Robert Frodeman

How Geoscientists Think and Learn

Decades ago, pioneering petroleum geologist Wallace Pratt pointed out that oil is first found in the human mind. His insight remains true today: Across geoscience specialties, the human mind is arguably the geoscientists most important tool. It is the mind that converts colors and textures of dirt, or blotches on a satellite image, or wiggles on a seismogram, into explanatory narratives about the formation and migration of oil, the rise and fall of mountain ranges, the opening and closing of oceans. Improved understanding of how humans think and learn about the Earth can help geoscientists and geoscience educators do their jobs better, and can highlight the strengths that geoscience expertise brings to interdisciplinary problem solving.

Peer Review and the Ex Ante Assessment of Societal Impacts

Funding agencies and research councils around the world rely on peer review to assess the potential impacts of proposed research. This article compares the procedures of two major public science agencies — the US National Science Foundation and the European Commissions 7th Framework Programme — for evaluating ex ante the potential societal impact of research proposals. In this paper we survey the state of the art and discuss some of the conceptual questions that arise in using ex ante peer review to assess the societal impact of scientific research. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

New Directions in Interdisciplinarity: Broad, Deep, and Critical.

Aristotle launched Western knowledge on a trajectory toward disciplinarity that continues to this day. But is the knowledge management project that began with Aristotle adequate for the age of Google? Perhaps an undisciplined discourse more evocative of Plato can help us constitute new, more relevant inter- and transdisciplinary forms of knowledge. This article explores the history of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, arguing for a new, critical form of interdisciplinarity that moves beyond the academy into dialogue with the public and private sectors. Contemporary knowledge production should involve not only a horizontal axis stretching across academia but also a vertical axis where academic research is integrated into contemporary life.

Interdisciplinary research and academic sustainability: managing knowledge in an age of accountability

For the past 125 years the university has been the home of knowledge production. The 20th century research university combined a Kantian belief in disciplinarity, a Humboldtian commitment to linking research and education and upholding academic autonomy, and a Cartesian allegiance to infinite knowledge production. This approach to knowledge creation was seen as sufficient, for knowledge products themselves were understood as automatically relevant to society, and no one imagined a problem with endless knowledge production. The 20th century model of knowledge production is now under pressure from a number of sources: information technologies, neoliberal assumptions and demands for greater accountability. ‘Interdisciplinarity’ has become the term of art for addressing this crisis. But interdisciplinarity is no panacea to the challenges facing knowledge production today. In addition to knowledge on sustainability, knowledge production itself must now be made sustainable. This requires clearly connecting knowledge production and use, and ending the bad infinity of knowledge production.

Intellectual Merit and Broader Impact: The National Science Foundation’s Broader Impacts Criterion and the Question of Peer Review

Over the last 300 years science has been quite successful at revealing the nature of physical reality. In so doing it has provided an epistemological basis for scientific discovery and technological innovation. But science has been decidedly less successful at guiding political debate. How do we conceive of the science‐society relation in the 21st century? How does scientific research hook onto the world in a multi‐faceted, pluralistic, and global age? This essay seeks to reframe our thinking about the broader impacts of science by awakening an appreciation of the inescapably political and (and as a consequence, philosophical) dimension of all knowledge, scientific or otherwise.

Philosophy in the Age of Neoliberalism

This essay argues that political, economic, and cultural developments have made the twentieth century disciplinary approach to philosophy unsustainable. It (a) discusses the reasons behind this unsustainability, which also affect the academy at large, (b) describes applied philosophy as an inadequate theoretical reaction to contemporary societal pressures, and (c) proposes a dedisciplined and interstitial approach—“field philosophy”—as a better response to the challenges facing the twenty-first century philosophy.

Nanotechnology: The Visible and the Invisible

Science and technology have become geologic phenomena: like grinding tectonic plates, subtle incremental movements over time add up to decisive transformations of our cultural topography. According to many pundits, nanotechnology will be the next manifestation of this process—subterranean changes that will burst upon society with little warning. Or so some believe, with varying degrees of hope and fear. The question is, what type of philosophic questions do we need to ask if we are to prepare ourselves for the next earthquake? The portentous implications of nanotechnology are cast in high relief by the concerns of nineteenth and twentieth century European or continental philosophy. Thinkers like Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty comprise a rich and distinctive tradition of thought on nature, human nature, and the limits of our actions. Nonetheless, it is a tradition that is rarely applied to questions surrounding the relationship of science and technology to society. While the reasons for this neglect include a wilful abstention from policy on the part of such thinkers, the primary cause lies in the continuing societal love affair with positivism: thinking reduced to that which can be quantified, problems defined by what is amenable to the scientific method. This has meant, generally, the marginalization of philosophy; and when the subject does come up, philosophy is usually limited to applied ethics, questions of risks, responsibilities, rights, and informed consent. But ethics alone cannot capture the significance of scientific discoveries and technological inventions that remake our world. The re-creation of nature or society portended by nanotechnology promises to be a metaphysical and even theological event, touching upon our most basic questions concerning the nature of humanity and reality. Policy-oriented philosophy has limited its attention to ethics; science, technology, and society studies (STS) has focused upon epistemology and politics. The motif of the laboratory has run through its debates: not only in the sense of asking what really happens in the lab (cf. Latour and Woolgar, 1986), but also that much of the work of STS scholars has turned upon the question of the extent to which scientific truth claims can be isolated, lab-like, from social matters (see the science wars). Moreover, STS is heir to a heritage that is itself positivist in orientation. The nineteenth century roots of the social sciences Science as Culture Vol. 15, No. 4, 383–389, December 2006

Redefining Ecological Ethics: Science, Policy, and Philosophy at Cape Horn

In the twentieth century, philosophy (especially within the United States) embraced the notion of disciplinary expertise: philosophical research consists of working with and writing for other philosophers. Projects that involve non-philosophers earn the deprecating title of “applied” philosophy. The University of North Texas (UNT) doctoral program in philosophy exemplifies the possibility of a new model for philosophy, where graduate students are trained in academic philosophy and in how to work with scientists, engineers, and policy makers. This “field” (rather than “applied”) approach emphasizes the inter- and transdisciplinary nature of the philosophical enterprise where theory and practice dialectically inform one another. UNT’s field station in philosophy at Cape Horn, Patagonia, Chile is one site for developing this ongoing experiment in the theory and practice of interdisciplinary philosophic research and education.

Hermeneutics in the Field: The Philosophy of Geology

Geology has had a marginal place within the philosophy of science; its processes and results have not matched our traditional ideas concerning the nature and outcomes of scientific reasoning. This is a reflection of the fact that philosophy of science has been, with few exceptions, implicitly or explicitly the philosophy of physics, and more generally the philosophy of lab science. In actuality, geological reasoning provides a rich and realistic account of the power and limitations of scientific reasoning. It also highlights the hermeneutic and historical nature of reasoning, scientific or otherwise, and the neglected kinship between reasoning in the sciences and the humanities.

The ethics of infinite impact

Transhumanism, the research program devoted to increasing our physical and mental abilities and lengthening our lifespan, casts light on the term ‘responsible innovation’. The goals of the transhum...