A quote on science

Comments (21)

1. I take this as a challenge. I am going to identify a fourth type of science. And then do it. Perhaps, “Science of things that are round, but go in a square dish.”

   1. Not a challenge, although if you get all Borges on me I may have to banish you to the Library. I am preparing a bit of work on how the sciences are and have been classified, and why.

2. Hrm. Reminds me, John, did you catch my post on Synthesis? It’s that mad-dog massively interdisciplinary thing we chatted about at PBDB4. It could be the paragon of the Science of Review… Be interested in your thinkings on it.

   1. Yes, I did read it, just before I got lost in Christmas and floods.

      My concern is largely politics and funding. Politics, because people jealously defend the boundaries of their specialties and object to crossing boundaries. A lot of the “that’s not science” attacks seem to be based on the claim that the discipline you are applying in this case isn’t my discipline so it’s wrong!

      Funding for a similar reason. I tried for two years to do an interdisciplinary grant application to study biodiversity measures. This involved ecologists, taxonomists and philosophers. Each reviewer could not see the point of the other disciplines, or why a philosopher might do something at that level in science. The philosophers wondered why I needed to contact the scientists (philosophy is based on intuitions and literature, right?); the ecologists thought it was an internal matter for ecology, so why philosophy or taxonomy, and the taxonomists thought they don’t need no steenking philosopher or ecologists.

      Eventually I realised that to get an ARC grant you have to do something the philosophers will recognise as philosophy, and not include anyone else. I suspect this generalises.

      1. I hear ya. But that’s precisely what I’m *hoping* Synthesis can resolve.

         It doesn’t ask anyone to do anything differently – specialists continue to do their thing safe within their bounds. And we outsource interdisciplinary facilitation to another bunch of specialists – in this case specialist generalists.

         So the Synthesists would do the heavy lifting to secure that grant on behalf of the others. And the others (hopefully) would contribute their expertise, woven together by Synthesists, and would receive the benefits of the final study. The idea is to reduce the opportunity cost of interdisciplinary study without forcing existing disciplines to get uncomfortable straddling their boundaries themselves, so to speak.

         Don’t know if it can work. But hey, giving the idea a shot.

         Anyway, we can discuss on a dedicated thread or offline rather than hijacking your thread…

         1. Plenty of space on this thread here…

            So long as you can modularise the individual disciplinary parts of the overall project so that each part can get funding specialist independently of the whole, then it might work.

      2. By modularise, you mean a particular study is 40% ecology, 30% taxonomy and 30% philosophy, so each discipline gets a proportional piece of the funding (and administrative) pie? If so, absolutely.

         Even adding in overhead for Synthesis – I still think this approach could be more efficient than having interdisciplinary research led either by one of the specialist discipline folk, or a cross-disciplinary team that casts shifty eyes at each other and mumbles about not understanding everyone else’s jargon.

         The funding could also come through the Synthesis dept as a single point of contact that carries the administrative burden and divvies up the funding or, going the other direction, pools the individual groups funding into a bigger pool.

         So, in theory, the funding of a Synthesis-led project wouldn’t be any greater than the funding of a traditional interdisciplinary project, but would be apportioned differently, with some skived off for the Synthesists.

         Reading papers about the perils of interdisciplinary research, it seems the admin and cultural issues are some of the greatest barriers – not the desire to bring researchers together, which everyone (publicly) lauds. Synthesis would hope to reduce those barriers – and try to weave it all together as a bonus by-product.

         1. No, I mean the ecologist is able to get funding for his part of the wider project as a project in its own right in the eyes of ecological grant-givers… otherwise professional exclusivism will prevent the ecologist getting funding.

      3. Synthesis, as I envisage it, wouldn’t necessarily work that way – and maybe that is a problem I have to consider more. Ideally, it would reduce the need for such one-to-one funding for interdisciplinary research.

         Then again, if that’s a problem now, and it’s a problem under Synthesis, yet Synthesis can offer other benefits, then at least we’re not moving backwards.

         Still, might not be moving forwards enough to shift the bloated inertia of academia to accommodate an idea such as Synthesis. Something for me to think about.

         Still, committed to giving it a whirl, fuelled by naive optimism and cheerful hubris!

      4. Did you study the work of Dr Elliot Grosvenor before this doomed attempt at cat-herding?

      5. My goodness; there’s a name I haven’t seen for a very long time…

3. I’m not a philosopher, but my surname (see second initial below) is “Peirce,” so whenever I see a reference to “Uncle Charlie,” I cheer a bit. In fact, I know very little of my genealogy, so I couldn’t tell you if we’re related, but I’ve read far more of his work than I’m actually capable of understanding. But he did get some stuff remarkably right, despite his irrational fondness for things-that-come-in-threes.

   By the way, I know there’s some debate and needless affectation about how C.S. Peirce pronounced his name. He pronounced it “purse,” but as this is my actual surname, I can tell you from experience that it’s actually pronounced “Pierce. No. p-E-i-r-c-e. Wait! E, and then i. I know, I know, I, it — it looks backwards. Right. Yes.” At least, that’s how I always wind up having to pronounce it.

   1. Apparently Peirce himself was at odds with his own family’s pronunciation of the name. It was probably his own affectation.

      1. I’m pretty sure that there is good historical evidence for the “purse” pronunciation, and the pronunciation does not appear to be idiosyncratic to Charles (see, for example this note http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/news/1_3/13_4x.htm#pronunciation). My favorite piece of evidence is an inscription by a Harvard student on the inside cover of Benjamin Peirce’s geometry textbook: “He who steals my Peirce steals trash.”

4. I’ve often wondered if there is a difference between the ways we divide stuff up into categories and the relevance of categories to reality.

   Do sciences categorise neatly into three boxes? Are they fuzzy boxes? Is three useful for administration but hopeless for describing the nature of the work? Do categories reflect how we perceive? And so on.

   I expect there is a science or philosophy of categorisation with some posh name. Naming things being another form of categorization…

   1. I think it’s spread across several disciplines and fields in philosophy: philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science (especially the ontology of science and theoretical terms), and philosophy of cognition/cognitive psychology. For me, it’s philosophy of classification, a book I am presently working on. See the “natural classification” category on this blog.

5. While I’m largely a fan of Peirce, from his work on the Coast Survey and geodesy to his semiotics, I’m always struck by his use of triads — everything is tripartite for him, so I have to wonder: what is he missing/eliding/ignoring to create a nice three-part scheme, just like this one.

6. An interesting question to ask is what is the “practical” aspect of the very act of classifying the sciences? For many of the major systems, the goal of classifying is pretty clear: for Comte and Spencer, classification was a way to place sociology as the master science. For Hobbes, the goal was to debunk the nonsense then taught in Universities, and create the foundation for a human science (“Civill Philosophy”). My sense is that classifying the sciences hit its peak in the 19th century, and ended with the creation of modern professionalized academic disciplines. People may still debate classifications, but I think very few would take a grandiose and logically necessary classification of the sciences very seriously.

   I’m not sure how to place Peirce in all this. His broader classification of the sciences seems as strange and archaic as other 19th century attempts–perhaps even stranger, given his alienation from professional intellectual life. But I do think there is something useful in his triadic classification of the branches of science–not as actually existing disciplines, but as moments in the scientific process of which individuals can specialize in some or all at different times. So when we are interested in the motives of doing science, we get Discovery/Review/Practical; paralleling Grammar/Logic/Rhetoric, syntax/semantics/pragmatics, perception/appreciation/action, and so on…maybe I’ve been reading too much Peirce myself.

   Good luck with the project!

7. Perhaps the full piece attempted to justify the classification? Because so far I don’t see it at all. Consider Mendele’ev. Clearly, science of review, right? A classification if there ever was one. And yet a profound discovery as well. I might consider it practical science also if I knew what that was intended to mean. Do you think there’s anything of value in the quote? And I was going to mention the science of things that belong to the emperor, but thought better of it.

   1. Read it for yourself – yes, I know, you don’t read philosophers if you can help it 🙂

8. Well, there is a difference between classifying natural phenomena and classifying the sciences that explore those phenomena. And there’s a difference between discovering (or inventing, if you prefer) a system of classification and actually using it to classify various items.

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