meeting the authors

Reading these three pieces (I know we were only assigned the two, but I forgot) was certainly an exercise in standpoint epistemology for me. Since I am currently taking my third class with Anne, have taken a course on Emergence with Paul and attended a few meetings of the emergency working group, it was pretty impossible for me to separate my prior experiences with these authors from their texts. While reading the second piece, seeing the names of who was speaking (I recognized all but one name) was especially distracting to me because it caused me to picture each person's face, hear their voice saying the words, imagine the vocal inflections and gestures that went with the words, remember pleasant or unpleasant interactions with them, wonder how their kids were doing, etc. and, all in all, took my mind off the task of examining the words at hand. It's a good thing Anne likes reader-response theory because my response experiences were pretty crucial to my understanding of the words.

Anne's theories on the emergence of stories elicited less of a response from me than Paul's article on a similar topic. There were two reasons for this. First, I strongly agreed with Anne's description of the creation of meaning and her work both reinforced and expanded my own understanding of emergence in language by specifically discussing literature while I objected to Paul's frequent generalizations. Second, Anne's literary style was more pleasurable than the style Paul had to adopt for a journal article. While thinking in this vein on implications of language choice, I also found the structure of Anne's piece to be more emergent or bottom-up versus Paul's top-down. She used a few specific intra-actions of agents (teacher-student, telling-puns) to build up to a broad concept while Paul began with the broad goal of integrating science into culture and used specific examples to develop this concept (a more conventional academic style). It was interesting to read two pieces with similar aims approached so differently.

But my goal is not to compare the three texts, but to relate them to our work thus far. In all the texts we've read thus far, much of the material is presented as revolutionary. And, due to my experiences and academic background, much of the critiques and solutions are not new to me, so I find myself increasingly focusing on specifics of style and construction of argument versus content alone. In that sense, these are part of a theme. The two articles also strongly resonate with many authors' rejection of dualism, acknowledgment of agency and insistence on social and cultural context. Much of emergent theory does emphasize the agency of the world, which sounds like a feminist endeavor. So, why isn't complexity theory female dominated like other agential and multi-standpoint disciplines? Is it because it's couched in scientific jargon?

Flora

I think that these readings were good summaries of all the ideas we have addressed over the course of this class. I was especially interested in both Anne and Paul's articles by the relevance of these discussions to science education and accessibility. It was funny to look at Paul's comparison of the scientific model he was taught as a child and the scientific model he found later. I, too, remember the first model -- it's a basic, understandable format, and I imagine it's easy to explain to children. It's so black and white, right and wrong. I also remember learning the second model at some point, and definitely understanding it in college. We think of questions, we design methods to answer those questions, we get results, we tell a story about what we found, we ask more questions, and so on. I've said this in previous postings -- I feel like science has made a concerted effort to embrace this model of postulation and refutation (what Paul would call the "assailability model" perhaps). But I do agree that there is still this gap between the world of science and the non-professional scientist public. While the scientific community is free to postulate and refute, the public is fed a very different image...

I do think we all need to be trained to be scientists... and I agree that this doesn't involve being a math-genius or memorizing chemical pathways... it's fostering the feeling that one can ask questions, can criticize, can feel free to doubt and to formulate independent, different thoughts.

I see the scientific world trying, I do. In many ecology-based classes I have taken, we learn theories which help us to predict and understand phenomena in nature. It has always been made clear, to me at least, that these are stories. They don't always work, they sometimes don't explain a situation at all, and sometimes a combination of theories fits an observation. Theories are tools that we use, just like any other tool in science. We build on these theories when we conduct further research - we create new stories...

My question is, what does the scientific community really have to do differently? We're talking about a language problem, not really a problem with methodology, correct? It's the culture around science, not necessarily the physical practices of science that are the issue at hand here, correct? And while anyone can embrace scientific thought, without having to make a huge commitment to it, it is, ultimately, the mathematicians/staticians who can offer interpretations based on this "other," less ambiguous language... It's making it accessible and allowing everyone to have an influence on scientific pursuits that seems of more importance to me...

Thanks for these readings, guys -- I really enjoyed them!

“Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.”

-Ambrose Bierce 

Synthesizing the two pieces by Professors Anne Dalke and Paul Grobstein, it seems that the common thread is story telling.

In Anne's piece, she uses the concept of emergence to describe how even a single word (such as in a pun) can be given two different meanings, and thus how one story can even spawn "in ways that are unpredictable beforehand--other tales not yet articulated." How is this useful for us in this course? As articulated best in the dialogue at the end, I believe it is pertinent since science, math, and computer languages have a concept that if you get the right equation or insert the right code, you will get a certain outcome. Or even, as in the example of computer languages, you will get one of a limited number of outcomes.

What was most useful for me was the snippet between Paul and Anne on the second to last page:

Paul: 'Having done a, b, c, and d, there are no a series of possibilities. You pick from among them.' That choice makes the use of language a generative process.

Anne: That's a really useful thing for literary studies to be aware of, because we still have this model of mathematical exactness, that you can get the right or the best interpretation, or the original meaning.

The reason this was particularly useful to me was because it demonstrates how our culture seems to have synthesized basic scientific processes as being a required standard for all walks of life. That you can get it right that Homer meant this. If you get just the right ingredients, you can make the perfect hamburger.

However, in my daily life I find myself operating much as Paul describes in the last paragraph of the dialogue. To paraphrase, the motivation is not to replicate, but to inquire into the state of another brain. Language for me is often about trying to not only illicit a certain response, to strike a certain chord in another person. It's also about 'testing' the other person, to see what is different about their response, to see how their see the world differently.

But for Anne, I would appreciate it if we could come out with a working definition of the concept of emergence, just to make sure we're all on the same page by what you mean.

Paul's article seemed to outline the journey of the class, so far, and our understanding of what science is. How science is not the answer for everyone, or the tool that everyone is accustomed to using. I particularly found the second section ("Science as a Method: Strengths and Limitations") to be useful. "When given to believe that science is about getting things right, students (and others ) are being seriously misled about the fundamental character of the scientific process." I like the idea that science is constantly testing itself, that is this constant cycle of re-evaluation.

I also found it useful in the fourth section how he outlined the emergence theory that Anne describes, where two competing ideas for how a nervous system develops eventually merged into a new story. Is there any way we can apply this to our discussion on incorporating more women into scientific fields? Would that be the emergence theory we are trying to advocate?