Ellie Epp - notes toward the new Goddard IMA program, made in the context of emails from Danielle, Catherine, Neema and Ralph. 2002. Q. Can the liberal arts be transdisciplinary enough? I agree with Ralph that the transdisciplinary work that most needs doing is metadisciplinary, ie a crossbreeding of math/science and arts/humanities. I'm most aware of this need in questions that have to do with mind, so I'll speak from my own experience here. I find that a science-less conception of consciousness studies, for instance, has serious problems. One is a tendency toward Cartesian separation of mind and world, which can only make sense in a deist/creationist framework that explains mind as dropped into the physical world from outside. In a nondeist account evolution has to be part of the story. A related problem is that studies of conscious being shouldn't be separated from studies of kinds of knowing that are nonconscious and yet effective. 'Consciousness' - ie conscious perceiving, thinking, knowing, acting - needs to be understood as a nested subset of mental/physical function that also includes nonconscious perceiving, acting, thinking, knowing. We can integrate studying conscious and nonconscious knowing only by seeing both in terms of physical structure. So consciousness studies needs evolutionary theory, cognitive science, and ethology in addition to its liberal arts roots. Temperamental preferences of faculty and students, and tightness of institutional resources, mean that liberal arts colleges really have only one partner to the necessary marriage of the liberal arts and science. If we want to do really exciting transdisciplinary graduate work we need to come up with the other partner. Should we look for students who have scientific formation they picked up somewhere else? Could we organize programs for such students that wouldn't seem too soft? Should there be scientific catch-up seminars for faculty? Q. Do we know what we mean by the ground of a form of study? The structured human body, including its brain and the whole of its nervous, endocrine and other systems, is the immediate ground of every kind of study, in the sense that it is the means by which any kind of knowing occurs. There is also a cultural ground, in the sense that knowing bodies alter and are altered by cultural practices propagated and sustained in communities. More inclusively, the whole physical world and the local environment are the ground both of evolved living bodies and of cultural communities. So there are these different levels of actual grounding that exist simultaneously. Given these different levels of actual grounding we have a choice of theoretical grounds or frameworks. Q. At what level are we placing epistemology? If we say epistemology (or, alternatively, the related notion of transformation) is the ground of the IMA program, what choice of level are we making? I think the answer depends on whether we do or don't make science part of the mix. Danielle is defining epistemology as critical and reconstructive scrutiny of methods and paradigms, "An awareness and reflexivity regarding the paradigms and bodies of knowledge we use or draw from." Epistemology in this way of thinking is the theory or study of knowledge, knowledge being understood as something that is "in the culture," in cultural records and practices. This sense of epistemology can be understood within the terms of the traditional liberal arts. If we include science, we can approach epistemology in what I think is a more basic way, as the theory or study of knowing, of how knowing is done. This approach, which takes every sort of human knowing as done by means of structured and restructuring human bodies, makes cognitive science the core of a theory or study of knowing. The study of knowledge - the cultural level - can then be seen as nested inside the study of knowing - the level of evolved, responsive individual bodies. I prefer to pitch camp at this level because I think there is more happening here. The new stuff in cognitive science has radical implications for just about any question concerning knowing, because our existing approaches are based on assumptions that have turned out to be wrong. If we don't know how bodies use language or pictures, we don't know how to understand cultural practices. Q. What unifies transdisciplinary studies? Questions and/or methods. Transdisciplinary studies form when there is a vital question that cannot be answered within the terms offered by established knowledge communities, or when there is a new method that can be applied in a lot of contexts. The most successful mainstream transdisciplinary efforts at the moment are cognitive science and complexity studies. Cognitive science has been including philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, psychology, artificial intelligence and connectionist computer science. (It should also include the arts, but hasn't.) With cognitive science the thread being followed into and through and out of disciplinary communities is a question about how to understand mind or intelligence. With complexity studies, the development of computer-aided nonlinear mathematics and mathematical visualization has opened up more subtle ways of understanding systems in a lot of fields. In relation to a transdisciplinary graduate institute, then, it seems that we should be clear as possible about questions and methods. Do we have a new method? Do we have clear questions? Q. Individual named degrees would be built around different questions. What are they? Environmental studies. Is the question, How do we understand natural systems as wholes? Is it, What bad things are happening to the environment by human agency? Is it, What needs doing? Consciousness studies. Is the question, What is it like to be? Is it, What are the uses and misuses of the notion of consciousness? Is it, How can sentience be understood as an embedded part of the physical universe? Is it, What are the possibilities of sentient experience, and how to we shift among them? Social activism. Is the question, What is a good community? Is it, What sort of intervention is effective? Is it, What needs doing? Q. Interrelations among named degree areas If the structured, environmentally situated body were taken as the ground of knowing, and if understanding how knowing happens were consequently taken to be the enterprise that is the common framework of the MA program, there would be implications for the relations among the new named degrees. Some of the more interesting questions are questions that seem to cut across two or more of the degree areas. Environmental studies are generally taken to be studies of the non-human worlds of earth, water, weather, plants, animals and their interrelations. Environments, though, can also be understood as creating minds and qualities of mind; and minds and qualities of mind can be understood as creating environments, not in any mentalist or idealist sense, but through action. So between consciousness studies and environment studies there are the questions, What relation to environment makes good minds? And What sort of minds want to take good care of environments? The overlap where environmental studies and consciousness studies come together is cognitive ecology, which so far has hardly been touched. Between environmental studies and social activism there are the questions, What is needed to make shared physical environments support community? and What sort of communities can do a good job of sharing physical environments? Between consciousness studies and social activism there are questions like What state of mind is needed for activism that isn't ego imperialism? Q. What provides the discipline in transdisciplinary studies? Traditional disciplines - in the sense of established knowledge cultures - have institutionalized training and testing regimes. They therefore know what they mean by discipline in the other sense of rigor, developed or specialized competence, accredited excellence, etc. Established departments of knowledge also tend to have a sense of discipline that is a remnant of the authoritarian origins of the university, ie discipline in the sense of repression, punishment, and coercive or self-coercive control. People working outside these institutional formats have to have a discipline that is closer to the bone, which is ethical discipline: honesty, effort, debate, community scrutiny, openness of process, emotional clarity, and integration of these within the widest possible interest in social, environmental and personal well-being. Followed with energy, an ethic of integration and well-being is MORE rigorous than disciplinary standards concerned with demonstrations of mastery. Can this sort of discipline be built into institutional structure? Or does it depend heavily on the personal quality of students, faculty and staff? If the latter, are there implications? The liberal arts / science question comes in here too. Should it be part of liberal arts discipline to take on the challenges and hardships of embracing the awful other of science?