This a question I've been thinking about for a while too.
I'm a philosopher and have only a slight amount of formal science education. But have been involved in teaching university courses that investigate the foundations of psychology as a science, taught a stack of introductory logic, and even inflicted some of the (contested) foundations of mathematics on my unsuspecting students. I've also helped run a course on the ethics of engineering and design which was a part of the requirements for students wishing to qualify as professional engineers in Australia.
It's the latter that I thought might be of interest to #steemstem. Design, whether it's in an engineering context or not, is an activity that involves making decisions about value and ethics. As I've written elsewhere there are a whole host of engineering disasters that had distinct ethical failures attached to them.
- Treating human life as just another a factor in a cost-benefit analysis.
- Cutting construction costs with a lack of regard for the safety guidelines.
- Designing addictive software with no concern for the well-being of the people using it.
- Covering a tower block in cladding without properly checking if it's flammable.
- Generally trying to see if can can do something without asking whether or not you should do it...
These are all decisions that can be made in an engineering, design, or even scientific context. They all involve value judgements (usually poor ones). Value judgements are not strictly science, but they are part of the scientific and engineering process in the real world.
I was curious to hear if anyone in the #steemstem community was interested in this sort of thing. The conversation here doesn't bode well, but I should probably try for a larger sample than just @suesa ;)
" I should probably try for a larger sample"
lol...sounds scientific to me, sd!
My inquiry deepens; right now, all I can do is ask rhetorical questions for you and me to think about!
Of course ethics (social philosophy) isn't engineering or science, but is it relevant in their own minds to the people who practice those disciplines? Is it (or should it be?!) within their range of interests? Does it makes them better engineers or scientists?
And what about philosophy of science, and critical thinking? I’m sure that the professionals in those fields claim that they are expert critical thinkers, no matter whether they understand critical theory or not! As I wrote in my blog, I’ve actually worked with hundreds of professors, and few of them hold practical wisdom as a value. They pay lip service to social flourishing, but do they understand that it’s not the result of technology, but rather of careful attention to moral values?
As for deeply coherent thinking, most academics with whom I’ve worked are intensely focused on their own specific disciplines, with little to no regard for deep thinking in other areas. Most have had little practice in integrating moral values, philosophical wisdom or critical theory in their habits of thinking and behaving. Human relating, personal motivation, and psychological self-regulation are subjects that most people don’t seem to want to hear about. Of those who do, many are already convinced of their beliefs, so confirmation bias applies and they need to ignore any idea which contradicts their already- understandings.
People are tough, right? Life can be very tough, can’t it?
John Rawls (A Theory of Justice) wrote that the ideal model for the best (but of course unavailable) system of human understanding (wide dynamic reflective equilibrium) is “a hypothetical process of continually balancing a broad range of observations and conceptions in the process of forming and reforming the beliefs and the policies according to which we regulate our behavior...Taking this process to the limit, one seeks the conception, or plurality of conceptions, that would survive the rational consideration of all feasible conceptions and all reasonable arguments for them. We cannot, of course, actually do this, but we can … characterize the structures of the predominant conceptions familiar to us from the philosophical tradition, and … work out further the refinements of these that strike us as most promising.”
Narrow reflective equilibrium means that one is continually working at justifying one’s beliefs within a relatively narrow range of mutually justifying ideas, and not working as hard to figure out the other stuff. That describes most people, but of course some people work harder to understand more and better.
That’s you and me, right?
Excelsior!