Flourishing Together: Toward a Collective Philosophy of Science
A conversation with a foremost scientist sparks a re-appraisal of the production of knowledge and its role in how we live well together
Lindy Elkins-Tanton, one of the world's foremost scientists, exemplifies a vital shift in the philosophy of science: the movement toward a collective mindset. Her work and wisdom are a reminder that flourishing, both in science and society, requires acknowledging our interdependence and focusing on how we live well together.
Something she said to me in a recent Origins Podcast conversation had that exhilarating and indescribable effect of constellating previously disconnected areas of one's thought:
An ethics of care, inner tension and conflict, competition-cooperation, the conversational nature of things. Her comments here and throughout the entire conversation weave together a tapestry of topics perpetually near my thoughts and inseparable from the notion of flourishing we are cultivating. Flourishing is not about the individual or the collective alone; it is about the dynamic interplay between both. This balance—between the individual’s contribution and the collective’s progress—defines our scientific and societal achievements.
What Maryanne Wolf, scholar, advocate for literacy around the world, and explorer of the connection between the process of reading and the neuroscience of the brain, understands is that we have to slow ourselves down to the pace of the text, because when we don't, we "lose our most beloved home that is the associational epiphanic state of deep reading." Slowing myself down to the pace of the text and subtext from this conversation with Lindy, one of her comments, in particular has continually brought me into Wolf's epiphanic state:
"Every endeavor is an endeavor of humans and it is how the humans treat each other during it that determines its success or failure."
An endeavor of humans. “Our minds are all threaded together, and all the world is mind” wrote a prescient young Virginia Woolf in her diary on why we read and presaging the grounding for the modern field of collective intelligence. Over a hundred years after Woolf's writing and across chasms not only in time, but in culture and context, researchers across the natural, physical, and social sciences resounded her observation and raise its exigency: the study of collective behavior must rise to a ‘crisis discipline.’ “We have built and adopted technology that alters behavior at global scales without a theory of what will happen or a coherent strategy for reducing harm" writes Joseph Bak-Coleman. Social media and other forms of communication technology restructure out interactions in ways that have consequences. Unfortunately, it is unknown whether these changes will bring about a healthy, sustainable, and equitable (in short: flourishing) world. Woolf could not have known our 21st century conditions, but those social observers that can understand the importance of using collectivity as a re-framing for our society and all of its activities.
"I forced myself to think what is the new concept and it became clear to me that it was risk, not only in technology and ecology, but in life and employment, too" (Ulrich Beck Risk Society). It is indeed an uncertain world, too immense for any one mind.
How do we reappraise the production of knowledge, our epistemology, and our philosophy of science in light of the collective, interconnected, and uncertain state of the world? How does this shift impact our behavior and decision-making?
A collective philosophy of science
A collective philosophy of science asks us to rethink not only how knowledge is produced but who participates in that production. It challenges the idea of the ‘lone genius’ and instead emphasizes the collaborative processes that give rise to breakthroughs.
"Science is this way that we try to get a clear step closer to a truer understanding of our world. It's one among all the different ways that humans try to."
One of the most active and exhilarating areas of philosophy is the philosophy of science. And the philosophy of science as we know it, the traditional Popperian and Kuhnian views, cannot persist amidst what we've learned, what we're learning. We need a more collective understanding of the process of science and the production of knowledge. That is a collective philosophy of science and it matters.
From Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions to Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery, even Vannevar Bush's Endless Frontier (he who was largely responsible for the establishment of the National Science Foundation), for a hundred years the philosophy of science has furnished the modern lenses with which we think about science, design its methods, and understand is implications. It is both the mental frameworks and how we instrumentalize scientific knowledge and progress. In a day and age of existential dependence on scientific discovery it would be hard to imagine a more important domain of philosophy.
Existing approaches to understanding the process of science, commonly 'Science and Technology Studies' or more recently the 'Science of Science' [Fortunato et al., 2018] largely follow individual-focused philosophical constructions in designing the metrics of science. Our metrics for quantifying science and scientists are heavily individual: number of publications a person has, first authorships (many tenure committees actually look for solo-authored papers in a backwarding of how science is actually done), awards and honors bestowed upon individuals. The list could go on.
We know that these Science of Science metrics fail to capture what we might call ‘breakthrough science’ (e.g., Fontana et al.). Why? One reason might be that we hold onto this notion of the ‘lone genius’ in science (that an individual is responsible for a scientific discovery).
Yet, we seem to know and have for most of human history that creation and creativity come not from individuals, but collectives. The ancient wisdom traditions certainly know this (Buddhist interdependence only the most obvious example). It is a common refrain even among titans of science that knowledge does not advance through individual effort (it is hard here to resist the trope of Newton's 'standing on the shoulders of giants'). Perhaps less well known if not equally relevant is Brian Eno's 'scenius' in describing the extreme creativity that groups, places or "scenes" can occasionally generate. His actual definition is: "Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius." So why do we hold to a framework and set of metrics for science oriented around the individual?
Science is a society. And when we acknowledge the fact, new philosophies for witnessing it are needed.
Implications of a collective philosophy of science
The notion of society is useful. As a metaphor it provides a bridge from how we have learned to understand societies into how we understand science. The first implication is that it invites sensibilities from new fields to inform how we think about science. Anthropology, sociology, and collective intelligence study individuals and, critically, their interactions and how those interactions give rise to collective phenomena. Societies are socially constructed, so is science. Whether it has been too difficult or an artifact of institutional inertia or mere complacency, we cling to our neoliberal accounting of science, yet the demands on science and scientists and how our philosophies for them have failed to support their flourishing raise an urgency and an imperative to embrace a more collective understanding of how knowledge is made.
We accept that societies, collectives, are always in flux, ever-changing, always being affected by internal and external tensions and always intertwined within a larger system. Science and scientific knowledge, too, are in constant states of flux. "Everything we discover will be amended or proven outright wrong over time, we are stumbling toward a better understanding," mused Elkins-Tanton in our conversation. Our understanding of science must acknowledge this inherent and inexorable state of change. Philosopher and cognitive scientist, Evan Thompson, pointed to what's really at stake, scientific progress itself: it is a dialectic rather than synthesis-seeking; dialectic is always coming to some kind of understanding that seems joint or integrated or harmonious and that new place leads immediately into new tension and that ongoing dialectic movement never stops. When we reach full harmony, when the dialectic stops, the system dies.
Perhaps a more appropriate way to understand science is as a conversation, a dialectic.
Collectivity and flourishing
Flourishing, in this collective sense, is not simply a goal but a requisite for how we must live together—whether in scientific teams or society at large. Flourishing depends on recognizing our interdependence and fostering environments where diverse perspectives can thrive.
Balance is a core tenet of flourishing systems, and a philosophy of science suitable to the flourishing of scientific discovery, scientific communities, and society must find balance. Of course the individual scientist is important, yet discovery is irreducible to the behavior of any of the individuals. Our measurement of science must instead be capable of crossing scales and revealing multi-scale structure. Scientists of collective intelligence, sociologists, and anthropologists study the individual, but with a predominant focus on the interactions between individuals as the generative processes for a society, a collective. We need ways of understanding how scientists are interacting and how it gives rise to various effects at collective scales. Indeed, we already learn that interactions with groups traditionally left out of accounting within the Science of Science (artists, the public, decision-makers, etc.) are vital elements in how and what science gets done. Perhaps in these interactions we will find better explanations for the discoveries that have historically been made and those that remain elusive to us.
Collectivity privileges diversity and plurality. Lindy intimated, "Science is this way that we try to get a clear step closer to a truer understanding of our world. It's one among all the different ways that humans try to." Robin Wall Kimmerer names it directly, "There are many ways of knowing and of understanding and knowledge is only deep when you embrace all of them." And Danielle Allen identifies a common ground between science and democracy when both presuppose the centrality of diversity and plurality, "Engage all members of a community in the work of creating and constantly re-creating that community and to state clearly that the resulting institutions and shared practices are an asset that belongs to all." Scientific knowledge, as the way we govern and organize ourselves, is indeed an asset that belongs to us all and must be stewarded by us all, with all of the ways of knowing.
Finally, a fundamental shift attends to a collective interpretation of science: competition is not the only principle of organizing ourselves and not the only pathway to creativity and adaptation, there is instead a great deal of cooperation (and care). What would it look like to value the cooperation within science, the often unrecognized and always vital efforts of care and selflessness that undergird the processes of science? Do cooperation and care furnish a different understanding of science?
Parting wisdom
Thinking about collectivity is a movement of mind not only relevant to the process of science and the production of knowledge, but to each of us daily. It is the ordinariness and the familiarity of the problems within science I have described above to any life that make these philosophical thoughts relevant more broadly. What I have started to outline above, in a disconnected and messy way no doubt, is a way in which scientists live better together, an improved society of science.
Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Virginia Woolf, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Danielle Allen though speaking across disciplines and eras, all point to the same insight: knowledge and progress arise from connection that celebrates diversity and plurality. Allen's shared community, Woolf's “threaded minds,” Kimmerer’s “many ways of knowing,” and Lindy’s reflection on human interactions during scientific endeavors are all part of a tapestry that redefines how we understand flourishing.
Flourishing is centrally concerned with what it means to live well together. The reimagining of the philosophy of science towards collectivity is an attempt to respond to this generative question of our time, and its lessons are sagacious for any society one might consider. It need not be focused on science to offer insight and indeed many of the thinkers drawn on are far afield or are referring to society much more broadly in their writing.
To foster a truly collective philosophy of science, we must rethink our institutions, our metrics for success, and our interactions with one another. We must prioritize cooperation over competition, diversity over homogeneity, and care over individual achievement. Only then can we create the conditions for collective flourishing, both in science and in society.
So I leave you with this question, one intended to be generative of a collectivity here and one for which Lindy, in her leadership of the Psyche team as in her life, is a model for us all,
"How do you create an environment in which people do want to keep going and want to solve these hardest problems that face humanity ...[so that] we’ll have won, again, something actually worth winning: the chance to work harder, for longer, on something that will amaze us and drive human knowledge farther?”