Turning Division into Dialogue and Dialogue into Design
A Report on the National Endowment for Humanities Project
Dialogues Between Two Cultures
Erik Fisher
University of Colorado, Boulder
6 January 2004
“I was required to read a book a week for thirty weeks in Humanities at Columbia. I thought it was a great course, I loved it. Even though I was a Physics major. But nobody would think, except maybe places like St. Johns [College], that somebody ought to read a Science book a week for thirty weeks.”
- Allan Franklin
I
The Dialogues Between Two Cultures project is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and seven academic programs at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The multidisciplinary lecture and seminar series has brought together twelve faculty and two graduate student participants from thirteen academic programs drawn from three colleges. The academic programs are split almost equally between the “humanistic” and “technical” sides of what, after 45 years, can still be roughly referred to in terms of C.P. Snow’s gap between the “Two Cultures.” CU faculty members met twice monthly from September 2002 to May 2003 to explore, in the words of the NEH grant proposal, “the concept and place of dialogue as a means to understand and overcome the divisions between the two cultures of science and the humanities.” The CU faculty group was joined by a series of nine visiting professors from institutions throughout the U.S. that exemplify innovative multidisciplinary, collaborative approaches to education that engage both technical and humanistic approaches to knowledge and learning. Visiting professors also delivered a series of eight related public lectures that drew a total of approximately 300 faculty and students.
The stated objective of the program is to lay the groundwork for “joint institutional efforts to create an intellectual culture that will foster future collaborations that integrate science and the humanities in undergraduate courses.” Accordingly, once the initial lecture and seminar series had been nearly completed, the project participants met, along with several other interested guests from additional programs and institutions, in order to determine a logical continuation of the project that would also allow for more focused interdisciplinary collaboration that could move “beyond dialogue.” After much deliberation, a specific interdisciplinary topic that related to our discussions, scholarly interests, and concerns over the Two Cultures rift was chosen: interdisciplinary design.
The initial results of the first meeting are listed in part IV of this short report. Part II attempts to sketch out an extremely narrow slice of the contextual background arising from one of the eight faculty seminars that helped lead to the particular selection of design as the focal point for the continued efforts of the undertaking, and Part III relates the excerpts presented in Part II to the theme of interdisciplinary or, perhaps, as it has been termed by one of our participants, humanisticdesign in order to incorporate this topic into the continuation of the Dialogues project. It is hoped that, as mapped out in the proposal, the final stage of the project will include targeting a large national grant to support sustained and in-depth multidisciplinary, collaborative educational programs at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
II
The first of the eight themes explored to date by the Dialogues project was the seminal Snow-Leavis “Two Cultures” debate that occurred during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, and which has roots in earlier exchanges, notably that between Matthew Arnold and T.H. Huxley some eighty years before. This theme was chosen in order to provide both historical and intellectual background to the seminar and also for the sake of thinking through the nature of the problem of specialized knowledge, especially as it exists in the various divisions between science and the humanities, as understood and experienced by the participants.[1]
The second theme, to which this report refers, consisted of the notorious “Science Wars,” which are typically described as a contemporary “flare-up” of the Two Cultures debate. Although the central issues of the Science Wars debate, the truth-status of scientific knowledge and the intellectual rigor of humanistic and social scientific studies of science, do not explicitly point to Snow’s concerns with addressing international ethical, political, and economic “menaces”[2] that result from technology and industrialization; they are nevertheless implicated in the manifold and increasingly public controversies surrounding issues in science and technology policy. Consequently, the Science Wars theme was chosen in order to confront modern day socio-epistemological contentions that, for better or worse, exemplify the reified disciplinarity that underlines the rift among academic fields and their practitioners—especially within academe.
In a 1996 issue of the journal Social Text, mathematical physicist Alan Sokal published a sham article[3] that ostensibly linked science and cultural studies and then, in a second article in the journal Lingua Franca, revealed the first article to be a hoax. Sokal claimed he wanted to expose a “decline in the standards of intellectual rigor” in humanities scholarship, no doubt inspired by what he saw as faulty if not baseless assertions about the lack of objectivity in scientific theories. The hoax led to countless articles and numerous books, as well as several conferences, produced by both the “critics and defenders of science.” One such book, The One Culture? A Conversation About Science (Jay A. Labinger and Harry Collins, eds., Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 2001), brought together several authors engaged on both sides of the Science Wars for extended consideration of the nature of the disagreements; this text provided substance for our second seminar, an abbreviated account of which follows.
At the outset of our second discussion, CU English professor Mark Winokur provided some helpful background on post-structuralism, an intellectual movement that, among other things, asserts that structuralism and “the study of texts” in general, “can never be a scientific pursuit.” This point is important to bear in mind considering that most of the “critics of science” who participate in the Science Wars tend to see themselves as post-structuralists. In short, the post-structuralist criticism of science is that it is not science—precisely because all knowledge is socially constructed.
In response to a question by another participant regarding how science is defined by some of the social scientist authors in The One Culture? who claim that they themselves practice science as do physical scientists, CU physics professor Allan Franklin, who himself “lobbed a few grenades” in the Science Wars, stated
I don’t think [the sociologists] define [science]. I think that, essentially, it’s the idea that they are presenting evidence and argument in favor of their position. Which is something I would agree with. One of the essences of science, not necessarily the essence, is the idea of evidence and argument and I think there’s something very odd about what they do, namely that they are willing to say, “Believe us because we present evidence and argument, but don’t believe the scientists who present evidence and argument. Pay no attention to them, pay only attention to their off-hand comments, made to us in interviews.”
In response, CU Mechanical Engineering professor Roop Mahajan proposed an element of science that frequently gets overlooked, especially in the stagnant opposition between science as objective knowledge and science as socially constructed agreements; here, Mahajan emphasizes the admittedly impenetrable heart of inductive insight over deductive ratiocination:
You know, the reason I asked that question is because many a time even among scientists and technologists or engineers, many of the discoveries and innovations are intuitive. And then we present evidence later on…[T]hat intuitive discovery might be because of what we have done in the past. We can say “yeah, we have already been exposed to this and you know something was going on in our brain,” but in one moment of enlightenment we are that intuitive. That is a wonderful process. Now that intuitive thing is not so much evidence based, it is not so much experiments based.
One more round between the adept categories of the physicist (Franklin) and the probing attempts to transcend formal process models by the engineer (Mahajan) reveal a fruitful tension between technical approaches:
Franklin: No, no but one is talking, I think this is a very old fashioned view in philosophy of science, namely the context of discovery and justification and in the old days the context of discovery was regarded as the subject for psychology. With the context of justification, how something becomes accepted in scientific knowledge is what philosophers deal with. So some of us who have written more recently, this is in the late 1930’s, you find this. I’ve suggested that there is a third context and no doubt more, but at least one more, namely the context of pursuit. How, why people move to further investigate a hypothesis. For example, take the old myth, it doesn’t really matter where Kekule got his idea for the benzene ring because he dreamed about snakes swallowing their tails, God knows what a Freudian would do with that, but what matters is what evidence was then provided to argue that benzene had a ring structure. And that would be the context of discovery and then the context of justification but why people took it seriously enough to further work on it would be what I would call the context of pursuit. Where, in fact, I think more, most of science is, in fact, done is in pursuit, not in discovery or justification.
Mahajan: No, I’m still trying to get back to the issue that I raised, that when people talk about comparing one with the other, I want to know on a fundamental level, what is the definition of science that they have in mind, what are they comparing it to? Are they missing the intuitive part? Are they only going by the process? What is the basic premise?
Indeed, As will be pointed out in Section III, this exchange highlights two opposing yet mutually complimentary views of technical and humanistic intellectual activities, whether those activities consist of theorizing or making: the formal stages of a process model on the one hand (argument, evidence; justification, pursuit) and the unpredictable yet originating mental or psychological movements (intuition) that populate these stages.
The conversation next turned to a discussion of the role of theory in formulating a definition of both science and post-structuralist thought, which prompted Winokur to suggest that a fundamental difference between scientific and sociological/humanistic theorizing is the presence of ambiguity in the subject being studied—another potent set of differences that could, I suggest, be brought together productively in interdisciplinary activities and even brought to bear consciously on the continued presence of Snow’s menaces or at any rate more modest societal and environmental challenges posed by the products of science and technology. Indeed, CU rhetoric and composition instructor Rolf Norgaard carried this line of thought further more explicitly, pointing out that rhetorical studies frequently look at the process whereby “legitimate scientific work” takes on new meaning as it enters into
public discussions of one kind or another and in looking at that material, at that phenomenon, not questioning the science, but understanding that the larger role of science, within cultural institutions and the like, [rhetoricians observe] that there are differences: the conversations are inflected differently, they are partial and incomplete as things will enter into different spheres of activity.
Again, both technical and humanistic endeavors have a shared interest in examining the “circulation in larger cultural institutions” of not only scientific facts but technological artifacts as well.
Towards the end of the seminar, following an exchange regarding the suggestion that sociologists of science “corrupt the youth” and the question of the proper vs. actual function of the university, Winokur introduced a provocative notion that radically extends the earlier observation about the humanities preoccupation with ambiguity:
At its best for me, interpretation creates—recreates—the student as a kind of paranoiac. Questioning everything about the world, not just literature, not just interpreting literature but, the hope is, beyond literature, the student will be asking questions about the way the world works including, hopefully, the way that science works, the way that every discipline works, the way in which one perceives the universe to work and certainly one’s own self. It’s a little bit, for me, the analogy for me (to go back to World War II here, my apologies) is the Allied parachutists, parachuting into Nazi Germany and the first thing he’s told in spy school is, “Trust no one. Trust nothing. Trust only your own senses and ask those questions that you think are appropriate to ask.” Including those questions that are, to use one of the disliked phrases in this text that you know recurs a number of times for example in the Sokal essay, making the student, as paranoiac, a radical skeptic at some level about everything and absolutely fearless about asking questions about everything. And again, that’s not, I think, really what the university teaches but I think at its best, it’s certainly what it promotes.
This notion received mixed responses, some humorous,[4] but seemed to be accepted to some extent by most of the participants. For instance, CU computer science professor Clayton Lewis stated:
My sense is that the best scientists, and again, I think this is to some degree held up by some of the assertions again in various of the articles of the book, is that the best scientists are the ones that are in fact skeptical of themselves, of what they do. Here again I was the most impressed by those sections in which there’s a kind of assumption that really the greatest and most acute criticism comes from within the community, not from without.
Having undertaken to sketch out a few themes, considerations, and exchanges from this seminar, I will now attempt to show how the chosen theme of design promises to build upon much of the work done in this seminar and provides a fruitful area for allowing differences among disciplines to complement, rather than compete with, each other. (The reader is asked to bear in mind that there are seven other seminars and eight lectures, all of which could no doubt provide a sense of the context out of which the theme of design has emerged.)
III
In choosing design, the project participants elected to get away from the standard epistemological questions that have grown out of one manifestation of the “Two Cultures” debate known as the “Science Wars”; namely, whether science is socially constructed or is objective truth. As our seminar on the Science Wars suggested, neither of these two opposing extremes are adequate: sociologists “do” science insofar as they offer evidence and argument and at the same time scientific knowledge need not be reduced to the status of a purely subjective undertaking simply because any scientific theory is potentially provisional.
Instead, participants suggested that the middle ground between extremes is worthwhile exploring and promises to offer more that can be incorporated in all disciplines represented. Moreover, despite the necessity of risking it sometimes, it is wise to avoid, to the extent that it is possible, a situation in which different disciplinary practitioners views deteriorate into opposing and thus into a largely stagnant exchange. Thus, a useful vehicle for capitalizing on the fertile middle ground between divergent disciplinary approaches would, it was thought, allow multiple disciplines from both technical and humanistic ilk to contribute to a central enterprise while maintaining their integrity and interests. Design, which is by nature interdisciplinary whether practiced by engineers, artists, or writers, provides therefore a palpable and largely familiar conceptual and practical organizing principle.
As seen from the above seminar excerpts, the question of how to define science is hardly a matter of agreement even among scientists and engineers. In stressing the intuitive aspect of discovery and innovation, Mahajan opens up an area that for practical purposes resists the unproductive opposition between social constructivist and absolutist views of science. Moreover, discovery, and innovation are standard concepts in engineering product design and, no doubt, other forms from the design of architecture to the design of scientific experiments. Thus, a focus on design both retains a close proximity to scientific and applied scientific activities of interest to scientists and humanists without instantly raising the contentious epistemological issues about the definition of science that can preclude fruitful but at the same time inquisitive collaboration of the sort desired. Finally, insofar as it is debatable whether intuition, which is frequently aided by new perspectives and questioning standard assumptions, is formally teachable, its role in the technical design process will be more accessible to non-experts and for that reason interdisciplinary design will be less likely to exclude those not trained in the specific methods required by a given design project.