There are many ways for people to come to understand the world. Many different approaches to learning about things, including minds. Scientism — the belief that science is the only route to useful knowledge — is a philosophical mistake (Hughes 2012).
I say this as someone who loves science, who teaches it for a living and who’s in the middle of another science course right now, for general interest and with an eye to future research. Science is wonderful. We just need to be careful about how we apply it, and what ways of knowing we risk crowding out if we rely on it too heavily.
When it comes to autism, people sometimes rely on scientific studies to the point of disbelieving autistic people’s personal experiences. Despite the low quality of much of the published research on autism, non-autistic experts are assumed to understand autistic experiences better than the people having them. This is a serious problem in a number of ways, and also an interesting case study in the limitations of science.
Autism and Scientism, Research Journal Middletown Centre for Autism
This is one of the heartbreaks about being autistic. We tend to love certainty and support science. Yet, we constantly face scientific and medical professionals whose credentials we want to trust but whose information has been greatly misinformed. It’s a systemic problem.
John Marble on Twitter
The failures of autism science are not random: they reflect systematic power imbalances.
Autism and Scientism: Why science is not always the best way to learn about autism
Scientism begets epistemic injustice.
So much of the reason why borderline-abusive practices like ABA have been allowed to proliferate is that policy-makers have prioritised anything claiming to be scientific over the constant objections of the people having these things done to them.
Science is an incredibly powerful tool, but that just makes bad science all the more dangerous. No court would dismiss someone’s testimony of their own pain just because there are no peer-reviewed studies to show it’s real – so why do politicians?
@ferrous@neurodifferent.me
Epistemic injustice refers to harms that relate specifically to our status as epistemic agents, whereby our status as knowers, interpreters, and providers of information, is unduly diminished or stifled in a way that undermines the agent’s agency and dignity.
Neurodiversity, epistemic injustice, and the good human life – Chapman – 2022 – Journal of Social Philosophy – Wiley Online Library
When they speak, it is scientific;
Who Can Speak? by Grada Kilomba in ’Decolonizing Knowledge‘ (2016)
when we speak, it is unscientific.
When they speak, it is universal;
when we speak, it is specific.
When they speak, it is objective;
when we speak, it is subjective.
When they speak, it is neutral;
when we speak, it is personal.
When they speak, it is rational;
when we speak, it is emotional.
When they speak, it is impartial;
when we speak, it is partial.
They have facts, we have opinions.
They have knowledges, we have experiences.
We are not dealing here with a peaceful coexistence of words,
but rather with a violent hierachy, which defines
Who can Speak, and What We Can Speak About.
As a scholar, for instance, I am commonly told that my work on everyday racism is very interesting, but not really scientific, a remark that illustrates the colonial order in which Black scholars reside: “You have a very subjective perspective”; “very personal”; “very emotional”; “very specific”; “Are these objective facts?” Such comments function like a mask, that silences our voices as soon as we speak. They allow the white subject to place our discourses back at the margins, as deviating knowledge, while their discourses remain at the centre, as the norm. When they speak it is scientific, when we speak it is unscientific;
universal / specific;
objective / subjective;
neutral / personal;
rational / emotional;
impartial / partial;
they have facts, we have opinions;
they have knowledge, we have experiences.
These are not simple semantic categorizations; they possess a dimension of power that maintains hierarchical positions and upholds white supremacy. We are not dealing here with a “peaceful coexistence of words,” as Jacques Derrida (1981: 41) emphasizes, but rather a violent hierarchy that defines who can speak.
Kilomba, Grada. Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism (p. 26). Between the Lines.
Objectivity and Reason
…the Western educational focus on reason and cognition denies an understanding of the whole person in learning.
Ollis, T.. A Critical Pedagogy of Embodied Education: Learning to Become an Activist (Postcolonial Studies in Education) (p. 170). Palgrave Macmillan US.
Rationalism has always dominated western educational thought (Beckett & Morris 2003). Since the Enlightenment and Descartes’ dictum, “Cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am) (Descartes 1983), the focus on rationalism has taken primary importance in understanding learning. The emphasis on cognition through the development of critical thinking leaves the focus on learning as an intellectual activity alone (Brookfield, 1985), denying the connectivity of mind, emotions, and the body in learning (Hunter 2004; O’Loughlin 2006). Dewey claims education has moved away from its initial intention, “It ceased to mean ways of doing and being done to, and became a way for something intellectual and cognitive” (Dewey, 1930, p. 312). A focus on disembodiment in adult education denies the reality of somatic learning (Beckett & Morris 2003). As Dewey rightly claims, being human is about experiencing the world around us and learning occurs through experience, “ . . . every experience influences in some degree the objective conditions under which further experiences are had” (Dewey, 1938, 1999, p. 30).
It is demonstrated in this book that learning is embodied , including the physical body, not just with speech and communicative actions but the physicality of actually being present in a classroom or learning space (Beckett & Morris 2003). We physically move the body as we learn and teach—we interact with others, teachers, students, and colleagues, we move our bodies in the space of learning when we work in groups with other learners; learning, therefore, requires a physical presence. We bring our bodies into learning when we walk into the classroom or workplace. Our bodies represent our present and past experiences of learning and our constituted educational discourses (Hunter 2004). Students bring their own lived experiences of class or privilege into the classroom (Hooks 2003a). They bring their own experiences of education both constituted by their corporeal experiences of education and by the hegemonic educational discourses and practices that have been worked on them (Hunter, 2004).
Ollis, T.. A Critical Pedagogy of Embodied Education: Learning to Become an Activist (Postcolonial Studies in Education) (pp. 166-167). Palgrave Macmillan US.
“Lower Status” Knowledge
…within the Western tradition, embodied knowledge of the disempowered or disenfranchised has, for too long, been deemed suspect, illegitimate, or of little value to the process of knowing, even within some radical political circles. In contrast, Ollis rightly argues that it is impossible to truly understand the development and identity formation of activists without careful attention to the manner in which the whole body is implicated in their learning practices and in the evolution of their participation within social movements.
Ollis, T.. A Critical Pedagogy of Embodied Education: Learning to Become an Activist (Postcolonial Studies in Education) . Palgrave Macmillan US.
Activists are active in communities and social movements. They are connected to communities; they meet with politicians, advocate for reform or change, resist dominant discourses of oppression, they socialize and meet with other activists. They develop knowledge about systems of government by understanding key players and stakeholders in their area of interest, sometimes advocating for change within the existing system and, at other times, marching in protest and taking direct action. In doing this they actively construct, renew, and remake their practice. This constructivist and interpretive knowledge is in contrast to the abstract and immaterial learning founded in behaviorism and in contemporary education pedagogy and practice. It is at times referred to as lower status knowledge or practical knowledge (Beckett & Morris 2003; Maddison & Scalmer 2006). Lower status knowledge, which stems from our concrete material experiences of the world, is often viewed by educators as the “junk” category of knowledge (Schön 1987; Beckett 2008;). There is a need to understand why some people have more knowledge than others, but rather than view the whole person as a site of knowledge, “outstanding practitioners are not said to have more professional knowledge than others, but greater ‘wisdom,’ ‘talent,’ ‘intuition,’ or ‘artistry.’ ” (Beckett 2008, p.13). Schön develops this point further:
Unfortunately, such terms as these serve not to open up inquiry but to close it off. They are used as junk categories, attaching names to phenomena that elude conventional strategies of explanation. So the dilemma of rigor or relevance here reasserts itself. On the basis of an underlying and largely unexamined epistemology of practice, we distance ourselves from the kinds of performance we need most to understand ( p. 13).
Beckett (2008 ) raises the importance of taking seriously embodied knowledge and believes “low status knowledge, typically called ‘intuition’; or ‘commonsense’, or ‘know-how’, is receiving long-overdue critical attention” (p. 2). His contribution to the literature on embodied learning in adult education is important because he focuses on the hitherto neglected area of the whole person or embodied learning at work (Beckett & Hager 2002; Beckett & Morris 2003; Beckett 2008). In The Reflective Practitioner, Schön (1983) argues that the Western educational focus on reason and cognition denies an understanding of the whole person in learning. In contemporary adult learning theory it is sometimes called deeper rather than surface learning, but is more broadly connected to critical pedagogy (Darder, Baltadano, & Torres 2003). Educators need to move away from a cognitive focus of “knowing why” to an embodied focus of “knowing how” (Gonczi 2004).
Ollis, T.. A Critical Pedagogy of Embodied Education: Learning to Become an Activist (Postcolonial Studies in Education) (pp. 169-170). Palgrave Macmillan US.
