disciplinary boundaries

One of the most interesting sessions at the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting was a panel of men and women who participated in the IGERT program as students and are now working in a variety of different careers. The point of the panel was to hear about the ways that they felt their experiences as IGERT trainees prepared them for their current positions, as well as to identify aspects of their current jobs where more preparation might have been helpful. The session was moderated by Judy Giordan (President and Co-Founder, Visions in Education, Inc.). The IGERT alums who participated in the…

About three weeks ago, I was in Washington, D.C. for the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting. I was invited to speak on a panel on Digital Science (with co-panelists Chris Impey, Moshe Pritzker, and Jean-Claude Bradley, who blogged about it), and later in the meeting I helped to facilitate some discussions of ethics case studies. I'll have more to say about our panel in the next post, but first I wanted to share some broad observations about the meeting. IGERT stands for "Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship", and the program is described thusly: IGERT is the National Science…

As I was driving home from work today, I was listening to Marketplace on public radio. In the middle of a story, reported by Nancy Marshall Genzer, about opponents of health care reform, there was an interesting comment that bears on the nature of economics as a scientific discipline. From the transcript of the story: The Chamber of Commerce is taking a bulldozer to the [health care reform] bill. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported the Chamber is hiring an economist to study the legislation. The goal: more ammunition to sink the bill. Ewe Reinhardt teaches economics at Princeton. He…

Or, less generally, am I a geologist? I have a B.S. in geophysics and an M.S. in earth and planetary science with a funky geophysics/geohydrology emphasis. I took some intro physical geology and earth history as a sophomore, but I have never taken formal courses in mineralogy, petrology, structural geology, sedimentology, or stratigraphy. However, I've picked up the basics of these fields from older kids on the street corner and make use of them in my work. Please assume while you are answering the poll that my work involves using my knowledge of the Earth's history, processes, and…

In the 12 September, 2008 issue of Science, there is a brief article titled "Do We Need 'Synthetic Bioethics'?" [1]. The authors, Hastings Center ethicists Erik Parens, Josephine Johnston, and Jacob Moses, answer: no. Parens et al. note the proliferation of subdisciplines of bioethics: gen-ethics (focused on ethical issues around the Human Genome Project), neuro-ethics, nano-ethics, and soon, potentially, synthetic bioethics (to grapple with ethical issues raised by synthetic biology). Emerging areas of scientific research raise new technical and theoretical questions. To the extent that…

Reading the comments on my post and Chad's post about the different societal attitudes towards humanities and arts and math and science (especially in terms of what "basic" knowledge a well-educated person ought to have), I get the feeling that some interesting assumptions are at play. Since I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, I'm just going to lay out some of the hypotheses that have occurred to me as I've read through these discussions: Math and science are objectively harder (and/or require greater intelligence to learn) than humanities and arts. While math and science do not…

Over at Philosopher's Playground, Steve Gimbel asks why the philosophy of chemistry is such a recent discipline given how long there has been serious activity in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of physics. He floats a few possible answers -- as it happens, the same options those of us who actually do philosophy of chemistry encounter fairly regularly. After responding briefly to these possible reasons for thinking that there shouldn't be a distinct philosophy of chemistry, I'll offer a brief sketch of what a philosophy of chemistry might be about.* (1) There are no big questions…

Via Crooked Timber, I see that philosopher Simon Blackburn would like to dispel some myths. (He does this in the inaugural article of a Times Higher Education series "in which academics range beyond their area of expertise".) Of the ten myths Blackburn identifies for busting, the one that caught my attention was "the myth of the scientist": This claims that there is an expertise, science, and that people who are good at it deserve a lot of attention. This is almost wholly false. There is no such thing as a scientist, and it is a shame that William Whewell, a rather patchy philosopher (…

As I was weighing in on aetosaurs and scientist on scientist nastiness, one of the people I was talking to raised the question of whether careerist theft and backstabbing of professional colleagues was especially bad in paleontology. (Meanwhile, a commenter expressed surprise that it wasn't just biomedical researchers who felt driven to cheat.) I don't know. So I figured I'd put it to my readers: In your experience, which scientific discipline seems most prone to fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, and generally nasty business between its members? Do you have any hypotheses as to why…

It's been pretty quiet here. Not only have I been engrossed in preparations for the Spring semester (classes start today), but I also went to the 2008 NC Science Blogging Conference. So it seems like a good time to ruminate a bit on how conferences fit into the patterns of (my) academic life. The official reasons academics go to conferences include presenting their work to others in their field and finding out what other people in the field are working on. In the "scholarly communication" hierarchy, giving a talk or presenting a poster is less valued than getting a peer-reviewed…

Following up on the earlier discussion here and at Chad's about the "fundamental difference" between chemistry and physics, I wanted to have a look at a historical moment that might provide some insight into the mood along the border between the two fields. It strikes me that the boundaries between chemistry and physics, as between any two fields which train their tools on some of the same parts of the world, are not fixed for all time but may shift in either direction. But this means that there are sometimes boundary disputes. One locus of the dispute about boundaries is the chemical…

Over at Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel tries to explain the fundamental difference between physics and chemistry: My take on this particular question is that there's a whole hierarchy of (sub)fields, based on what level of abstraction you work at. The question really has to do with what you consider the fundamental building block of the systems you study. Chad's rough breakdown is fine as far as it goes. But it wouldn't (in my experience) be a terribly accurate guide to discerning what (say) a physical chemist actually worked on in his or her research. Chad describes the corresponding…

This New York Times op-ed, to be precise. My questions for Paul Davies can be boiled down to these two: What kinds of explanations, precisely, are you asking science to deliver to you? Just why do you think it is the job of science to provide such explanations? Let's back up a little and look at some of what Davies writes in his op-ed: ... science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn't be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly…

When I was growing up in New Jersey, hurricanes were "on the radar" for us, one of many possible (if infrequent) weather patterns during summer and fall. Later, in my first semester of college in Massachusetts, the morning of my first broadcast on the college radio station was made memorable by the landfall of Hurricane Gloria; I remember the name of the storm because I closed my show by playing the U2 song "Gloria" before signing off the air at 7 am. (The governor of the Massachusetts had just declared a state of emergency, although it wasn't until some 30 minutes later that the trustees…

The July 9 issue of Chemical & Engineering News (alas, behind a paywall -- but worth checking to see if your library has an institutional subscription) has an interesting piece [1] on the recently-settled trial in which the makers of Equal (an artificial sweetener based on aspartame) sued the makers of Splenda (an artificial sweetener based on sucralose) over their claim in advertisements, "Splenda is made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar." The makers of Equal (a company called Merisant) asserted that this claim was deceptive. Most of the C&E News piece focuses on the ways the two…

In my last post, I allowed as how the questions which occupy philosophers of science might be of limited interest or practical use to the working scientist.* At least one commenter was of the opinion that this is a good reason to dismantle the whole discipline: [T]he question becomes: what are the philosophers good for? And if they don't practice science, why should we care what they think? And, I pretty much said in the post that scientists don't need to care about what the philosophers of science think. Then why should anyone else? Scientists don't need to care what historians,…

David Ng at the World's Fair has some questions: 1. What's your current scientific specialty? 2. Were you originally pursuing a different academic course? If so, what was it? 3. Do you happen to wish you were involved in another scientific field? If so, what one? I'll play: 1. Currently I'm not a scientist but rather a philosopher of science and an ethics teacher for future scientists. However, when I last was a practicing scientist, I was a physical chemist whose broad focus was the dynamics and thermodynamics of far-from-equilibrium systems. Here's a narrower description of my work: I…

In his book Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (reviewed in the last post), Greg Critser includes a quotation from a physician (in a self-help book [1]) that I found really striking: In your search ... you are going to come across physicians who may initially be skeptical of any medication, technique, or new technology that has not already been proven to be successful with an indisputable double-blind study. This would not be the right physician for you. The very essence of Vitality Medicine has to do with flexibility, change, and a…

Because I am engaged in a struggle with mass quantities of grading, I'm reviving a post from the vault to tide you over. I have added some new details in square brackets, and as always, I welcome your insight here. I just got back [in Octiber of 2005] from talking with an outside evaluator about the federally funded training grant project at my university that tries to get more of our students to graduate school in science. The evaluator is here not at the behest of the funding agency, but rather at the request of the science professor here who oversees the program. Because, you know, he…

It has recently transpired that I will be teaching (and before that, designing and constructing) a brand new ethics module in the large introduction to engineering class at my university that all the freshman who are majoring in any of the multitude of engineering disciplines must take. I'm jazzed, of course, that the College of Engineering thinks that it's worth cultivating in their students the idea that ethics is an integral part of being a good engineer (and a good engineering student), so much so that they are devoting two weeks in the fifteen week term to this. And, I want to do a…