Dhruv Raina, Associate Professor, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
Sanil V, Associate Professor, Philosophy, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT, New Delhi
R. Gadagkar, Professor, Centre for Ecological Sciences and Chairman, CCS, IISc
Sundar Sarukkai, Professor, School of Humanities, Centre for Philosophy (NIAS), Bangalore
Roddam Narasimha, Director, NIAS, Bangalore
Vijay Chandru, Chairman and CEO, Strand Life Sciences, Research Faculty MIT (Research Affiliate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Srikant Shastry, Professor, Theoretical Sciences Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research
Partha Ghosh, Professor, Academic Programme Coordinator at the S.N.Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Calcutta
Satyajit Mayor, NCBS, Bangalore
Mihir Chakraborty, Professor, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Calcutta
Vivek Dhareshwar, formerly Senior Fellow, CSCS
Sasheej Hedge, Professor, Sociology, Hyderabad Central University
Sudhir Chella Rajan, Professor, IIT-Madras
Piyush Mathur, Professor, IIT-Madras
Shobhana Narasimhan, Associate Professor, Theoretical Sciences Unit, JNCASR
Franson Manjali, Professor, Centre of Linguistics and English,
School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, J.N.U.
N. J. Rao, Professor and Chairman, Department of Management Studies, IISc
Abhijeet S Bardapurkar, Research Scholar, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Mumbai
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Session 11: October 28th, 2009
Questions of separation and integration led us this time to other questions. What is Natural Science? What is Human Science? In the course of the discussion we came up with three points:
1. Was there something specific to the object of inquiry?
2. Was it related to nature of inquiry? The immediate problem here is that the object of inquiry is constituted by the nature of inquiry and vice versa.
3. The third point was the language of inquiry... the reduction of natural language to nomological language.
Given this, can what Natural Science is be generated out of the history and space of its emergence?
We first had to answer who is undertaking this inquiry? Where is the subject located, what are his or her biases? What are those positions that inform the subject's inquiry? That again took us in 3 directions...
1. The subject who is the recipient and the user of the services of science and technology but who is looking back at what had been received. There are subjective priorities that would become fundamental (the suffering of the subject is clearly foregrounded; at other times it could be empowerment; entitlement could also become important).
2. The subject as producer of scientific knowledge
3. The relation between the producer-subject and the recipient-subject
This was not to deny and we were aware that when we talk of subject we have in mind contingent subject-positions and not subjects with an identitarian embeddedness. Yet we were trying to think what the subject can do to science.
The interesting realization that the collective arrived at is that the subjective turn was not enough to mute the problem we were dealing with. Access was not enough. Institutional change was also not enough. Sensitivity was a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition. We were required to address the knowledge gap that separates the producer-subject and the recipient-subject. Also isn't there the knowledge limitation that haunts the producer-subject? Here Penrose's ambition comes to mind: Are minds subject to the laws of physics? What indeed are the laws of the physics? (Penrose, 1989, p4). Do we have a good enough physics? In itself, physics must negotiate between Newton, Einstein and Heisenberg. We could see that even the inauguration of the subject question would take us to the knowledge question. Nonetheless, this is not going back to the domains of knowledge. On the other hand, if one begins from the knowledge pole we still have to ask questions about the subject.
With this we can come back... what does this do to our question - what is Natural Science? Carnap and Popper came up with a prescriptive rendition of science; verifiability for Carnap and falsifiability for Popper. The other route is to go with a description of science and Kuhn... not what science should be but what science is in terms of its history, its enunciation, and its researchers' collective. In that sense, we have contended with the prescriptive program and seen its limits. What we are doing is attempting the descriptive program sincerely and see the process of science-making, see how objects of inquiry, nature of inquiry, language of description, causal explanations, predictability theories, the producer-subject, the recipient-subject, knowledge in itself, in its deployment, and in its use and reception, all of these in their over-determined and contradictory dimensions constitute provisionally 'Natural Science'. So the ISE integration urges us not to go by prescriptive definitions (verifiability & falsifiability become measuring rods for complex nature of human activity in different cultures and in different time frames and the culture question becomes present as a critique here). Maybe we go through the pain-staking work of observation and understanding and description; in a shared form the experience of science-making. It is only after going through all this, a work that is necessary for the Human Sciences as well, can one begin to see these (science)makings (not knowing, but ways of making knowledge) could be seen in their interruptive and integrated moments of relationality.
1. Was there something specific to the object of inquiry?
2. Was it related to nature of inquiry? The immediate problem here is that the object of inquiry is constituted by the nature of inquiry and vice versa.
3. The third point was the language of inquiry... the reduction of natural language to nomological language.
Given this, can what Natural Science is be generated out of the history and space of its emergence?
We first had to answer who is undertaking this inquiry? Where is the subject located, what are his or her biases? What are those positions that inform the subject's inquiry? That again took us in 3 directions...
1. The subject who is the recipient and the user of the services of science and technology but who is looking back at what had been received. There are subjective priorities that would become fundamental (the suffering of the subject is clearly foregrounded; at other times it could be empowerment; entitlement could also become important).
2. The subject as producer of scientific knowledge
3. The relation between the producer-subject and the recipient-subject
This was not to deny and we were aware that when we talk of subject we have in mind contingent subject-positions and not subjects with an identitarian embeddedness. Yet we were trying to think what the subject can do to science.
The interesting realization that the collective arrived at is that the subjective turn was not enough to mute the problem we were dealing with. Access was not enough. Institutional change was also not enough. Sensitivity was a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition. We were required to address the knowledge gap that separates the producer-subject and the recipient-subject. Also isn't there the knowledge limitation that haunts the producer-subject? Here Penrose's ambition comes to mind: Are minds subject to the laws of physics? What indeed are the laws of the physics? (Penrose, 1989, p4). Do we have a good enough physics? In itself, physics must negotiate between Newton, Einstein and Heisenberg. We could see that even the inauguration of the subject question would take us to the knowledge question. Nonetheless, this is not going back to the domains of knowledge. On the other hand, if one begins from the knowledge pole we still have to ask questions about the subject.
With this we can come back... what does this do to our question - what is Natural Science? Carnap and Popper came up with a prescriptive rendition of science; verifiability for Carnap and falsifiability for Popper. The other route is to go with a description of science and Kuhn... not what science should be but what science is in terms of its history, its enunciation, and its researchers' collective. In that sense, we have contended with the prescriptive program and seen its limits. What we are doing is attempting the descriptive program sincerely and see the process of science-making, see how objects of inquiry, nature of inquiry, language of description, causal explanations, predictability theories, the producer-subject, the recipient-subject, knowledge in itself, in its deployment, and in its use and reception, all of these in their over-determined and contradictory dimensions constitute provisionally 'Natural Science'. So the ISE integration urges us not to go by prescriptive definitions (verifiability & falsifiability become measuring rods for complex nature of human activity in different cultures and in different time frames and the culture question becomes present as a critique here). Maybe we go through the pain-staking work of observation and understanding and description; in a shared form the experience of science-making. It is only after going through all this, a work that is necessary for the Human Sciences as well, can one begin to see these (science)makings (not knowing, but ways of making knowledge) could be seen in their interruptive and integrated moments of relationality.
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