Beskrivelse
Much scientific inquiry involve working with ‘problems’ in different ways. It can be as a researcher, a student writing the bachelor thesis or a scientific community. Many universities also claim to engage in ‘problem-based learning’ for their students and to produce research that addresses and solves the problems of society and the world. In this webinar, we take a step back to invite a conceptual discussion of ‘problems’: what characterises a scientific inquiry problem? How do we formulate them? What makes a problem ‘good’?To shed light on this inquiry into ‘problems’, we have two presentations that discuss the issue of problems from two different traditions: French epistemology and American pragmatism.
Problematics as catalysts for scientific object construction – The French epistemologist trajectory of problem philosophy - First, Anna Cornelia Ploug presents perspectives from French epistemology and engages with Gaston Bachelard’s notion of the ‘problem’ or ‘problematic’, emphasising the process of formulating problems as the inquiry instead of a positivist ‘finding’ problems out in the world. To exemplify this way of thinking around scientific inquiry-problems, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and the ‘woman problem’ is used as a case.
On Problematic Situations and Problematizations. Study Practices and the Pragmatics of a World To-Be-Made - Secondly, Hans Schildermans gives his perspective on ‘problems’ drawing on the North American Pragmatism of John Dewey, while re-reading Dewey’s ideas about problems and inquiry through the work of Isabelle Stengers. Focusing on practices of studying that engage with problematic situations and problematizations and thereby enable the coming into being of different possible futures, he reconceptualizes the problem-inquiry nexus in terms of a ‘Pragmatics of a world-to-be-made’.
The presenters:
Anna Cornelia Ploug is a doctoral fellow at the Philosophy and Theory of Science department at Roskilde University. Her PhD project explores conceptions of ‘the problem’ and concept formation in European philosophies of science. She is particularly interested in the critical methodological potential of French epistemology in relation to Hegelian dialectical thought.
See profile: https://forskning.ruc.dk/en/persons/acploug
Hans Schildermans is a postdoc at the Department of Education at the University of Vienna. He has recently published the book ‘Experiments in Decolonizing the University. Towards an Ecology of Study’ (Bloomsbury, 2021) and is currently working on a book about how different ideas of the university have been enacted historically under the influence of alternative imaginations of social and technical futures.
See profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hans-Schildermans
| Periode | 11 feb. 2022 |
|---|---|
| Begivenhedstype | Seminar |
| Grad af anerkendelse | International |