Michael E. Gorman

A Framework for Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Science and Technology

Michael E. Gorman

University of Virginia

March, 2008

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Conference, Society and Journal

Conference, MexicoSept 2006

Next: Berlin 2008

Society, 2007

Journal 2008

Michael E. Gorman

Examples of interdisciplinary collaboration

• Herbert Simon and his range of collaborators, including Newell, Langley &c.

• Convergent technologies to enhance human performance (NBIC + ethics)

• CERN, Human Genome (Thagard)

• Causal inference in disease ecology

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Collaboration can enhance creativity by providing a larger

and more divergent pool of ideas, hypotheses & designsProvided these ideas can be

communicated across paradigms

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Interdisciplinary collaboration requires

Disciplinary/expertise depth +

Cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange

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Problem of incommensurability (Kuhn)

• Participants from different disciplines or research communities disagree over what is a problem worth solving, the proper way to solve it and what constitutes data

• They operate from different paradigms (incommensurable). – Garcia’s studies of taste and classical

conditioning were rejected by learning journals (behaviorist)

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Normal science experts

• Classify problems in ways that point to the solution (judgment)

• Possess algorithms, heuristics and procedures, some tacit (skill)

• Have a language they can use to share information rapidly

• But an expert can be like the drunk looking under a streetlight for the key…

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‘Tis nobler to be brilliantly wrong than safely right

• Paradigm is provocatively ambiguous

• Incommensurability is overstated--but experts and stakeholders from different communities do often operate as if they lived in different realities

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Kepler as an example of a paradigm shift

• Planets orbited on spheres, in perfect circles--in hindsight, a mental model, but at the time, a reality for most people

• Kepler had access to Brahe’s data (see Langley et al.’s work on BACON)

• But Kepler could not get the orbit of Mars to fit a perfect circle (anomaly)

• Eventually, he discovered that planetary orbits are elliptical, a view incommensurable with circular orbit models

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Mental models and paradigms

• MMs can be nested: perfect circle model leads to lower-order models like specific combinations of epicycles for individual planets

• Failure of one of these lower-order models can either trigger its revision, or become an anomaly for the ‘hard core’ assumptions

• Thought experiments are a form of mental modeling that can trigger revision (Shephard)

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Bell’s Ear Mental Model

Speak

Ossicles

Different ways of inducing current

“Follow the analogy of nature. Make transmitting instrument after the model of the human ear. Make armature a after the shape of the ossicles.”

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Explains why he and Elisha Gray were not inventing the same

thing• Bell=mental model of how to translate

mechanical motion into undulating current• Gray=off-the-shelf solution to transmitting

speech. He though of using the ear, but had never mounted the ossicles on a device, like Bell

• Bell though of telephone as a breakthrough, Gray and his backers thought of it as a toy

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Trading Zone as solution to collaboration despite incommensurablity

• Galison-- scientists and engineers develop an interlanguage (from jargon to pidgin to creole) to communicate when designing systems like radar, particle accelerators– Golden event vs. statistical paradigms

• Nanocajun• Lambert--Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers

refer to their negotiations over where to land a rover as trades

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Interactional expertise can complement or substitute for a creole

• AIDs activists who worked with scientists to rewrite research protocols

• Collins (sociologist of science) who gained enough knowledge of gravitational wave physics to pass as a member of the community on an imitation game experiment, but could not do research

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Imitation game

• A Turing test for expertise

• Collins & a gravitational wave physicist answer brief questions

• Members of the gravitational wave community see if they can tell which is the expert

• Collins wins

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Sample question

• State if after a burst of gravitational waves pass by, a bar antenna continues to ring and mirrors of an interferometer continue to oscillate from their mean positions?– Collins’ answers were shorter (impatient

expert) and not as likely to have come out of a textbook (he had to think them through on the fly)

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Boundary Object

• A technology that can facilitate coordination across a trading zone, although it is represented differently by participants:– Biobike (Shrager), a programming language

that can be evolved both by biologists and programmers

– To create it, Jeff had to acquire dual expertise, but the users should be able to coordinate without learning each others’ expertise

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Models and simulations can serve as boundary objects in trading zones

• Models and simulations can differ in– programming languages & algorithms– mathematical techniques– Levels of resolution

• They can provide a platform for comparison--or exacerbate incommensurabilities

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DOME (David Wallace, MIT) as a boundary object

• Allows product designers and environmental consultants to collaborate by linking their different models

• A kind of creole is established by DOME that sets requirements for input

• Changes automatically propagate throughout the system

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Taxonomy of trading zones

Homogeneous HeterogeneousCollaboration Community:

InterlanguageContributory expertiseShared mental model, leading to co-evolution

Equal trading zone:CreoleInteractional expertiseBoundary object

Coercion Dominant ideologyUsers converted to designer’s mentalmodel

EnforcedUsers forced to conform todesigner’s mental model

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Incommensurability can be an excuse

Metacognition and (in the case of value disputes) moral imagination

offer alternatives

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Steps toward metacognition & moral imagination

1. Awareness that one’s reality is a mental model

2. Opens up listening to others’ ‘realities’ (mental models)

3. Leading to alternatives

4. That can be evaluated, using data, models, improvement in quality of life &c.

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Arizona State University’s decision theater permits development of a visual creole that

allows multiple stakeholders to form a trading zone by seeing the impact of their

assumptions on the growth of Phoenix

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Do virtual environments like Second Life enhance or inhibit moral

imagination?

Avatar transforming her environment in Second Life:The model becomes the world

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Future research

• Ex Vivo imitation game studies of interactional expertise need to be supplemented by In vivo and Sub Species Historiae studies

• Same methods can be used with trading zones– Including ways of mapping their trajectories – Better taxonomy, including other types of collaborative

networks