The new style of thinking

Thenewstyleofthinking:theproblem
ofspecialisation,multiparadigmaticand
thecrisisofscientificidentity
RNDr. Michal Černý,
mcerny@phil.muni.cz
Department of Information Studies and Librarianship – Faculty of Art & Department of Social Education - Faculty of Education
Masaryk University Brno

Theconceptof
theparadigmof
ThomasKuhn
 A paradigm is a mind-set suitable for the practice of a
specific scientific discipline.
 Every science has its paradigm that allows questions,
organizational information, experiments design,
language, education of scientists, etc.
 A paradigm is always one science discipline. Or just
waiting for a paradigm shift.

Assumptions
 There are clearly defined and stable scientific
disciplines. Every discipline has own paradigm.
 The individual paradigms do not interact too much.
 Paradigms always have a competitive character within
one discipline.
 A paradigm within a discipline is always what
determines it.

But…
 Foucault produced a discourse going across the
sciences.
 Sciences arise dynamically (cognitive sciences,
informatics, non-Euclidean geometry, set theory, etc.).
 Sciences do not have anchoring in one paradigm
because they are:
 Often anti - Popperian focused on a very general
(complex) problem.
 They are often interdisciplinary
 They are often transdisciplinary

But…
 Martin Heidegger: The exciting thing in science is on
the seam of disciplines:
 Social informatics
 Philosophy of information
 History of natural sciences
 Biophysics
 Quantum chemistry
 …

Problems
 The absence of stable education in the new sciences
(before the established first generation of professors
will pass a lot of time).
 The paradigm (in context complex problem) cannot
exist because it is not defined for more sciences
(combinations of distant disciplines are also common).
 The sciences further specialise and split.

Problems
 World War II shakes confidence in science (eugenics,
human experiments, atomic weapons) as a social good.
 Feierabend criticizes the myth of science as a
privileged account of the world.
 Traditional methodologies are uninteresting.
Experimental methods (not only for grants) are
attractive.
 AI has replaced much of human activity in science.

Identitycrisis
 Identity is sociological strongly associated with the
profession.
 But what about a situation where:
 Much of the activity is replaced by machines (AI).
 The scientist will replace several completely different
departments.
 The scientist will replace completely different
methodological procedures.
 Scientist are more like the worker in a factory than
scholars (Heidegger).
 The scientist has too narrowed a profile (in traditional
European continental education) to be transdisciplinary.
 The development of science is unpredictable.

Early–late - future
modernstylesofthinking

Earlymodern
styleofthinking
 A scientist is a scientist in one of his fields of study.
 Studying one discipline, doing it and dying in it is a
virtue.
 There are scientific journals that set the preferred
direction of research.
 BDW: there are still built libraries (all over the world -
Universal Decimal Classification) and do habilitation
and professorship procedure (in the Czech).

Latemodern
styleofthinking
 Valuable is a new perspective on the problem, new
methods, often transferred from a completely different
environment.
 There are no boundaries between disciplines; this is
important at the boundaries between them.
 The environment, not the entity, has primacy in
cognition.
 Journals are focused on a topic, not on one discipline.
 Science is often associated with the ability to use the
mental model from one discipline in another and to
adequately interpret it.

Latemodern
styleofthinking
 The paradigm is an increasingly short description.
 But this does not mean the destruction of the "classical
sciences", just an extension of the repertoire.
 Modernity is a threat to scientific identity… if I'm a
bad scientist.
 The future is in increasingly close cooperation between
scientific disciplines, which means narrowing the
barriers between them.
 Science will have to find new methods for rapid and
accurate exchange of information (but for example:
"information" in biology, philosophy, information
science or information means something completely
different!).

Nearfuture
(newstyleof
thinking)
 Science is not done by one person, not by a team of
people, but by hybrid systems: a group of people and an
AI team.
 It is necessary to move to the concept of the extended
mind as the basic concept in education and science.
 We must accept that the history of science will not be
able to treat isolated genius personalities (Copernicus,
Newton, Einstein,…).
 We must take that part of the scientific work will be
'inhuman', linked to AI.
 It is necessary to abandon the definition of science by
"subject and methods of inquiry", but to start thinking
about science more dynamically (neither subject nor
methods are given in advance).

Conclusion
 We are in the environment and process of creating a "new
style of thinking".
 Changing the definition of knowledge and thinking (with
the extended mind, inforgs, information interactions
models,…) will have major implications for science and
education.
 Floridi: society is hyper-connectivist.
 Information: data with meaning.
 Knowledge: information linked to a structure (network) that
is dynamically built but not trapped in one head. The
knowledge network is something that connects us with other
people and technology (AI).
 We must redefine the identity of a scientist as a man who
carries out a socially respected … but dynamically
changing profession. maybe ... is the Nobel Prize a good
award for 21st century work in science?

The new style of thinking

More Related Content

What's hot (20)

Similar to The new style of thinking (20)

More from Michal Černý (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

The new style of thinking