Of Flour and Salt are both Bread and Paste Made

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Of Flour and Salt are both Bread and Paste Made
September 16, 2006

Type/Items(s): Workshops, Opening & Closing, Discussions & short presentations
Submitted by: Erkan Alpman (ICVolunteers)
Contributors: Moira Cockell (WKD), Viola Krebs (ICVolunteers), Patrizia Kuriger (Young Scientist), Randy Schmieder (MCART)

Getting any minds together in one room is a challenge in itself. Getting great minds together is harder. Getting great minds to agree on a common methodology is the stuff of miracles. But at the World Knowledge Dialogue, miracles are just what the organizers are after.

Led by Ms. Ruth Dreifuss, former President of the Swiss Confederation and Honorary Member of the WKD Committee, approximately 40 world-class representatives of academic research addressed the challenge she posed: "often when it comes to talks, the possibility is there, but is the potential for an exchange there too?"

In the spirit of cooperation, teachers donned the hat of student once again. Participants formed into three groups that were each given thirty minutes to debate this and other questions asked by Ms. Dreifuss: How can political bodies help promote interdisciplinary research?

From ideals to action: most agree that dialogue among fields of natural and social science brings benefits to society as a whole, but not all share the same ideas about methods. Illustration: R. Schmieder

And how can the dialogue between the natural sciences and the humanities become embedded in a broader dialogue between scientific community and society at large? The goal of the discussion: to try to arrive at proposals- if not solutions. The conclusions would be officially presented during the closing of the WKD 2006 Symposium.

Of flour and salt are both bread and paste made

In the debates that followed, it quickly became clear that mixing the "magic ingredients" of great minds together in one room is no guarantee of accord. Perhaps not surprisingly, representatives of the natural and social sciences seemed to fall into two major camps, with natural-sciences representatives seeking more pragmatic, issue-driven debates, and social-science representatives driving to widen the debates to more conceptual subjects.

While a spirit of cooperation was clearly in evidence, there was nonetheless a struggle to find a "common language" when approching issues, even when the positions taken seemed essentially similar. For example, when a participant stressed that poverty, environmental and social concerns should underpin all of our efforts in the pursuit of knowledge dialogue, reactions were mixed. One participant even suggested that perhaps social issues should be left to politicians.From both sides, some felt that Symposium sessions could have focused better; some even cited "navel-gazing discourse". Outside of the Symposium itself, some major sources of rifts between the natural and social sciences were identified, including:

Lack of inter-disciplinary communication
Shyness of opening the "door of talk"
Academic isolationism

Money matters

Perhaps not surprisingly, the issue that representatives of both social and natural sciences found equally grumpy ground to share was difficulties with funding. Some felt that competition between the two domains of science even compromised objectivity of discussions. Another warned that overriding pressures for funding can risk unproductive competition between domains of science-- at the expense of objectivity.

Overall, there was accord on the suggestion that funding should be equally distributed, perhaps by a funding committee of some sort. By working with a committee, a clear priority to inter-disciplinary research could actively advocate dialogue, and that such a funding committee would benefit from including "science-neutral" partners, such as economy and politics representing society. Concretely, funding for joint projects where collective expertise is needed may be provided by national as well as European and other public and private institutions.

Strength in numbers

Overall, the social and human sciences seem to be at a disadvantage. Teaching responsibilities in the humanities are often extremely time-consuming, thereby reducing time and other resources available for research and publication. This lack of time is often confounded by the difficulties of finding quantitative criteria with which to easily judge quality of research. As strongly expressed by the subgroup discussion led by Prof. Reiko Kuroda from Japan, both sciences have a role to play, and it is a challenge before us to find ways to place value on that which is not always easy to measure.

So what role then for the social and human sciences in multidisciplinary research projects? As WKD Young Scientist Patrizia Kuriger points out, concrete problem-based research projects --such as interdisciplinary studies on climate change, or the joint construction of a robot involving both technicians and philosophers-- seemed a good approach to integrate and exchange "cross-cultural" knowledge.

Certain domains may play the role of communicator and bridge-builder between scientific community and society. As was noted repeatedly, scientists are often "not in the business of interpretation". The humanities may also provide critical reflection on the impact of business and industry on scientific research. Citizen science projects--a participatory process including wide sectors of society in the planning, development and conduct of public-interest research-- were suggested as one valuable approach to bridge the gap between natural and social / human sciences as well as to embed this dialogue in the larger context of knowledge exchange between scientific community and civil society.

One issue appears certain: long-term dialogue at this level, like all dialogue, whatever the form or policies, has a critical need for capable facilitators investing their time and energy in fostering constructive communications and offering a fertile ground for exchanges.