PostNormal Times: Tougher Than It Looks?

PostNormal Times is a podcast for our complex reality and unpredictable world—a world where the stakes are high and innovation is crucial. Andrew Vosko, PhD, associate provost and director of transdisciplinary studies at CGU, and his guests explore ideas that transcend traditional academic boundaries and address our most pressing needs. Get ready to challenge your assumptions.

In season 2, episode 3 of PostNormal Times, Andrew Vosko and guest Professor Patricia Easton discuss the history of transdisciplinary thought and the challenges involved with working in a field dedicated to applied knowledge, including complexity, integration, and ethics.

ANDREW: Welcome to PostNormal Times, a podcast for our complex reality and unpredictable world, where stakes are high, and innovation is crucial. In this series, I get to sit down with some of my favorite minds to explore new ideas that transcend traditional academic boundaries and address our most pressing needs. I’m Andrew Vosko, associate provost and director of transdisciplinary studies at Claremont Graduate University. Welcome to the show.

I’d like to welcome everybody back to another episode of PostNormal Times where we don’t discuss business as usual, we discuss business in a transdisciplinary world. And by business, I mean everything that’s going on here in higher education and in global affairs—and if we want to talk business, we can talk business, too. But today, we are going to talk about everything including the kitchen sink about the way we understand how to ask questions in the world, with one of my favorite guests, one of my favorite people, a professor of humanities, Professor Patricia Easton. Welcome, Patricia.

PATRICIA: Thank you, Andy. It’s great to be here.

ANDREW: I want everybody to know that Patricia is who got me started down the pathway to transdisciplinary studies. She brought me into CGU, to be a part of the transdisciplinary studies family. And before I was leading the program, Patricia led the program— and for about how long?

PATRICIA: About two years, maybe three years? ..

ANDREW: So, I have to ask as we hit the ground running: How did you find yourself in transdisciplinary studies at that time, because you come from a very different place in terms of your academic training and how you got there?

PATRICIA: So, we went through about a decade of the “T-program” at the time under Wendy Martin’s leadership. When she stepped away from the position, there was a lot going on across campus. Jacob Adams, who was the provost, came into my office. You always know you’re in trouble when the provost comes to your office, and you’re sitting there working … and he said, “Look, given your commitment to transdisciplinary studies, and how you’ve taught in the program, and how you’re a capable administrator, would you step in and then, at some point, find our new director?” And I said, “Absolutely” and also if it could be a halftime gig.

ANDREW: I know how those go.

PATRICIA: Yeah, exactly. That first year, I got through the transition And then Tom came on as a partner, a thought partner. Tom has so much energy—Tom Horan—that we ended up doing a “big data, better world” conference, and it was fantastic. The students got involved with projects. At that time, we were interviewing for the new director, and we had had a temporary director come in. But as soon as we interviewed you, Andy, we knew that we had to get you.

ANDREW: I’m blushing, for those who can’t see me right now. … I remember when we were talking. One of the things that you do when you’re approached as somebody who’s going to be interviewed, is you look to see who’s interviewing you. And I saw in your profile, Patricia, that you were a scholar of René Descartes and had this Cartesian philosophy background.

I was coming from the health sciences and medical education. So, all of us had this picture of the reflex, of a baby touching the fire or whatever that weird … it’s the picture we learn in our intro neuro course, the intro bio psych course. And I was like, “Wait, here’s a person who actually studied this history, this has got to be fascinating to be coming from this approach to knowledge. Because in some senses, that version of how I learned … in the health sciences and in medical education, is that we’re machines and so you can treat us as machines. Thank you, René Descartes.”

And that was very freeing for us because it allowed us to lose some of that baby taboo of “Don’t touch, don’t open, don’t look underneath the hood,” literally. We can actually fix ourselves if we do some of that. So, that became kind of the mantra of medicine of like, “Well, if you understand enough about how the engine works, or if you look hard enough under the hood, you can fix it.” But that isn’t really everything about life, either. Not everything is an automobile or a clock or any of these other machines. Transdisciplinarity is a different way to think about it. So how did you bring your Cartesian … ? First of all, am I wrong in my interpretation of Descartes?

PATRICIA: Let me just say a couple of things to set some of the groundwork for what I’m going to say later. Absolutely, the mechanical philosophy of the 17th century: Descartes was a proponent of that. So was Thomas Hobbes. So was Isaac Newton. … Wow, if we could study nature as a kind of machine with mechanical principles, and laws of motion as the full explanation of what goes on, it’s not only liberating, it’s also very…

Well, you could reach some certainty, or you could have some certainty about the world, right? It was very exciting at that time. But remember, for Descartes, he wasn’t just a materialist, he was a dualist. And so, understanding ourselves and the brain’s connection to the soul—that’s another part of the story that doesn’t get told.

What was really important, though, about mechanical philosophy was the ability of those thinkers to then reduce the problem. It was all very reductive. What they were trying to understand was physics, the mechanics of how bodies move through space. That was the dawn, really the birth, of modern science. Chemistry came a little bit later in the 17th century and then they tried to apply these principles to biology, more or less successfully. But as science evolved, the method had to evolve as well.

ANDREW: So, as you were mentioning this reductive model—that’s been the big criticism of science, that it’s too reductive, it’s always “How does that relate to the use of the scientific method and kind of unifying all of the sciences.” … You could start with physics and go into chemistry and biology, like you’re adding so many more unknowns to this, that you can see where it’s not as easy to simplify and model.

But then when you get into the social sciences, and things at these larger levels, I’ve noticed in my life—and I certainly see it around—that most folks who are serious “scientists” are even more set on having that model be the thing that guides them. So, how did something like creating a system for studying physics get translated into studying complex human behaviors?

PATRICIA: Indeed, it was so successful. We could explain so many more things than we could before we applied this approach. By the early 20th century, there was the unity of science movement, the logical positivists, and the Vienna Circle. Their grand vision was that you’ve got physics, and then built on top of that chemistry, and then biology, and then maybe psychology might make it—it was trying to be a hard science, too.

But then what about history? And they believed that there’d be bridge laws that’d get you from history to psychology, to biology, to chemistry, to physics, and whatever other special sciences emerged—that the bridge laws would create that unity. The method was the common method that had evolved. By the time of the 20th century, we had discovered statistics. That became part of the inductive methodology that could be applied using the hypothetical deductive method.

ANDREW: First of all, I’m interested because I’m curious what these bridge laws might have looked like—or is this a concept out in the ether that nobody can really describe? Do they know it when they see it? How did philosophy go from being in this hierarchy, pretty close to foundational, to something that was then relegated to the humanities and outside of science, unless you were studying philosophy of science or history of science?

PATRICIA: Karl Hempel tried to apply this whole scientific framework to history. And let me just cut to the chase: He was unsuccessful. So then there were cracks in the unity of science picture. Psychology was getting more complicated. Ecology came into the picture. Social sciences, if they’re including the understanding … sociology, it didn’t really fit into the reductive universe that had given birth to so much in terms of explanation and knowledge.

Philosophers of science and philosophers started to step back from that worldview and say, “There’s something else going on here. There’s something more complicated that we need to account for.” But today there are still philosophers of science and scientists who believe that that picture of the unity of science and methodology is the best we’ve got and we need to go forward with it.

ANDREW: I’m very much from that tradition. So, I was schooled by wonderful human beings … it’s a wonderful tradition, so there’s actually zero criticism from me toward my education. But that was how I was educated, and I didn’t have this broader view that there are other possibilities. So then, you’ve got this Vienna Circle, and this is the early 20th century, then the Second World War hits, and you start bringing in people from different places, you bring the anthropologist together with the beginnings of computer science, with sociology, and all the military and defense spending. These applied spaces for knowledge had come into play where people were like, “I don’t know what the solution is, but you five need to figure it out in this room, because we need to win this war.”

So, it really changed something that we’d done beforehand, though I wouldn’t say it democratized something. But it did take knowledge from the ivory tower to—I don’t want to say to the community, it was actually in the war room, that was the obvious place it’d gone.

Is there a relationship that you see in the history and philosophy of science, that kind of interface, where these big events like wars create pivot points for how we look at knowledge?

PATRICIA: Yes, I do think so. If we go back to the 17th century for a moment, there weren’t special sciences at that time. There was just natural philosophy. And then as time went on, people started identifying different domains and reducing the complexity by saying, “Oh, we’re just going to look at botanical stuff or we’re just going to look at biological systems, or we’re just going to look at cells.” That evolution and the specialization of knowledge of sciences gave rise to another problem, which is, how do you synthesize that you can no longer be the same type of person as Newton and Descartes were in the 17th century, someone who kept up with all of the new knowledge being created and cross-pollinated it?

Something like a war brought into being a multidisciplinary need to solve problems. So, I do think that the circumstances were fertile for us to begin to try different modes of knowledge and inquiry. A lot of that was done even though they didn’t have a framework to think about how to do it.

ANDREW: I remember early on when I got here … I’m a book nerd. I like to go through old JSTOR PDFs, or into the library and look at the oldest things I can find. Where’s the first instance of transdisciplinarity mentioned anywhere—or transdisciplinary anything?

I remember something I wish I’d written down. It’s credited to Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist, saying “We need to go beyond interdisciplinary, we need to go into transdisciplinary space.” But he was not the first person to say transdisciplinary, at least in the written record. I found something from the 1920s or 1930s of somebody talking about primary or secondary education, and about that needing to be a transdisciplinary space. I’m like, “You know, this isn’t such a linear thing.”

Some of these conversations have happened long before, and they happened outside the elite school of European continental philosophy and psychology. So, it had been around for a minute. But then after the Second World War, there was this society, as you mentioned, in which synthesis became a thing because we were specialized and we had seen a need for it. So, there was a group that came around and said, “It’s not enough that we’re specialized and in the same room—if we don’t synthesize and don’t integrate, then it’s still not good enough. And we’re going to call that interdisciplinary studies. … If you take the multi-disciplinarity of a bunch of people in a room, and then on top of that, you force integration or synthesis on it, now we’re interdisciplinary.” They made a whole movement about it and that’s where they became their own society.

And they had been for a long time the people who’d championed how to get that stuff done in a way that involves a more formal organization and framework than just getting people in a room, or what we used to call in interprofessional education “butts in seats.” Magic doesn’t just happen when you get a philosopher and a neuroscientist in a room.

I used to show this thing to students, this panel that was held somewhere in New York that was a bunch of really prestigious chairs and professors of departments all talking about the brain in the mind. So, you had your historian of science, you have your psychiatrist, your neuroscientist, your neurologist, your …

PATRICIA: And each of them with their own assumptions, their own methods, right?

ANDREW: And they were bringing their own humanity to it as well. It was the first time I recognized this idea that we’re all schooled to have a disciplinary shield or disciplinary armor with us, so that instead of saying, “I think that…,” we say, “As a neuroscientist, I think that…,” meaning that I had zero to do with this emphasis, I’m merely reflecting what I represent at this table.

To me, that’s one of those big barriers to synthesis. Because synthesis doesn’t happen at the level of a discipline, synthesis happens at the level of an individual. When you have a Newton or you have a Descartes, and they have the time and the apple tree and the candlelight and they’re allowed to synthesize … your social parameters haven’t told you that you can’t synthesize. You’ve got the time, you’ve got the ink, you’ve got the space, so you synthesize for everybody.

So, how have you seen that in your own career? Your own trajectory was not one that came from you just representing a discipline. You veered, you turned left, and you said, “Wait, why are you asking that question? How do I bring this in and integrate something else?” How did you chart that path for yourself?

PATRICIA: That’s a great question, another multi-layered question, in fact. I think that, as a philosopher, I had at one point believed I was a transdisciplinary thinker, just by nature. But in fact, especially teaching—thank you for letting me teach the course this semester!—has given me the confidence that I could do this. It’s because it’s about the modern foundations of the scientific method, and thinking about post-normal science and “wicked” problems.

And through that process with amazing students, we’ve generated a lot of knowledge. I don’t believe any longer that I am a transdisciplinary researcher. I do believe that I am a transdisciplinary thinker, and in my practice, I practice the principles.

So, it was exciting for me to begin to think about, “Well, what exactly is transdisciplinary studies, and why do we need it?” Because everybody—well, not everybody—but many people on our campus in particular think that they’re engaged in transdisciplinary research and scholarship. Some are, but it’s implicit. So, getting clarity on what our particular disciplines do for us reduces the complexity.

Are the concepts and norms that we apply, the methodologies that we employ, designed to help us reduce the problem? The problem with wicked problems is that they’re not so easily reducible. And so, you have to create a new framework and way of thinking and let the problem lead you.

ANDREW: It’s like wicked problems are the prime numbers of problems. You can’t reduce them to more than just what they’ve already been reduced to. So, you got to deal with them in that way and respect that that’s … their nature. That’s not going to change because you’ve closed one eye and put your own frame around it to look at it in a particular way.

This is so interesting because we’ve talked about this before. Even in the class, I think you held the debate with me, and somebody said that my discipline is inherently transdisciplinary—which is one of those things where I can recognize that disciplines have a transdisciplinary-ness to them, that they have this inherent boundary-crossing capacity, they have some of these things that we bring in that allow us to appreciate complexity.

Anthropology does a good job of this, and so do education and evaluation. A lot of them integrate some of these things. But the nature of a discipline is that it also has to be looked at as a cultural moment. A discipline also has a roof on it. The second it becomes a discipline, it gets a set of standards. It has a set of journals, a set of linguistic norms, and a way of passing on knowledge and stewardship.

And so once that happens, you’re not transcending it anymore because you’re contained in its house. The identity crisis for transdisciplinarity is that it considers itself a discipline now, paradoxically. How do we handle that? And one of the interesting things about CGU is that we’re one of the few places where we’ve held to our own version of it without committing—yes, we haven’t committed an allegiance to one of the couple of schools that have existed where you’re either like the Swiss school or the French school of such and such. We haven’t done that. We’ve created our own thing with it, which I find quite interesting.

So in some ways, it’s hard because we’re not doing disciplinary transdisciplinarity. So, we … are more honest about it because we recognize that there are things about being transdisciplinary that we recognize in other disciplines. But we haven’t completely put a roof on it the same way as we see it happening in other parts of the world.

PATRICIA: I was thinking, as you were talking, that one of the things that we did in our class this semester on the foundations of transdisciplinarity and wicked problems is that we really focus for a couple of weeks on what a wicked problem is: How is it different and what gives rise to it? We came up with four characteristics: The facts are uncertain, the values are in dispute, the stakes are high, and the decisions are urgent.

So, I had them formulate what they think is a wicked problem. There were all kinds of things they put on the list. But as we put it all to that test, things started to fall off.

And I did the same thing with my own thinking. Philosophical questions are very fundamental. So of course, the facts are uncertain, and people disagree. It’s very disputable. And are the stakes high? I mean, there’s the problem of free will. The stakes can be high in some respects. But people can be determinist, compatibilist, or libertarian, and it may not really impact anything. Then there’s the same thing with urgency. There’s a sense in which yes, these questions are urgent because they affect humankind and our existence, but they’re also not urgent, no, in the way in which—

ANDREW: We’ve been arguing about free will for quite some time. And not having that answer hasn’t—

PATRICIA: Hasn’t impacted—

ANDREW: —being wrong or right about it. We’re still uncertain, and we’re still gonna argue about it for another 100 years.

PATRICIA: So, the students came up with a few wicked problems. We worked through those and what kind of frameworks and how do you ask … other research questions. One of the groups picked diversity, equity, and inclusion in an organization. And I kept saying, “Well, what’s the problem?” And they weren’t ready to—

ANDREW: It’s a topic, not a problem.

PATRICIA: Exactly, exactly. And so they went off and worked on that. And then another group worked on illiteracy: That the problem is that children don’t all learn how to read and there’s differential access to education and all sorts of things that come out of that.

And as the semester progressed, they were like, “Ah, man, this is really hard. There’s a wicked problem in there.” Every time they came back to it, they reformulated it. If we air some of the podcasts that they came up with, you’ll get the answers to their questions—pretty open-ended.

But it was a valuable exercise because it showed that certain features of questions, problems, and the frameworks in which we place them are important. … When you put a transdisciplinary team together, it means that synthesis cannot happen just on the individual level. The synthesis has to happen at the project level. So, how do you negotiate that when everybody’s coming from a different perspective? And they had to create new ways of thinking to get there. That was one of the first things they discovered.

The other thing they started to try to incorporate into “What does transdisciplinary research look like?” was a bunch of case examples from Gertrude Hirsch Hadorn and Christian Pohl who came from the Swiss school. They weren’t completely satisfied, but they did show some of these attributes and how they would materialize in a particular kind of study—and then the idea that you have to expand your peer communities, that you have to involve the participants whom you’re studying, or perhaps in some cases, not even just humans.

You have to be prepared to use creative ideas to bring about the result. If you’re trying to impact a social problem, you’re already talking about a social phenomenon. So, the complexity is built in there. You could approach it from one discipline or another, which gets at a piece of that problem. But it’s difficult to get at the whole problem.

And so one of the examples we worked through was what Hadorn and Pohl called the theater approach. I’m sorry, I’m going to forget the actual researchers and so on here, but the example itself I think illustrates nicely the difference between what we call the traditional classical approach to a scientific problem and now this new thing.

The thing they wanted to do—it was not so much a research question as an objective—was to reduce the infection rates of HIV in a particular population. Sounds like a standard scientific problem, right? They already knew what causes HIV. So, that’s not the problem. The question became, “How do we reduce it in this particular population?”

So, the population was between the ages of, say, 16 and 26. It was a country in Africa, that had specific customs and norms, and they had done everything they could to communicate how you get HIV and AIDS, but that wasn’t having any impact whatsoever.

So, what they did was recruit people from the population and train them to collect data, analyze it, and communicate. So, the actual new researchers who were part of the population used a theater. They would develop plays take them on the road, and try to reach their audience. They were very effective, in fact, in having an impact on the very problem they started with.

So, it was a wicked problem, not just because of the complexity of the approach but also because if you want the social-good outcome, you have to think about … you have to learn what context and environment you’re in. And the only way to do that is to involve your peer communities or participants if you really want to have an impact.

ANDREW: One of the big pieces of that part of the transdisciplinary dialogue is how the arts are a way of knowing. They’re another form of knowledge. They’re not just the vehicle of delivery of knowledge … even though they’re a vehicle for delivering knowledge in a context—and a really helpful one.

PATRICIA: And for generating knowledge.

ANDREW: And that’s the other thing—it also generates knowledge.

And that’s … something the French school had brought to this conversation. Your imagination is a way of knowing. Your spirituality is a way of knowing. And we’re not so stuck on “What is the truth?” because we already have the sense that there’s lots of truths. And in your dreams, you do have a whole series of weird truths that aren’t the same as during your waking hours when you’re walking around and interacting with other people who have to share an experience with you. But it doesn’t mean those dreams aren’t important, and it doesn’t mean that they don’t have value.

So, how do you extract value from each of those things? How do you apply them to something where we need your help? That’s one of the big differences I found in the transdisciplinary space versus classical training. Because before I would think about dreams as, “Who the heck cares about my imagination?” How are they relevant? How are they truthful?” They’re not truthful because they haven’t gone through this specific series of hypothesis testing and peer review.

And yet now this other version is like, “I’m not as concerned about whether it’s true. Yes, there’s truth to it, and that’s part of your research, but does it help? Do we need it?” It’s a different way to approach something that I tell people about and which we’ve talked about before on this podcast—that the motto of that model of the hypothetical deductive way of looking at things is “I didn’t really do it, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants.” I think that’s a Newtonian attribution.

But the truth is, what if that first giant you’re standing on the shoulders of was oriented like 10 degrees in the wrong direction, and you built an entire Jenga house up there and you missed all the other degrees because of that orientation you built on those shoulders? And that realization is what the transdisciplinary approach really pushes. You can stand on shoulders and that’s super important because we know so much about that one angle. But your values determined you’d be at that angle in the first place. We keep on building on those values we started with and we might have learned more in the process. But have you connected to someone else’s giants that they’ve been standing on the shoulders of? Because they can give you a different and deep perspective.

That way of thinking about it—I find that a lot of people can understand it. We never questioned whether that was the right giant, and we assumed that because somebody had done it, there was truth in it because truth is singular. But you know, the Nicolescu school comes in, and says, “It’s that Stephen Colbert term of truthiness. There is truthiness … truth is contextual.”

So, you can’t present truth in terms of health statistics to people who don’t have that language of truth, but you can present truth in a play. That truth resonates because that is the context in which they can connect to that truth. It doesn’t matter that one involved figures of legend … it was what was needed.

This has to change our engagement with the process of inquiry from us … wearing a disciplinary armor while just exposing and uncovering the truth and the secrets of truth, to being instead people who take responsibility for the way that we look at truth, integrate truth, and decide what truth is needed. Now we have to determine that “I think you need this, I think we as a group need this, and this is one of those moments in which diversity of thought is super important because it lets us recognize that we’re making a decision for the public good. But if you put that all on my shoulders, this is not going to go well.”

PATRICIA: Right. And the potential for harm is huge, right?

ANDREW: It’s huge.

PATRICIA: You can’t afford to say, “I’m the Newton who’s going to figure out exactly what this social problem is all about and solve it.” You will fail.

ANDREW: There was … I don’t know if we talked about it on this podcast, but Bruno Latour had been considered one of these greats in transdisciplinarity because he was getting at how everything has agency in terms of how we work in groups and the inanimate objects in this studio that we’re in have agency over us in how we engage with each other. So, what is it that we’re trying to resolve, or what is it that we’re integrating into our knowledge systems, that’s coming from everything in our world? And they’re somewhat relative, kind of hardcore relative.

That was very twisted in the early 2000s by politicians who wanted to deny climate change. At that moment, there was a microphone held in front of Latour as someone asked, “What do you think?” He had looked at science as an enterprise that was just as much social as it was objective. And he was like, “Well, there is relativism in science,” and then back at him, “So what do you say to the climate change deniers?” and he was like, “I have no comment on that. I’m not gonna comment on that.”

And he was criticized for that later, because—

PATRICIA: It was an opportunity.

ANDREW: It was an opportunity. But also, if you introduce a new tool that has dangers—like Einstein with the atomic bomb; he said, in some ways, he wished he hadn’t introduced such a force of destruction into this world even though it also has other purposes—but if you do introduce something with such destructive power, and then you’re like, “Okay, I’m done with it, you do with it what you will,” then the world kind of needs the operator’s manual of what to do with it afterward. Otherwise, it’s immediately going to become apparent, the hard way, that you didn’t prepare us for this kind of use, you didn’t prepare us for the counterarguments, and you didn’t help foster it in a way for us to take this to the next level.

So, the wicked problems are really important. Because once you get involved with wicked problem work, you’re not quite done. You’ve made a commitment to making the world better in this way. So, you at least have to come up with a baton handoff plan when you’re done, and not just say, “I merely discovered the atomic bomb. I didn’t push the button.” That’s not sufficient. Now you’ve got to work through it.

PATRICIA: It’s humility and responsibility. You really need to say, “This could impact …” There is no such thing as value-free science. … In the evolution of the scientific method, 17th-century folks didn’t really think it was value-free. They didn’t even formulate it that way. But over time, over the next couple of centuries, it became, “Yes, science is objective, and it’s fact-based and values are over there. We’re not sure what they are, but they’re relative, they’re subjective, and they have to be kept out of science.” And you can’t do that with wicked problems. You can’t do that with transdisciplinary research. You have to allow them in and that in itself changes how you approach the questions. The standard classical methodology just won’t work.

ANDREW: So, if the 17th century didn’t have that clear kind of siloing of those two areas, how did those folks who had understood the mechanicalizing of knowledge, or the idea that we could be a clock that could be fixed but also we’re spiritual beings—how did the history of inquiry handle our values as being a part of inquiry in that era? Was it all because there was a religious injection in there, or how did people do that?

PATRICIA: There was the assumption that moral knowledge came from somewhere else, and so it was just different. It wasn’t so much that when we’re studying natural philosophy, and trying to figure out what the mechanical principles are and how to explain what’s happening, that they saw that as knowledge being power. Bacon recognized that it was actually for human good that we were doing this. So, there was no intention to say, “Oh, we can keep these two things separate.”

But, they did believe that moral knowledge and spiritual knowledge came from different sources—not from body, but from mind. And so, there was a kind of dualism built into the metaphysical view of nature at the time, but it wasn’t antagonistic and it wasn’t … they were just different. Nature was there to serve man. And it’s really in the 18th century where materialism is on the rise and everything else is not and you start getting Hume saying there’s facts, and then all of a sudden values appear. Where do they come from? Right then, the fact/value distinction becomes crystallized.

ANDREW: OK. I want to follow that up. How do we … I know how classically I was trained and, again, nothing against it, but no one prepared me to say that if I’m going to study something, I have a moral obligation to that thing as well. And because certain problems are wicked problems, are all problems like this? As you said, some are actually … like the free will problem, I can leave that to the side and still sleep at night (or not, if I’m neurotic). If I need to sleep at night, I can be like “That is academic.” And now I have a soft, comfy pillow. But for something like—well, sustainability is the mother of these problems. That’s the one that keeps coming up. Certainly, inequities are right up there, too.

PATRICIA: Well, they’re right in front of you in a way. I will get back to the free will question with you at some point—not today, because it’s not urgent. But I do think that the actual harm being done by certain wicked problems are the high stakes and urgency, those attributes to the question that don’t let you look away and say, “Oh, I’ll pick it up next year.”

ANDREW: That’s true. So then how do we prepare people to be both the scientist and … I took an ethics class, but the ethics class I took was because I had to, and it was like, “How long do I have to keep my notebooks in the lab? Do I have to go to the animal training and the human experiment training? I had to learn those things that were more rote and automatic. But what would preparation look like for students to take on wicked problems if the training were different than what we traditionally get?

PATRICIA: Well, if I had the answer to that, Andy, I would be well ready to—

ANDREW: Well, you taught a class it turns out—

PATRICIA: I think that the most powerful moments in our class were us coming to the realization that the problems, their complexities weren’t what we’d thought they were and that the potential harms, if we approached them a certain way, were evident. But you don’t see all that right at first, right? You have to work through the process. So, it is a process. I think Soren kept saying, “This is a process.” One week I got to this place and then I realized I had to go back and look again, and then I got here.

Through that process, it was not just a realization that no particular method was going to answer it, nor was any particular approach. We had to think differently. It was a mindset. But also we had to be outward looking. What potential impact does this work have? So, the impact question, which we spent the last few weeks on, was really about that social good question.

And we had some difficult conversations about whether … there is a common good, and whether a common good is achievable. I maintained “yes” to both propositions, throughout. But it wasn’t easy. The process involves a lot of disagreement. And, as you said, the greater diversity of voices in that discussion, the better. Because if you really get to a place of at least some common understanding and discourse, that’s a beginning.

ANDREW: How far do you think philosophy as a discipline is from understanding transdisciplinarity from current trends? Is it going in a direction where there’s a meta-awareness of its own practices and its own inquiry, or is it just as much about defining its own disciplinary space, as most disciplines are in creating boundaries of like, “That’s not us, this is us,” an “out-in” kind of thing?

PATRICIA: On the one hand, philosophy over the past 50 years as a discipline—at least Anglo-American and European philosophy—has accommodated a lot of developments from science and other disciplines. There’s a philosophy of science, a philosophy of neuroscience, a philosophy of biology, and a philosophy of social sciences. And in those spaces, there is a realization, that things aren’t as simple as we once thought they were. And a lot of what we learn as philosophers is by looking at what’s happening.

So, it’s an iterative process as well, that sort of philosophical reflection on practice and what’s being discovered or understood. But on the other hand, philosophers, we have our own training, our own discipline, and I do see some positive signs of at least questioning those things.

Early modern philosophy is my area of specialty. This semester, in my other class, I invited several of my colleagues to Zoom in just for an hour or so to talk about what kind of texts they’ve been working on, in particular a lot of women philosophers who’d been ignored or neglected or lost from the 17th century. The excitement and the questioning of our analytic training have been very generative, I think, in their work. And I could see the students really loving the idea that there’s some openness now to thinking about what is in the canon and what should be included in the canon. What does what’s included in the canon tell us about ourselves?

ANDREW: What it tells us about ourselves is a point that I came across when I was looking into the complexity side of the wicked problems of the transdisciplinary world. It’s true that everybody can approach a transdisciplinary space or wicked problem by understanding, by asking the right questions, and reframing is the most important step. And it can take, Pohl had said, 20 years for you to figure out what the actual wicked problem is or the way to frame it.

But the thing that we don’t talk about very much is the expectation that once you have a problem, or even once you’ve called it a problem, that next there’s a resolution. For things that are truly complex, there is no resolution from a single intervention. You’re lucky if you see some kind of resolution in your lifetime. You have to change your mindset to making things better.

The act of an individual engaging with something is itself super complex. Integrating these ideas of reflexivity while doing that makes the wicked problem engagement mutually beneficial to the problem in you. So, the point is that you “moved the needle.”… You might move the needle in one direction and then move it back. You don’t have full control, but you helped a little bit, you grew in the process. That’s the point of a transdisciplinary engagement more than anything else: to do good. Yes, you’re gonna move a needle. But because you’re engaged in what you’re doing … you want to make sure there aren’t unintended consequences, that this is iterative, that this is something you believe in that involves your values and your knowledge. … If you’re thinking about what’s happening and iterating and changing in the process, then you will always grow somehow in the process.

That might not happen beyond you gaining more “knowledge” than in a more traditional hypothetical, deductive, and simplistic model because your growth comes from like, “Oh, I shouldn’t use that electrode next time. Oh, now I know that the cell membrane operates at negative 70 millivolts.” Like, that’s great, but it isn’t this bigger understanding of “I guess I thought that just because I made a vaccine, people would want the vaccine.” It’s a completely different way of learning and then you roll up your sleeves again and you say like, “OK, now we got to work on how we get people to want to be a part of this vaccination effort.”

That transformative moment is one of the things I like about anybody who thinks that any kind of education has the potential to be transformative. We’ve embraced that here at CGU. But I think transdisciplinarity is really the space in which it happens because it forces you to deal with something that’s so much bigger than yourself and you still have to go and try getting in the mud and dealing with it. And you will grow because of it, big time.

I think that if we understood that that was the point of—

PATRICIA: Not the outcome per se, right?

ANDREW: Yeah, you can make things better and it doesn’t mean that you solve the world’s problems. In fact, it’s like selling someone a bill of goods: It’s not honest, there’s no truth in that. The truth is that you might have moved the needle, but for wicked problems, that’s the best you’re going to do. But you’re still going to grow, and you have the option to keep moving the needle. And that’s kind of an entire mindset you have to adopt.

So, do you think that there are people in a disciplinary space and a generational space? You get to see scholars at different levels because you’ve been here for 25 years.

PATRICIA: Since 1995.

ANDREW: OK, so you’ve been here a minute. You have kids in the scholarly pathway yourself. You’ve taught people for the past 30 years. So, you’ve seen different folks come through here. One of the things I have heard is that there are some different generational approaches to these kinds of knowledge and that there is some appetite for people to say, like, “I might not solve the problem, but we’ll make it better and there’s more to this than I used to see.”

PATRICIA: I agree.

ANDREW: So, that’s what I was going to say: Are you seeing that people are more ready to take on that kind of mindset?

PATRICIA: I do. Of course, as you know, I was out of the classroom for about six or seven years. I’m now back and it has changed even in that period of time. COVID-19 accelerated some good things. But I want to go back to what you said about transformation because I absolutely agree that that’s what I see when the light goes on in discussions.

And so one of the last discussions our class had was about how transdisciplinary research advances knowledge because our traditional way of thinking about it is you publish something in the journal, the specialists … read it, they cite you, and you keep pushing the boundaries in this very academic way.

We all agreed that transdisciplinary research and inquiry are more about understanding, synthesizing, advancing practice, and advancing understanding than publishing something in a journal that’s going to be read by just the specialists in that group. It’s harder and in some ways, as you said, it can feel incremental, but it is very transformational when someone starts to think in a different way and begins to approach questions differently. It just opens things up when we’re too closed. …

ANDREW: I agree. And there’s the normal question, I don’t know if you ever got this: What does the trans in transdisciplinary mean? And the common answer to that is that it means transcend, you know, you’re transcending the disciplinary space.

But Julie Thompson Klein had written early on that—and I think she took this from bell hooks, but I don’t know who took what from whom—the “trans” has at least three different interpretations. One of them is transcending the discipline, one is the transgression that takes place from your disciplinary norms and sometimes from your colleagues who are like, “What are you doing?” …

Traditionally, I think one of the big differences is that the folks who went into transdisciplinarity were the senior folks, the tenured folks who were like, “I tried this other version of inquiry for a long time, I wasn’t happy with it, and now this came along and now I can do it, I have the freedom to do it, I’m not bound by having to publish at a certain schedule in a certain set of journals.” Lately, that’s changed and you see younger people who are interested in it. And then the last (third) trans is for transformation.

That’s what happens to you when you go through a transdisciplinary experience. So, I think that that tripartite idea of transdisciplinarity makes a lot of sense, but it’s also hard for people to get it unless they’ve been through it. It sounds cool. I’d love to make a campaign slogan with that. But it doesn’t actually register for those of us who are used to doing things as business-as-usual. What does transformation really feel like? When you’re in your 40s, or 50s, or 60s, and you’ve been really doing things a particular way that’s given you success at a certain level your whole life … I’m so glad that your students had a chance to experience that, that’s exactly what we want to have happen. I can think of no better instructor than you to be doing that. I’m so glad you had a chance to teach that course.

PATRICIA: Oh, thank you, Andy. It was so much fun. And I’ll be doing it again in the fall.

ANDREW: I’m super glad for that. I have one last question for you: As we see the parameters of the world change, do you think that there are going to be more wicked problems and more opportunities for transdisciplinary intervention than before? Or do you think it’s pretty much going to always be there for those who are down?

PATRICIA: It’s going to be getting, I’m gonna say, worse. I mean the complexity, the disputation over what’s valuable, the urgency, and the stakeholders. The high stakes, all those things are gonna go up. And we can see it for so many reasons. But we see it happening. We’re in the middle of it.

ANDREW: Yeah, I agree. That’s why we call this show PostNormal Times. Because we’re living in them. And really, things are changing at that level and we need to equip ourselves and we have to be ready. It’s not that this is insurmountable.

PATRICIA: And it’s not just academic.

ANDREW: So, it’s everything. A real coup would be to have transdisciplinary skills from kindergarten on and I’m glad to see that a lot of K-12 spots are investing in this kind of inquiry as well. So, we’ll see what the future holds. But Patricia, it has been so wonderful having you.

PATRIC: It’s been my pleasure.

ANDREW: Thank you so much, everyone.

Thanks for listening to this episode of PostNormal Times. Thanks to our guest, and thanks to our support from Claremont Graduate University. If you enjoyed boundary crossing with us and want to hear more, make sure you follow us, spread the word, and tune into our next episode.