Prof. Bruno Bachimont is Scientific advisor of the Department of Research and Innovation at the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (France’s legal deposit institution for all television and radio material) as well as Professor at the Université de Technologie de Compiègne where he teaches computer science, logics and philosophy. A graduate of the Ecole des Mines de Nancy, Prof. Bachimont received a PhD in Computer Science from the Paris 6 University in 1990 as well as a PhD in Philosophy from the Ecole Polytechnique in 1996.
We interviewed him on December 10, 2009 when he had come to India as part of Bonjour French Science by the French Embassy in India. Excerpts from the interview...
Anup Dhar: Ours is a social science institution, we have been working in some interface with law and science which is when IISER approached us. They wanted to set up the humanities-social science component at IISERs. They approached us and requested us to come up with a model for IISER.
We had a few questions. One is what is the Indian experience of thematic social science in science and technological institutes? We have had two sets of experiences – one: even I come from that tradition in the philosophy department; we become critiques of science or philosophy of science and we become final arbiters of science. On the other hand, is teaching social science in a pure science department, so science teaching goes on, technology teaching goes on, and it is in these departments that we teach Mughal history - sixteenth century Mughal history - and students don’t know why they are doing it so either the courses are not taken seriously or the students become critics.
We did a study of the Indian experience and these two were seen as the dominant approach to the problem so we suggested that let us think of another way, like not the two given ones, so to put it this way, the philosophy of science approach or the sociology of science approach is a sort of critical outsider to science, it does not engage with the science base but remains outside and here we found your work and your trajectory very interesting, that you have experience working with both.
We are thinking of a way out of this. Which HSS will we take to IISER? Because the HSS base itself has gone through serious questioning and we cannot take the old style history to IISERs! So too philosophy has gone through so many moves. I don’t know whether you got a sense of it, IISERs are new experiment in science teaching in India so one had to attend to the new experiment too. How one can attempt a bridging or the connecting rift that we have inherited in Indian higher education which has had this rift in a well entrenched way. Here one tentative suggestion we have been making off late is that can we develop integrated themes; themes that have human science, natural science questions and concerns. So rather than approach them from knowledge domains -not that they are irrelevant- or approach it from disciplines, can we identify a problem or a thematic specific which will require critical interdisciplinarity; inter-institutional approaches sometimes, its not simple multidisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity but this problem, the theme becomes the condition for the critical question we ask.
Bruno Bachimont:…. I felt exactly the same thing. I was misunderstood earlier (in other lectures in the India tour) for I was too close to technology and they asked me my idea what is philosophy and I had response ‘in my technology’. They are working apart from technological sciences and pure sciences when they make link between natural sciences, technological sciences and human and social sciences. So I was mismatching their expectation but yesterday I found people (at CCS) very open, very ready for collaboration. I said I am not social scientist off course but there are other ways to interdisciplinarity.
AD: let us go this way… What has been your experience as you have straggled two spaces - natural science and human science philosophy?
BB: I have personal experience and institutional experience. My personal experience is about my own research and this research is in cognitive technologies. So I have an object which can be considered from natural sciences or from humanities and social sciences and this object is complex enough to resist any resisting forces. With this kind of object, cognitive technologies we can confront human sciences and natural sciences and we can mix them in a constructive way.
But after that we have to face the question - how acceptable is it? You can prepare your research program by mixing ways of research from considerations from philosophy and considerations from technology and this mix can be done by using some specific areas of philosophy and technology… and using German philosophy phenomenology, because at some level these are perfectly readable by people. I think the key is to prepare in the very beginning a common research program, have interdisciplinarity because otherwise you have to juxtapose considerations about how is it to be is a concern of the engineer or the meaning of that is a concern of the social scientist. But they won’t speak to each other and that’s a bad way of thinking. Social scientists are convinced that natural scientists are stupid and natural scientists are convinced that social scientists are useless.
In my institutional experience… I have been working in a university of technology and this university is multidisciplinary so we have, for example, chemistry, mechanics, computer science and so on but we also have departments for humanities and social sciences and the research is only on technology. For example if we are working with democracy and for a new way for constructing a good democratic debate by using digital technology, we are also working on different people coming from different social sciences and human sciences but working together on these subjects as technological subjects, so there are all these different perspectives. The first difficulty is to make these people from social sciences work together. It’s not so easy to make anybody coming from academics to work with somebody coming from philosophy… Most difficult is psychology and philosophy; it’s explosive. This was the first task; the second task is to make them together cooperate with natural scientists and engineers.
And so we are considering two basic queries, the first query is about primitive sciences. (requiring several kinds of collaboration and domain expertise) And the second way is multiplicative. To use social sciences and concepts from social sciences in the technological sciences, the best example is the systemic thinking of science in biology; its another kind of thinking so they have to renew their way of understanding the biological systems, they want to imitate nature in order to reproduce some natural phenomenon in a technological device and so they are asking for new concepts. Multiple spaces are created for using concepts in biology but also, for example, in epistemology research studies. There is still a lot to be done but I have a feeling that researchers are more ready than before to collaborate.
AD: One interesting thing is that it sounds very close to the way we have been trying to think integrated themes, integrated objects of enquiry. It is heartening to know that, what we have attempted and sort of managed to do in India. So when you look at technology what are the things you look at?
BB: We have two main concerns. One is about resources. For example, resources coming from agriculture but we want to design something digital to replace these resources. You need to have a global understanding of the phenomena if you want to understand how your research will be useful for this purpose. The second kind of research is about transportation system. There are communicative problems; it’s a question of people, transportation of people, transportation of information, transportation of goods and also you have to have security and safety for goods, persons and information. So still here you need systemic approach in order to combine different questions and different problems in order to yield a technical solution. People are ready to see elsewhere for a solution, to see what can be useful for some problem because they perfectly know inside the discipline they may miss some concepts, they miss some information, some knowledge in order to solve the problem.
In many cases the common property is that you have the human being observed. So it’s not technology for itself, its technology alongside with society and the human being. And once you have the human being, you have interpretations and once you have interpretations, you have social sciences. Voila! And it’s of use for people coming from natural sciences because if you have to understand how human beings can write, how we perceive information, how we understand a context and so on you need some physiological understanding for capturing information for his behavior and so on. They are able to say I need some others, and the others are coming from outside, from psychology, cognitive science, from economics, philosophy and we may be successful together because our problem is rich enough and open enough in order for everybody to participate and win... The solutions don’t belong to anybody in particular but we reach the solution as a team of the researchers. Because the problem is very big, it’s a systemic problem, so the solution is too big for one person.
AD: For one person to attend to it…
BB: Absolutely. There is a thrust coming from institutions as working on more specific problems they are less ready to engage in collaborations than people working on systemic problems. But we have to consider technology with a very open understanding that technology is not a technical device which is an application of a scientific theory, but technology is a device for the human being, for society and is very complex in itself. It’s at the same time a technical construction, a technical application of some scientific knowledge but at the same time it’s also an interpretation device because this technical device will be used so there will be an interaction, so there will be also a consideration to understand how a technical device can work. And its economic value may be very different from the initial understanding we had at the beginning and it may change with time. So we need some specific consideration of these phenomena, and these phenomena do not belong to computer science, mechanics or chemistry. So we have two faces of this -we are trying to consider at the same time while dealing with technology. But if technology is seen as applied science, then there is no technology, there is no interdisciplinarity.
AD: Actually that is the problem we too are contending with, not to see technology as simply an application of science because then we miss out on what technology is; we do not engage with it.
BB: What is interesting for me is that devices coming from some scientific understanding, knowledge of the universe have very specific consequences on knowledge, on the way we use the device. So it is a black box; we have a black box after which the scientist will come to see how people can use this device but there is no interaction between design by engineers and use by people. I think we have to open the black box to see how the internal scientific setup of the device can interact with the interpretative behavior of the device.
For example if you are working in information technology, take digital writing. It is very hard to describe the associations between techniques we use to design new data bases or new interfaces or new documents, and the consequence it has on the way people write or person think and can interpret, understand the stuff which is on the screen and the database. There is interaction loop; when you transform the device you transform knowledge by acting on the interaction with the device and after that a new connection, a new device. This interaction between interpretation and design is very important when we consider technology.
AD: What about cognitive science?
BB: We are more interested in cognitive technologies rather than cognitive science. Cognitive science can be understood as tentative understanding of the human mind in order to simulate it, to replace it and so on and we are not willing to restrict ourselves. We are not interested in that because we want to understand how the human mind can work - through its brain, through its tools, processes and so on. So we consider that in short the human mind is not only located in the brain. The human mind is also composed of our body. A good part of cognitive science for us is useless because it is too much restricted by normal sciences, which are for my work a catastrophe
AD: Even for us.
BB: It’s epistemologically strange, and scientifically I am not convinced by the results. But by cognitive technology we want to understand what technology can do for man and can change human beings and human minds. For example if you are working with paper and a pen, you are not working exactly similar as with a screen or a keyboard. It’s not the case that one is better than the other but it’s different! We want to understand how it’s different, to what extent it is different and after that to have a better understanding of technology and a better understanding of human mind. So the focus is in the interaction. Then comes co-building of the self of the human being - human mind and the technical object. First is interaction and then verification and individuation of the self on one side and the object on the other side, so it’s very close to phenomenology and close to science. This concept is very fruitful because you can focus on what is important and what is important is interaction but not only the human mind in itself as neuro-science believes and not the object in itself.
AD: How do you bring in this concept?
BB: For example, we develop a device and this device enables an interaction between a person and what is before her. Her visual experience is transferred into tactile sensation and what is important here is that the focus is not only on the tactile stimulation but on the coupling between perceiver and the environment. So what is important is that I have a feeling of tactile stimulation that I replace with another tactile stimulation. This causes some imbalance in your environment and this imbalance will become the perceived object. The purpose is not to change vision into tactile information; our focus is on interaction and we are working on a new experiment where people have to discover each other through these kinds of stimulations.
So we have people working on computers, they are separated by rooms and they can exchange some tactile information through the network and so discover, encounter while exploring space an object. That object has the strange behavior that it can also sense stimulation so they discover that it’s not only an object but the hands of a person! Here is a phenomenon where two persons are encountering virtual spaces and there is a path to be discovered on the screen; the first player shows to the other one how to find the path on these routes of tactile information. It has been really effective. So we design the interactive space in order for people to enter in communication and discover each other through these types of experiments. So in this kind of research we should have some phenomenology, we should have some computer science and computer engineering and also psychology, psychology for setting experiments, measurement. It’s interdisciplinary research.
AD: To push you a little more how does phenomenology offer you some perspective?
BB: This kind of research began by seminars on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and we have lectures between us in order to explain to each other texts of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. The purpose of these lectures was to build an understanding of what is interaction, what is perception and what is a role of body, of the tool in perception. We were beginning the question about tools and the body and how we were able to use the tools. Then how to set up some experiments. It was not so strange to read some early experiments and we found this time also works of Paul Bakherita; what phenomenology has taught us in understanding Bakharita is that the focus is not on the device but the focus was on interaction through the device and so it’s the reason why we have used Bakharita. We haven’t only repeated him because we have enlarged the experiment to interaction and not only to basic essence.
AD: What has been your experience… what is the resistance from well-entrenched disciplinarians?
BB: Everybody was interested if a bit skeptical but within the group and within the team everybody was willing because we had a feeling that we were discovering something new in the way of thinking things and science. It’s always the same story - you should have interested persons who have ideas and with that you can do it.
AD: To widen the horizon, what is the, if I may put it this way, French experience of the inherited divide of the natural and human sciences? You are, in your institution, managing to bridge the divide… but if I say generally France, what will you say?
BB: I think it’s very similar to your experience. For example in the field of philosophy a good part of philosophy in France is only part of the story of philosophy and if you want to do something else, you are not considered a philosopher. And it is a problem for pure sciences. For example in mathematics, if you are working in applied mathematics it’s considered less significant than pure mathematics. I think its just we should eliminate…
AD: …the distinction between the pure and the applied. But people want to retain it!
BB: Yes and so it is not so easy to perform in the academic world interdisciplinary research. Institutions are doing science but not technology and so on; we are specific in France so we have lots of disciplines which are concerned by technology. We may be outside the academic field according to classical values and so on, but everybody is concerned by technology, and even if he doesn’t perform interdisciplinary research he knows that it exists and it is important. So there is an added value of doing interdisciplinary research. Many people are doing research, of course, but they are aware there exists another kind of research and this kind of research is good research.
