Dear Lubomir,
Your proposal to organize science around problems is a powerful
heuristic approach. While it seems difficult and challenging as a way
to restructure institutional disciplines and organizational
structures, it is the way a lot of good science gets done.
If you think, for example, of new and emerging fields such as
molecular biology, that's exactly what happens. The book I mentioned
yesterday (Ceccarelli 2001) describes the process nicely as people
became aware of an inspired by a problem, organizing themselves
around the problem rather than through the disciplines. The late Jens
Bernsen (1986) suggestion that this is the core of the design
process, as well, and I'd suggest that this explains the design
approach to scientific issues.
William Byers's (2007) describes this as an essentially feature of
mathematical discovery, and he organizes part of his new book How
Mathematicians Think around "the idea," in essence, the high-level
conceptual description of a problem.
As MSC Nelson points out, some organizations take this approach on an
institutional level.
It seems to me that organizing all science and all institutions
around problems would probably create difficulties. There are many
things we should likely do in routinized fashions -- and one way that
human beings save time while evolving is to institutionalize what we
learn in disciplines and professions, building organizations and
behaviors on habitual patterns. This leads to other kinds of
difficulties when we become so used to our habits that we cannot
shift into a mode that allows us to solve the problems that habitual
structures cannot address.
By and large, though, your proposal is the way forward in many
fields, and it offers a conceptual structure that allows us to
transcend disciplines.
I'd argue that you've described how a great deal of effective science
and design gets done now. Not the majority, of course, because the
majority of science is lab work and puzzle solving, just as the
majority of design is studio work and hands-on production work.
Organizing around problems is for that proportionally smaller but
still large class of problems that we cannot solve in routine or
habitual ways.
Warm wishes,
Ken
--
Reference
Bernsen, Jens. 1986. Design. The Problems Comes First. Copenhagen:
Danish Design Council.
Byers, William. 2007. How Mathematicians Think. Using Ambiguity,
Contradiction, and Paradox to Create Mathematics. Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Ceccarelli, Leah. 2001. Shaping Science with Rhetoric. The cases of
Dobzhansky, Shroedinger, and Wilson. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Lubomir Popov wrote:
[In prior thread labeled: Interdisciplinary research]
"In brief, I would mention that one approach is to organize science
not by disciplines and then search for a way to stick them, but to
organize science around problem situations."
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