This is the second in our series of interviews with current historians and philosophers of science. In these interviews, our guests are asked to reflect on the current status of the field, how we might contribute to contemporary debates, what their own research interests are, and how these interests inform their worldview. In this interview with Federica Russo, we focus on the role of interdisciplinarity, belonging, and how to bring the HPS discipline into scientific practice.
Maura Burke (MB): Welcome, Federica. Thank you for joining me today. To start us off, would you tell us in your own words a bit about how your career in HPS has developed?
Federica Russo (FR): So, I am Italian and I started to study philosophy in Italy. I then studied the philosophy of science in French-speaking Belgium in the early 2000s. This is also where I did my PhD and had academic positions in French- and Dutch-speaking Belgium. Then I went back to Italy, I spent some time in the UK and I have now been in the Netherlands for quite a long time. I say these things because there have been multiple cultural clashes that I have experienced – not just at the level of the culture of a specific country, but also the different academic cultures and the different topics that are studied in various places.
By training, I am a philosopher. When I wanted to delve into the philosophy of science, especially the causality debates for my PhD dissertation, I had the opportunity to start having discussions with social scientists. This is when I started to realize the limitations of some approaches to the philosophy of science, those that focused mainly on theory and theorizing, detached from the practice of science. That moment marked an important turn for me because I really started looking into the practice of science very closely and this has been a hallmark of my research, looking into what happens in actual, current practices.
As things developed in my career, I was never enough of anything. I was never enough of a philosopher of science, or social science, or medicine, and never enough of a scientist either. But I came to the point where that is fine because this is also what has gotten me into interesting collaborations so I do not have regrets about this. I do, however, think my story is exemplative of some of the limitations of our academic system.
I am not a historian by training, although I have a lot of sympathetic interests and I really value the research done in the history of science and the history of philosophy. While I never felt like a proper HPS scholar, I do feel at home in HPS. Having been trained in Italy, history is a major element of any and everything we do, this is something that has been lost in many other places, especially in Anglo-American institutions. So, in a sense, I think being in this HPS group has allowed me to reconnect with this historical dimension which is a part of my training. I know I am not an expert in the history of science, but I like the idea that we can all work together and be complementary. I like that what I have done has been recognized by the HPS group as valuable, even if I’ve never been a proper HPS scholar, strictly speaking. It makes me think, OK – I can be whatever I am and that’s fine.
MB: Could you give us a brief word on what your formal current role is?
FR: So I took up the Westerdijk chair and am appointed as a Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Techno-Science, and that’s very interesting for me in various ways. The Westerdijk chair is an interesting position, it is absolutely a kind of recognition for what I have done. However, this position also gives me a lot of responsibility because, as it happens, I am still the only woman in a full professor position in the Institute – the first and the only one at the moment. So it sounds fantastic, but it is a lot of responsibility. I’m not trying to run away from this, but I’m just saying that it is a responsibility, that’s the thing.
So, the philosophy and ethics of techno-science. I picked the name of the chair and I was very happy that the committee liked it and didn’t have any objection. I was trying to do two simultaneous things with this name. One is formally putting ethics into a philosophy of science context, as the normative questions of our field should not be left out. Second, is to point to the fact that science and technology are really connected and not separated. This is one divide that I’ve been trying to bridge, the one between the philosophy of technology and the philosophy of science.
I’m glad that there is no AI in the name of my chair, although I enjoy all the work on AI I’m currently doing. I feel well supported by the Institute in thinking of what is useful from our perspective as HPS or science educators, to contribute to the debate. To me, HPS adds an interesting dimension to the debate, because it is not just about what’s wrong with AI or what’s harmful, but it is looking forward. What can we do with it and how can we best prepare our students for what is happening?
MB: There is a feeling that to some extent we’re living in these unprecedented times. This was the language that was popping up a lot, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, and then, very relevant to us, there is also this huge AI development. So looking at this position through the lens of your own research, what do you make of this unprecedentedness?
FR: This idea of unprecedentedness is probably the best word that we have to establish the legitimacy of our approach, that science is STS and HPS as well. Everything has to be unprecedented, otherwise, why should we study it? At the same time – this is where I find the HPS perspective really useful and necessary – of course, there is always some element of novelty, but nothing is entirely novel either. This historical dimension may help us tone down this narrative of the unprecedentedness, whether it is the pandemic or AI.
You picked, I think, two excellent examples: the pandemic and AI. They are timely and I think they really show what we can offer as HPS to contemporary analysis. So, right, it’s not the first time we had to go through a pandemic – what was new was living through a pandemic in a world that could not stop, and in which there has been a major shift towards online interactions, for better or worse. And again, for AI, this is not the first technological innovation that has been introduced in society and on the market. But probably the novel thing here is how they are really experimenting with us in using this technology.
So what can we do as HPS? That’s what you want to find out. I think we can do a lot of work in contextualizing and I think we can do this contextualization through a historical, sociological, conceptual approach. It is very relevant for the pandemic because according to some people, part of the problem was that we had been addressing the pandemic only from a strict biological lens, neglecting by and large, the social aspect of the pandemic.
For AI something similar is happening. The relevant connections should be with, again, sociology, and possibly with psychology and not presupposing that this is just an artefact, a piece of technology that we use. This is altering our social relations and our cognitive processes. We really need to discuss with people how they feel about it and perhaps it’s not just psychology, it’s probably a lot of pedagogy – we have to really talk to our students because of this impact on the cognitive processes.
MB: That brings me to the next set of topics I want to look at, which is the engagement between HPS scholars and ‘the public’. It seems that philosophy of science is in some ways still one of these ‘ivory tower’ practices that does not have much engagement and participation outside of its own discipline, much less outside of the academy. What would you say is the role that HPS could have, or some very actionable ways that an HPS scholar might start participating in opening up the practice?
FR: That’s a very nice question, Maura, because this has been one of the reasons I am so excited to have joined the Freudenthal Institute. I really see this as a space where HPS can make a difference. We always think of impact from the top down and I wonder whether we can start making an impact from the bottom up. It has occurred to me that in my 20 years in academia, we – I say we because I am thinking of me and all my colleagues – it never crossed our minds that we should talk to science educators and discuss how we teach science!There has been a lot of discussion about talking to policymakers, especially those of us active in social science, medicine, and public health. We have maintained that what we say about causation, evidence, or probability should impact how one would write guidelines – whether or not EBM (evidence-based medicine) is the right thing to do. You know, this is where the impact has been. But I mean, it’s not that you become a medic because you have a revelation, you become a medic because you are trained in medical school.
So that’s an area where I think we can make a difference – the training at the higher education level, but also in primary and secondary school. There is all this concern about the declining trust in science, but how are we teaching science? For me, it has been a transformative experience to study philosophy of science. Having had my high school education in science, I understood nothing about the side of science that we look at: the struggles to establish scientific knowledge. Science, to me, has been taught, as a sequence of achievements. This is the theory. This is the math. This is the physics. This is the biology.
I know I said earlier that Italy has this historical emphasis on a lot of their education, but for science, this is missing. So I really had to construct for myself this idea of what it takes to understand things, what it takes to make scientific theories. This is why I am so obsessed with epistemology and methodology, because I want to understand how to come to establish what we claim to have established. I am fascinated by how we are able to generalize, to even formulate a hypothesis, and then to test it, and on what grounds we can say this. So I think we can help pupils to develop an attitude whereby we trust the science, yet we are also cautious about science. We don’t take science at face value, but we have a lot of respect for the enterprise itself.
MB: I also see it as a very important role of HPS scholars to engage with the question of how you remediate this educational experience, and that relates very closely to my next question, which is: To what extent do you find that our colleagues either inside the Academy or outside the Academy are aware of what HPS knowledge is, both what kind of knowledge we generate and what kind of knowledge we deal with?
FR: Laughter. Good question. I don’t think it is well understood. In part because people may have very vague ideas of what philosophy is in the first place, what it actually is that we do on a daily basis. So history probably is easier to understand in that sense. It is a more generally understood practice: You look at the past. I’m sure people probably think that you can just read the facts from documents or things like that, and they almost certainly underestimate the amount of intellectual work it takes to reconstruct something historically.
So I think people have very little idea what we do, and in the little idea that they do have, they are probably incorrect. This is probably where I become a bit normative in what I want to say: we should pitch ourselves as working with scientists and with science, rather than saying that we have an external look at them.
Whatever you do in science, whether it is biology, medicine or physics, you use concepts and methods. You need to have a pretty good idea of what these concepts are, what these methods are, how they intersect and what kind of values underpin these methods or what kind of values can be at the end of the road if you adopt these concepts and these methods. I think we could pitch ourselves as part of this process rather than as external observers. At the Freudenthal Institute, we are in an excellent position because we are in the faculty of science. That’s a pretty privileged position that we have, I would say.
I was thinking about what has happened to me in the past few years. Very often I have found myself in proper philosophy meetings, with no scientists around the table to discuss problems with science, and when that has happened I find it a bit boring. What I ended up doing is that I moved away from philosophy of X to, instead, problem X which I approach from a philosophical perspective. I found that this can unite me and the other people around the table when we are focused on this shared problem with our different disciplinary backgrounds, perspectives, and objectives. I don’t do empirical research, so my goal is not to analyze the data sets, et cetera. That might be their perspective, and then what I do will be enriched by the philosophical perspective. Then you have a look around the table and at those people who can deal with the problem in different ways and this is how you can start to be more forward-looking as an academic rather than inward-looking. The most interesting conversations I have had in the past few years are from an interdisciplinary perspective and not a specific disciplinary perspective.
MB: This does flow very nicely into the last thing that I want to look at, which is the future of what this field might look like. If I could come back and meet with you halfway through this century – another 25 years – what would you have hoped that HPS has developed towards? And this can be a dream, it doesn’t necessarily have to practical and realizable.
FR: Interesting, ok. If I could dream, I would wish HPS could be more easily integrated into scientific projects, especially big collaborative projects. So in my mind, this goes two ways: the science recognizes, values, and takes advantage of what we do. Conversely, we treat this engagement with the science as essential, so we cannot just go do our part at home, ignoring that there really is science in practice that is happening! It has to be a mutual engagement.
Another thing that I would hope is that we can build a better professional image for those who study HPS. Those studying ethics have a comparatively easier time because everyone thinks that ethics is important. So if you study ethics, you may have a career relevant to ethics, even if it is not an academic career. In HPS, we have equally important and good skills that can translate outside of academia, HPS in think tanks or advisory committees for science policies, etcetera. Our expertise is not really recognized and that is something that we are not doing quite right. In part, this is about communication, but I think it is really about how we are trained. So for instance, writing philosophical and historical essays is important, but it’s equally important to write a decent blog post or a decent report. Those are examples of ways that we can make better use of our expertise and knowledge.
The third thing I wish for us is that there will be more of these interdisciplinary places where we focus on problems by valuing the disciplinary perspectives and that we make more space for these hybrid profiles. Some of the junior people do not start with a neat profile in philosophy of X, and that can make it very hard for them to enter the profession. So I hope we can have more places where not being a clearly defined philosopher of X is valued, rather than an issue for the assessment of a candidate.
The big question is why this matters. Why does the work that we do matter? And this is not to make an argument for impact, or to suggest that you can immediately anticipate how a theory will be used, but still – why does it matter? I would ask anybody from the logician to the historian: why does it matter? You have to be able to answer this question.
MB: So we have reached the end. This has been a very fun hour and to close it off I’d like to give people some opportunities to engage with materials that either exhibit a personal interest, or some development that you think is interesting. I want two suggestions, one of which is kind of free range. This can be as specific, as expertise riddled as you desire, and the second one is something that might be more generally accessible and interesting.
FR: Oh, that’s a super tough question. There is so much. So you asked me a very difficult question, Maura, because I’ve been reading a lot lately. Not about philosophy per se, but authors in the sciences are saying very interesting things that are relevant to philosophy.
This is also something that I’m going to touch upon in my inaugural lecture in early December. So I have been reading about scientists trying to explain why you have to go plural with the methods, and how this is connected to questions of ethics. One of these authors is Burke Johnson, a mixed methods researcher explaining the approach he’s advocating. It is called dialectical pluralism, and he pitches mixed methods research as, and I quote, ‘a practice to engage in difference,’ which I thought is really brilliant. Because at the heart of it is that to engage with people, other researchers, whatever the background, you have to listen to the people, you have to care about them. You have to explain the problem. It’s highly philosophical what he says and how he connects the reasons for embracing mixed methods research to study real problems, actual problems. So that’s one reading that I would definitely recommend, look at these publications of Burke Johnson.
And then perhaps more accessible to a wider audience… There is a blog run by Gabriele Bammer. It is again in the interdisciplinary field and looks at what it really meansto do interdisciplinarity research in practice. These people are aligned in trying to solve scientific problems from multidisciplinary perspectives and what it takes. They create a vocabulary for those who do not fit any of these boxes, and this is the sort of thing that I think anyone could find very useful to their own research. Thank you for having me today, it has been fun!
This interview has been edited for length and clarity by Maura Burke.