A personal view of the
meeting from Paul Griffiths
Major new research initiatives at the University of Sydney
emphasise the ‘integrative’ nature of their work. This conference focused on
what ‘integration’ is and how it can be facilitated. Participants were leading Sydney scientists, philosophers
of science whose recent work has focused on integration, and social scientists studying
integration and developing practical interventions to promote integration. The
conference was jointly supported by the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of
Science, the Charles Perkins Centre, and the Institute for Sustainable Solutions.
The conference program is available here.
A key concept at the meeting was ‘translational integration’,
a term introduced by Sabina Leonelli. This is a very different conception of integration
from that found in from traditional accounts of the reduction of one science to
another, or of the ‘unity of science’, and also differs from more recent work
on the emergence of new fields at the intersection of different disciplines. These
differences can be brought out using some apparatus introduced at the meeting
by Todd Grantham: to see what is meant by ‘integration’ in any given context it
is necessary to identity the units that are being integrated, the nature of the
connections made between them, and the purpose for which they are being
connected. Traditional discussion of reduction and the unity of science focused
on scientific theories or models of broad application – units that constitute
the major achievements of scientific disciplines. The connections between these
units were on the same scale, with the ‘reduction’ of one theory or model to
another being particularly prominent. The aim of integration was to clarify the
overall structure of scientific knowledge. This is very different from
translational integration.
The units of translational integration are methods, data,
and specific results (or even hypotheses). The ways they are connected are often
temporary and only locally valid, and the aim of integration is to design interventions. Integration of the results of research might seem an odd idea in a discussion which has often focused on integrating diverse elements in the process of research, but it does seem to be what is intended in some talk of 'integrative research. For example, in research on obesity, we have findings from, to choose just a few fields, molecular biology, physiology, social science findings about the (in)effectiveness of education programs, information on the price elasticities of different foods, epidemiological data on obesity in
domestic pets paralleling that in humans, etc, etc. Treated in isolation, these may support very
different recommendations about what to do to improve health. One reason to describe research as ‘integrative’ is if it tries to articulate these diverse findings to make a case for trialling particular
interventions This seems to
capture what is intended by some references to ‘integrative research’ in the
research initiatives which sponsored the conference. It is also something along
these lines that the social scientists at the meeting have been seeking to
facilitate.
Gabrielle Bammer’s presentation of ‘integration and
implementation sciences’ described a systematic approach to delivering
integrative research. She assumed that such research will be problem-oriented,
and emphasised that a major issue in translational integration is that knowledge
is incomplete, so that part of translational integration is the management
of unknowns. The aim of translational
integration is not to achieve a more complete vision of nature, and so incompleteness
of knowledge is a practical issue to be managed, not an insuperable barrier to
integration. Whereas philosopher Sandra Mitchell’s presentation argued for
the necessary incompleteness of any single scientific representation of the
world, and a consequent need to revise our ideal of scientific enquiry, Bammer’s
suggestion that the management of unknowns is central to integrative research
would remain valid even on the traditional view that the aim of science is to
produce a complete and consistent model of the natural world.
Bammer discussed two classes of tools for delivering
integrative research: dialogic methods and modelling techniques. Dialogic
methods were exemplified in a presentation by Michael O’Rourke and Stephen
Crowley. These researchers have drawn on ideas from the philosophy of science
to design facilitated conversations between members of research teams which
draw out underlying presuppositions about the aims and standards of science
which team members bring from their home disciplines. Bringing these into the
open pre-empts misunderstandings and allows the management of disagreement.
The use of models in translational integration ranges from
exploring potential connections between different fields, as exemplified in the
demonstration of systems diagrams by Robert Dyball, through the detailed causal
models of complex systems seen in presentations by David James and John Crawford, to
the deliberately abstractive mathematical models presented by Olaf Wolkenhauer.
Much recent work in philosophy of science has focused on modelling as scientific
practice, and models as scientific products. Whilst both these themes were well-represented
in these presentations, another perspective on models present at the conference
was their role as a tool for achieving translational integration. The construction of a model to serve as the
basis for action can be the activity through which diverse data, methods, results,
and existing models from the contributing disciplines, are connected up and
rendered commensurable.
What agendas for future research emerged from the meeting?
The social scientists involved in research on integration all emphasised that it
is early days in the process of developing a systematic approach to delivering
integrative research. Those who work with research teams to facilitate
integration are simultaneously engaged in research into the effectiveness
of these interventions. However, given the ubiquity of interdisciplinary team science
in today’s biology and biomedicine, the idea of learning from theory and experience, and
embodying those lessons in a more systematic approach to integration is surely worth pursuing.
