Interdisciplinary Cases as Real-World Experiments

Wolfgang KrohnBielefeld UniversityInstitute for Science and Technology StudiesFaculty of Sociologywolfgang.krohn@uni-bielefeld.de

Interdisciplinary cases and fields which I have observed

Ecological restauration projects (in collaboration with Matthias Gross, Holger Hoffmann-Riehm)

Interorganizational innovation networks between developers, suppliers, and users of high-tech tool machines (with Uli Kowol)

Waste management, waste research and regulatory regimes in Germany 1960-2010 (with Ralf Herbold)

Case study on situated man-machine communication research (embodied language theory to construction of talking robots; with Tobias Knobloch)

Relations between scientific and artistic research; starting

Formation of interdisciplinary expert advice in the German Commission on Radiation Protection (Gesellschaft fuer Strahlenschutz); ongoing, with Cornelia Altenburg and Martin Carrier)

These fields of interdisciplinary research are predominantly determined by features of mission oriented research

- Problem identification, reconstruction, and solution

- product development (create a lake, a machine , a recommendation, an artistic performance)

- strategies of experimental implementation and recursive learning

- transdisciplinary heterogeneous actor networks (scientists, professional experts, civil servants, stakeholders)

- project format: negotiating and contracting research goals and innovation strategies.

The following slides provide impressions from sanitation projects in a strip-mining

area

Bitterfeld Waterfront Project – Public information

A strip-mining area in operation

Field researchers at work

Restauration in progress

No trespassing - an open space laboratory marked as isolated

A botanist documenting success

A professor talking to the public

The following diagram hints at the work of sociological reconstruction.The content is of no concern here

Implementation

Project Vision

Accommodation

Grave Consequences

Accommodation

Negotiation

Unexpected Contamination

Socio-Economic Structure

Landowner

Engineering office (e.g.

investigation)

Coordinating engineering

company

Construction company

Analytical laboratory

Funding Agency

Investor

Policy Maker

Le

ga

l Fra

me

wo

rk

Experimental Governance:: a working model

new knowledge

Courtesy Matthias Gross, UFZ Leipzig

Three observations with epistemological implications:

(1)Interdisciplinary communication and cooperation are two very different things.

Interdisciplinary communication is successful if scholars irritate each other. After a while irritation fades away or stimulates new ideas.

Interdisciplinary cooperation is successful when a common good is generated on the basis of organic division of labor.

Standard problem of interdisciplinary projects: Communication is expected to lead to a common good. In fact, it leads to the least common denominator.

Welcome irritation and stimulation as eminent objectives of interdisciplinary discourse

Interdisciplinary discourse as organized mutual theft of intellectual properties with the intent to make use of the goods carried off in the domains of the specialists.

Academic interdisciplinary research groups usually get funded on the promise of deeply rooted concept work and far reaching perspectives for science and society. As they progress, they discover the difficulties involved and compromise on the common denominator or fall apart (with members either frustrated or enriched)

(2)In mission oriented cooperative interdisciplinary projects participating parties set each other boundary conditions which must be met by the design of their respective contributions.

However, the process is iterative: conditions can be changed upon changes of other constraints: recursive learning dynamics.

Problems of understanding and comprehension occur. To suppress them can become expensive. Appropriate ways of handling them are boundary concepts, models, maps, prototypes.

Welcome the specialists’ competences and be careful with high investments in developing a common language, knowledge base, and method.

(3)The programs and projects observed display oscillating research interests between solving a case and augmenting more general knowledge.

Solving the case: Cases, problem solving innovations, installations count in itself. They are not (only) an exemplar of a scientific set (a value of a variable) - but a reality to be accounted for in its complexity and singularity. A solution ‘in principle’ is no solution.

Openness to contingencies and surprises originating in the their social and ecological environments of projects have to be part of the design.

Design is important, delimitation of areas is impossible

Nomothetic ideal

IndividualizationGeneralisation

Reduction of complexity by abstraction

Value free

Similarity between objects relevant

Contingencies restrict validitiy claims (ceteris paribus clause)

Idiographic Ideal

Usefulness increases with generalisation (HO-model)

Increase of complexity by completeness

Value laden

Differences relevant

Contingencies increase validity

Usefulness increases with specification (expert knowledge model)

The tension between these dual goals is epistemologically interesting and leads to issues which philosophy of interdisciplinarity should address:

- How do the contrasting knowledge ideals of nomothetic and idiographic knowledge relate?

- How would a theory of scientific learning look like in which mastering cases and generating theoretical knowledge are equally relevant? (Does modeling play an intermediation role?)

- Is it an appropriate view of knowledge society as being determined by projects in which research dynamics and innovation strategies coincide? (Experimental society; society as laboratory)

Heinrich Rickert

(1863–1936) Wilhelm Windelband

(1848 - 1915)

Nomothetic and idiographic knowledge:from divergent to complementary knowledge ideals

Distinguishing between nomothetic and idiographic sciences

“in seeking knowledge of what is real, the empirical sciences are looking for the general in terms of natural laws or for the singular in its historically determined shape.

Those are sciences of natural laws, these are sciences of events.” (Windelband 1894, p. 145)

Examples of events worth scholarly interest are, according to Windelband, “Actions of a person, the character and life of a single man, or of an entire people, the character and development of a language, a religion, a legal order, a product of literature, art, or science: and each of these subjects demands a treatment corresponding to its peculiarities.” (Windelband, 1907, 363)

  

   John Dewey, pragmatist philosopher:proposed an ‘experimental ethics’ with which modern society should expose its values to hypothetical reasoning and methodical testing.

   John Dewey, pragmatist philosopher:proposed an ‘experimental ethics’ with which modern society should expose its values to hypothetical reasoning and methodical testing.

Robert E. Park, sociologist:‘Chicago: An Experiment in Social Science Research’ ‘The City as a Social Laboratory’. The development of the city is an ongoing process of collective self-experimentation, gratuitously offered to the sociological observer. 

Robert E. Park, sociologist:‘Chicago: An Experiment in Social Science Research’ ‘The City as a Social Laboratory’. The development of the city is an ongoing process of collective self-experimentation, gratuitously offered to the sociological observer. 

Theorists and practitioners of real-world experiments

Donald Campbell, social psychologist and evolutionary epistemologist,

‘Reforms as Experiments’.

He developed a new methodological toolkit for designing, performing and evaluating public reform projects as collective experiments. 

Donald Campbell, social psychologist and evolutionary epistemologist,

‘Reforms as Experiments’.

He developed a new methodological toolkit for designing, performing and evaluating public reform projects as collective experiments. 

C.S. Holling, founder of the adaptive management paradigm

Unpredictability of dynamical systems advanced to a theoretical term. Experimental strategies integrate

- public input and planning, - interventions and regulatory action, - monitoring and evaluation, - readiness to start new.

C.S. Holling, founder of the adaptive management paradigm

Unpredictability of dynamical systems advanced to a theoretical term. Experimental strategies integrate

- public input and planning, - interventions and regulatory action, - monitoring and evaluation, - readiness to start new.

Theorists and practitioners of real-world experiments

Theorists and practitioners of real-world experiments

Sir Karl Popper proposed in The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) piecemeal social experiments with single institutions, e.g. unemployment, as opposed to grant scale experiments with complete societies