| Science Visions
The Newsletter of the PSA Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Caucus
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Welcome to Science Visions, Vol. 4, No. 2&3! If you are our regular reader, you might have noticed that we did not release a newsletter in the summer. The caucus has gone through some changes and is now ready to make up for the missed issue by releasing a double issue! If you are still reading this, happy holidays and see you next year! |
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Contents Caucus Announcements: Welcomes and Goodbyes
Feature: (1) Fediphilosophy; (2) New "Highlighted Philosopher of Science" Editor, Katherine Valde Highlighted Philosopher of Science: (1) Kino Zhao; (2) Shereen Chang
What We Wish We’d Known: Getting Your Hands Dirty: How to Engage in Public Philosophy (1) Karen Kovaka; (2) Colin Klein Teaching Philosophy: Bringing Poster Sessions to Undergraduate Instruction
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Caucus Announcements
- The DEI Caucus would like to give a warm welcome to the new junior co-chair, Kino Zhao, as well as the new editor of the "Highlighted Philosopher of Science" section, Katherine Valde. Scroll down and learn more about them in "Feature" and "Highlighted Philosopher of Science"!
Our junior co-chair, Sarah Roe, will finish her term this month and step down. We would like to thank Sarah for her tireless service, especially in overseeing our transition to acting as a general DEI Caucus. It has been our honor and pleasure to work with Sarah for the past four years!
Our webmistress, Areins Pelayo, will continue to update and manage both the listserv and the PSA-WC website, but she will be stepping down from the position as the editor of the "Highlighted Philosopher of Science" section. The editorial team of Science Visions would like to express appreciation and thanks to Areins for her excellent work, and look forward to more collaboration with her as the webmistress in the future.
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Feature (1): Fediphilosophy, a Place in the Fediverse for Philosophers By Kino Zhao |
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Even if you are not on Twitter, you might have heard of the recent chaos ensuing from Musk’s mismanagement of Twitter. One result of this is the influx of “Twitter migrants” into the fediverse, a decentralized social network system. Below, I briefly describe how it all works and how you can join us.
The fediverse is an ensemble of servers that all follow an open protocol which allows them to communicate with each other, forming a “federated” network. Mastodon is one of the open source softwares that a server can install to create an instance to join the fediverse. It provides a Twitter-like experience where accounts can follow each other and post status updates. It also differs from Twitter and Facebook in that the accounts are hosted on different instances, run by different individuals or entities. Most instances have a few hundred or a couple thousand accounts at most. While you can interact with accounts from any instance in the fediverse, there isn’t a place or incentive to build user profiles to curate and promote content so users never stop scrolling. Instead, you have a timeline consisting of posts from everyone you follow, in chronological order.
The decentralized nature of Mastodon or fediverse in general also comes with some drawbacks, such as the difficulty to find the “hotspots in town” and the lack of centralized tech support.
Despite being around for a while, Mastodon is gaining a level of mainstream attention it has not gained before. The conversation around decentralized technology and digital democracy in the context of the fediverse is still just getting started. I don’t know where Mastodon will go, but I’m looking forward to it.
In response to the Twitter migration to Mastodon, Chrisy Xiyu Du (https://xiyudu.github.io/), a physicist and incoming assistant professor in Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Hawai?i at M?noa, and I started a new Mastodon instance, fediphilosophy.org. The instance welcomes past or current researchers (including graduate students) and teachers whose work engages with philosophy in some very loosely defined way. Everyone on the instance must use a real identity, which they must prove at sign-up by linking to an academic page. We hope that this instance will become a place for philosophers and other scholars to network and chitchat without the digital equivalent of handing very loud speaker phones to very few individuals.
To read up more on fediphilosophy, including a guide to join and our instance’s rules, visit here: https://github.com/xiyudu/fediphilosophy
To read more on Mastodon in general, visit here: https://gist.github.com/joyeusenoelle/74f6e6c0f349651349a0df9ae4582969
To read an EFF piece on the social significance of the fediverse, visit here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/fediverse-could-be-awesome-if-we-dont-screw-it
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I’m currently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wofford College, in Spartanburg South Carolina. I came here after completing my PhD at Boston University in 2019. My dissertation research was on the role of time in biological science. Since then, my research has expanded to include the relationship between science and values, and the concept of neutrality (in science and elsewhere).
Since joining the faculty at Wofford College, I’ve become involved in the efforts to create a more diverse and equitable campus community. I’ve been working on general education reform, helping the sudents in my department get a MAP chapter going, working with student organizations as a mentor through the Office of Diversity and Inclusion Anti-Racism Challenge, and training as part of the Teaching for Equity fellows program. I’m extremely excited to be the new editor of the "Highlighter Philosopher of Science" feature. I can’t wait to learn more about the fabulously diverse folks that make this caucus such a wonderful community, and to contribute to continuing growth and expansion of this caucus. |
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Highlighted Philosopher of Science (1): Kino Zhao
By Haomiao Yu |
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Kino Zhao (https://kinozhao.com/) is a philosopher of the social sciences working as an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University. Her research is in the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences. She has a BA from UBC, a MA in philosophy from SFU, and a PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Irvine. When the caucus interviewed Kino, she described her philosophy journey as:
“My path to philosophy is very far from glorious. I was a psychology major as an undergrad, with no idea what philosophy was. At UBC we were required to take a lot of electives, so I took philosophy classes because I wanted bragging right. To be honest, I didn’t enjoy a lot of the topics and I didn’t do well in most classes, but I loved all the lectures. I’d just go in every class and have a great time. I ended up taking too many classes that I had to declare a second major. |
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At the time, I was on a student visa while my parents were applying for immigration. In order to be on their file, I had to remain a full-time student. So, after graduating from UBC, I applied to a terminal MA at SFU because SFU was close and because the degree was terminal, since I wasn’t considering academic philosophy as an option. I had a terrible application package. To be honest, I still don’t know what persuaded them to accept me, but I had such a great time there. I learned what collegial scholarship was like and that I loved it. In a sense, I decided to go into academic philosophy when I was accepted into a PhD program.”
Kino graduated from the University of California, Irvine in 2022 and now works as an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University. Her research is in the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences. She is interested in both philosophically-informed-science and scientifically-informed-philosophy. Basically, her projects try to do one of two things: 1) identify a methodological concern discussed by social scientists and see if providing a philosophical analysis can help the dialogue make progress, or 2) identify a philosophical thesis that seems to involve factual claims about the social world and ask whether the social sciences are equipped to supply them.
She took on the role as the junior co-chair of PSA’s DEI Caucus because of her keen interest in promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion both in the academic research and in our academic life.
First, in the social science research, there has been a problem of sample nonrepresentation that the majority of samples consist of undergraduate students from Euro-American institutions. The problem has been identified for decades with little trend of improvement. Kino's paper published in 2021 on sample representation highlights this problem and offers solutions. By tracing the history of sampling theory, she reveals the problem of the dominant design-based approach. The approach promotes that a sampling procedure that is maximally uninformative prevents samplers from introducing arbitrary bias, thus preserving sample representation. She shows how this framework, while good in theory, faces many challenges in application. One of the challenges is that the limitation on sample resources leads to convenience sampling which often involves sampling undergraduate students from Euro-American institutions for the social science studies. In light of the challenges, she advocates for an alternative framework, called the model-based approach to sampling, where representative samples are those balanced in composition, however they were drawn. She argues that the model-based framework is more appropriate in the social sciences, because it allows for systematic assessment of imperfect samples and methodical improvement in resource-limited scientific contexts. She ends the paper with two practical proposals of improving sample quality in the social sciences: “First, instead of inconsistently reporting a more-or-less identical set of sample demographics, researchers should deliberately select a few that they believe to be statistically relevant to their research target and explicitly justify them as such. Second, there should be greater communication between scientists studying human behaviour and demographers designing full enumeration survey efforts.” (Zhao 2021, “Sample representation in the social sciences,” Synthese 198: 9097–9115, p.9113).
Second, about our academic life, Kino put together a climate survey to access departmental climate (https://asymptoticphilosophy.com/writing-a-climate-survey/). She has gathered 36 questions roughly fall under 5 categories (Identification, Overall Experience, Specific Incidents, Climate-related Support, Stress Level). Under “Overall Experience”, she invites the researchers to think about the overall climate of the department by asking them to rate on a scale from 1 (completely disagree) to 3 (neutral) to 5 (completely agree) for questions such as “I feel my individuality is properly respected”, “I am satisfied with the degree of diversity of faculty members within my department”, and “I am satisfied with the degree of diversity of the student body within my department”. In the next category, she also encourages people to recall specific incidents for questions such as “I have personally experienced discriminatory remarks or behavior by a faculty member because of my gender/race/disability/sexual orientation”, “I have witnessed another person receiving discriminatory remarks or behavior by a faculty member because of their gender/race/disability/sexual orientation”, “I have personally experienced discriminatory remarks or behavior by another graduate student because of my gender/race/disability/sexual orientation”, and “I have witnessed another person receiving discriminatory remarks or behavior by a graduate student because of their gender/race/disability/sexual orientation”. Some commented on the survey that even reading through it made them reflect on their own departmental climate. Needless to say, the application of a departmental climate survey like this is not restricted to philosophy departments only.
Like her journey with philosophy, Kino does not know where she would lead the DEI Caucus to in the next few years. But the caucus is confident that she would make something wonderful happen along the way |
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Highlighted Philosopher of Science (2): Shereen Chang By Katherine Valde |
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Shereen Chang is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Guelph working with Stefan Linquist. Shereen received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. There she worked with Michael Weisberg on a dissertation at the intersection of philosophy of science and animal cognition. Shereen took a little bit of a meandering path to get to philosophy. Her first undergraduate degree is in fine arts, where she did photography and integrated media (film, video and audio). However, Shereen found herself thinking and talking about ethics “basically all the time” – after a while she realized she needed to study philosophy. She went back to get a second bachelor’s degree, this time in philosophy at the University of Toronto.
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Her interest in animal cognition grew from two key sources of inspiration. The first is the work of animal cognition researcher Irene Pepperberg (which she encountered from her young life growing up with parrots). Pepperberg is known for her research program in which she demonstrated that parrots could be trained to communicate meaningfully with words, as detailed in her many publications, including her book “The Alex Studies”. Shereen has been particularly impressed by Pepperberg’s ingenious experimental design, such that her research results demonstrate which concepts the parrots understand without the possibility of being cued or other interference. The understanding that parrots can use words meaningfully has been key to Shereen’s journey as a cognition researcher. The second key influence was a chance conversation early in graduate school at UPenn. In an early conversation, Michael Weisberg pointed out to Shereen that her interest in animal cognition could be explored through philosophy, and the rest is history.
Shereen’s current research interests lie in animal cognition and ethics. She is developing a framework for thinking about cognition that emphasizes analogy and common function. As a philosopher engaged in empirically informed work, she noticed a disconnect between the way empirical research on animal cognition had been proceeding and the way that many philosophers were talking about animal cognition. Philosophers are sometimes too dismissive of the extent to which non-primate animals possess complex cognitive capacities, while science tells a different story. By emphasizing the significance of animal cognition research, she aims to challenge the assumption that there is a vast difference in human and nonhuman cognitive capacities for symbolic communication. Shereen believes that having a more principled understanding of cognition will allow us to appreciate and respect the rich and varied cognitive experiences not just of non-human animals, but of different humans as well. Last year, Shereen was able to run a lab experiment with cockatoos as part of Susana Monsó’s project on animals and the concept of death. For more on Shereen’s current work check out her website (https://sites.google.com/view/shereen-chang/).
When not doing philosophy, Shereen is very involved in environmental justice work. She founded a group called Cobbs Creek Environmental Justice (https://www.facebook.com/CobbsCreekEJ/), that is working to address the destruction of old-growth trees and the illicit privatization of public parks in her hometown of Philadelphia. Recently, private developers destroyed over 100 acres of trees on city-owned parkland without consulting the community – please check out the link above if you’re interested to learn more!
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What We Wish We’d Known: Getting Your Hands Dirty: How to Engage in Public Philosophy
What We Wish We’d Known is a short opinion column that features advice from female philosophers of science about a particular aspect of academic life. To suggest future topics or volunteer as a writer for a future column, please contact Jacob Neal at <jacobpneal@gmail.com> |
From the Editor
Following up on Alison Wylie’s Past Presidential Address at the 2022 PSA in Pittsburgh, this column focuses on how philosophers of science can and should “get their hands dirty” doing public philosophy. Two philosophers of science provide their perspectives on how they engage with the public in their philosophical work. Karen Kovaka describes her experience beginning new public philosophy projects, while Colin Klein provides tips on how to share philosophical research with lay audiences. We believe in the value of philosophy of science, so we hope that this column will inspire both early career and senior philosophers of science to start new public philosophy projects.
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Karen Kovaka (http://karenkovaka.com/) is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on the life sciences (especially evolutionary biology and conservation biology) and on public participation in and understanding of science.
One of the important things philosophers of science do is generate interesting normative ideas about science and society. Collectively, we have produced a huge stock of informed speculations relevant to improving various aspects of science: research practices, funding decisions, institutional structure, education, and communication – to name just a few. I think of public philosophy of science as the project of figuring out how to field test and apply these proposals. |
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My experience with public philosophy of science began when I was a graduate student. My advisor was developing a project and needed some help with it. The project ended up becoming a fruitful ongoing collaboration, and if you’re interested in doing some public philosophy of science yourself, I definitely recommend being in the right place at the right time, as I was. The good news is, being in the right place at the right time is becoming less chancy, because the interest in and infrastructure for public philosophy of science seems to be growing.
Potential launching points already exist at many universities. For example, many institutions encourage faculty to develop service-learning courses. These can be great ways to build relationships with community organizations. I developed one such course focused on environmental conservation. In it, undergraduates participated in different kinds of service projects, ranging from very hands-on (think: pulling up invasive weeds) to more philosophical (think: evaluating different possible ecological restoration strategies for a degraded local site). The community engagement offices at many universities can often help faculty members identify and connect with potential community partners. Starting small with something like a service-learning course can orient you with respect to community needs and interests, which in turn can generate good ideas for public philosophy projects, as well as connect you with the people and relationships necessary to actually carry them out.
Public philosophy of science has made my philosophical life much more satisfying. I’ve developed a better language for talking about the value of philosophy with a range of people, met a wide variety of collaborators, and brought ideas from these projects back into my philosophical writing. |
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My first encounter with public philosophy came when I published on insect consciousness with the neuroscientist Andrew Barron. The piece itself was a measured, hedged piece in PNAS. We had a lot of qualifiers, and we were very concerned to sound respectable. But of course, because we said that bees are probably conscious, lots of people wanted to hear more! We then got a crash course in radio and print interviewing. |
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The main thing I learned was to keep it simple. Philosophers are trained to handle nuance and anticipate objections. Do this in public outreach and you sound boring and evasive. I felt a bit dirty the first time I said “Yep, bees are probably conscious,” without hedging or qualifying. But that gets people listening, and it’s only when they’re listening that you can develop the details.
I learned to do what politicians do: I prepare a list of three or four simple points that I want to get across, and to make sure that I found a way to get them in no matter what. Preparing simple points also helps with nerves. Better to get some message across than to flounder around on air! Longer pieces require that too – you just get more scope for nuance later on. No matter what, you have to consider your audience much more carefully: readers of Aeon are going to be more sophisticated and attentive than the drive-time audience of Mix 106.3.
I’ve been lucky enough to work on topics for which there has been natural public interest. Consciousness, masochism, artificial intelligence, and online conspiracy theories are all pretty easy to motivate. But I think there’s really an enormous appetite out there for almost any topic if it is presented clearly and engagingly. What we do is important, and it’s very satisfying to get that across to the public! |
Teaching Philosophy: Bringing Poster Sessions to Undergraduate Instruction
By Janella Baxter |
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This fall marks my first semester as Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University. The position is special in various ways. Philosophy and Psychology share a department. With this unique institutional structure comes a unique history and curriculum. Psychology is a very large undergraduate major at Sam Houston. As long as the department has existed, Philosophy of Science has been a required course for all psychology majors. This means that we offer multiple sections of philosophy of science every semester. Sam Houston also has a very diverse student body. It has a large proportion of first-generation students and students from Hispanic backgrounds. The students overwhelmingly come from public schools in the Houston area. The educational experiences of students attending Sam Houston are also distinctive. For many of them, their educational experience has consisted of them being told what is true/false, testing their ability to recall these “facts” on scantron forms. They’ve had very little experience writing full papers, articulating their viewpoint in open discussion, or having their teachers show much interest in what they think. For these reasons and more, Philosophy of Science has the reputation as being a “hard” class among the psychology students. Many of them put off taking the class until their final semester at Sam Houston.
I decided to approach the major assignments in Philosophy of Science differently than in all my past courses. In the past, I’ve always controlled what students could write on to a high degree. I give them a few paper topics from which to choose, the logical structure of which I go over extensively in lecture. This time, I decided to allow Philosophy of Science students to choose their own topics. I had students develop their projects over the course of the semester by having them do small activities that gradually built on each other. The activities involved the following assignments: A syllabus review, which asked them to skim ahead in the syllabus to identify 1-3 readings that caught their interest. A project proposal and plan – a short paragraph describing the readings they selected from the course, their philosophical question, and a brief outline of how they planned to carry out the project. A rough draft of the first half of their paper and a second rough draft of the latter half of their paper. Once students had settled into their topics, I broke the class up into small groups. I gave students 4 class periods during which they met with their small groups during which they gave each other feedback on their assignments. Each student also received feedback from me.
So far, I’ve saved the best for the last. Part of the class project included a poster session in the last week of classes. Students were asked to display the essential parts of their papers on a virtual poster with images and colors. In the lead-up to the poster session, I explained to my classes that I would be inviting all the science departments to attend our session.
The poster session was all part of my (benevolent?) plan. Perhaps one of the most banal aims of the poster session is to give students an opportunity to earn credit for creativity – a much undervalued activity in many philosophy classes (I’d say). It’s also a fun way for students to share their work with each other. More importantly, the poster session was a pedagogical tool. It’s an opportunity for the author to formulate their project in a concise way. It’s also another way to get authors to think about their writing from the reader’s perspective. Instead of just dropping words on a Word document and never thinking about them again, construction of a poster prompts the author to reflect on the efficacy of their communication.
As I’ve become more acquainted with the culture of Sam Houston students, I developed anxiety about this assignment. It is not uncommon for students to not show up to class and to not do assignments. The anxiety on my students’ faces when I gave them the assignment also told me that I was asking them to do things they had never been asked to do before. They were unsure whether they could rise to the occasion. I worried whether I had set my expectations too high.
Remarkably, my anxieties were put to rest at the poster session. I did, indeed, invite many of the science departments on campus (as promised). To my delight, faculty from all over campus came to the 8 am and 2 pm sessions. It was a full house with every student in attendance. Faculty walked around scanning QR codes, skimmed student posters, and asked the students probative questions. The atmosphere at the start of the poster session was tense. I could feel the nervousness of my students. Then something wonderful happened. My students started talking about philosophy of science. What started out as stilted, choppy opening remarks grew into coherent, confident and high-level conversations. Within minutes, the room was buzzing with dozens of intense discussions.
On the last class meeting of the semester, I asked students to reflect on their experience of the poster session. Some students reported exhilaration at having faculty take interest in their work. They said things like, “I’ve never had anyone take that much interest in what I’ve had to say before.” Some reported that the experience helped them arrive at new insights for their final papers and that they were able to find better ways to express their thoughts. Some students reported feeling overwhelmed (but positive) by the amount of attention they received. Many of them expressed regret that they did not have a chance to see each of their peers’ posters.
The faculty who attended also reported to me. Some commented on how they observed students transform from timid to confident right before their eyes. Some were very excited about the variety of topics showcased in the poster session. Other faculty came to the session with intense interest in specific posters. Some faculty challenged the students to rethink the framing of their projects. It was a rare opportunity for me to hear how my students perform when I’m not in their immediate presence.
Overall, I think this was a major win. Now I know Sam students are up for the task. Importantly, now Sam students know they’re up for the task. This is something I plan to do every semester I teach Philosophy of Science. Hopefully this will help chip away from the stigma the class has among the psychology students.
I’ve always conceptualized the academic life is marked by distinctive developmental stages. We begin by learning what others have said about a topic. As we begin to master what others have said, we begin to raise our own questions about the topic. Sometimes these questions are critical of what others have said. Other times they are questions about topics that previous authors have ignored. Either way, the stage of raising our own questions then leads to the stage of formulating our own answers to the questions that matter to us. This is not the final stage, however. The next stage involves sharing our answers to our peers, during which we often receive critical feedback that helps us refine and innovate our own positions. I’ve often thought that going through the later stages of this process actually enhances what we learned in the earlier stages. That is to say, stopping short at any of these stages leaves one’s thoughts underdeveloped. I also wonder if stopping short may be harmful to one’s educational experience. If one finds a stage frustrating and ends before going through the full process, all one is left with is the frustration associated with learning. How might going through the full process foster a greater sense of satisfaction and relief?
It seems to me like many students have not been given the opportunity to excel much beyond the first stage of academic life. This is a grave injustice in my opinion. Not only does it give them a pale impression of how enriching the learning process can be, but it also risks leaving them with frustration that might be alleviated were they to ascend through the full process. This semester was a lot of work – intellectually and emotionally. But its work is well worth the effort. |
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