Deepanwita Dasgupta - Introducing A Wisdom Framework for Science in the 21st-century: The Idea of a Two-Track Scientific Community

Deepanwita Dasgupta (University of Texas at El Paso)

The Center for Philosophy of Science invites you to our Featured Former Fellow online lecture presented by:   

Featured Former Fellow:   Deepanwita Dasgupta

Friday, March 27th @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm EST

Title: Introducing A Wisdom Framework for Science in the 21st-century: The Idea of a Two-Track Scientific Community

Abstract: 

In this talk, my task will be to show how wisdom, which is an integrated form of multi-level skills, could be incorporated into the research/ teaching practices of contemporary science with some good effects. Additionally, such wisdom can allow us to use our intellectual breakthroughs to serve our existential ends. Our science today is built on the idea of developing expertise in multiple narrow domains, which then would be scaled up to yield quick flows of innovations. While a science based on this kind of narrow expertise can bring us rapid flows of things, it can also lead us to a crisis of sustainability, commodification of research, and a slide towards inequality. To improve matters, I suggest that our narrow practices be scaffolded by a wider and more expansive practice that could function as scaffolds to our current expertise. This combination of a faster and a slower track will allow us to address the blind spots that often lie embedded in our expertise and later gives rise to evidence-in-use problems. Setting up a link between these two tracks may be called wisdom, which we badly need today to engage with our current exponential technologies and their effects on us. This of course needs the inclusion of some new members into the community.

Adding a wisdom track in this way to our system can help us develop new sets of research questions, training procedures, or research protocols. It can thus allow us to explore our areas of ignorance. While there is much discussion about the Freudian kind of ignorance that makes us blind to various things, there is also a Socratic form of ignorance that can be used as a springboard for new ways of thinking.  In true Socratic spirit then, I claim that this wisdom approach might help us in three specific areas – in gatekeeping decisions, building trust in science, and in setting up consiliences with other knowledge communities and their traditions.

This talk will be available online only:

Zoom:  https://pitt.zoom.us/j/92652920133

 YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg.