as purely social issues ,disconnected from the core work of science or any other form of scholarship, I proceed with the possibility in mind that they are often fully embedded in the core. At the same time, I am working on figuring out how to see more easily through a lens that doesn’t take them as given or primary. For me, an attraction of this group in the Evolving Systems project is what it offers to this project.

My first organizing framework for exploring oppression was a critique of patriarchy. My second, entwined with the first, was my experience as the daughter of a schizophrenic mother whose journey in the mental health system, as in marriage and work, was for me a potent education in the often ignorant and unhelpful and sometimes outright oppressive and dangerous character of scientific knowledge and practice.  I’d like to draw on, and offer others, what is useful in this story, but not be limited to or by it. I can imagine that for others, there may be parallel stories -- perhaps about religion as authoritarian/suffocating, or about belief as a limit on intellectual growth -- that could orient and re-orient -- and be re-oriented by -- the investigation we are sharing.