Step 3: knowledge transfer between paradigms: how can it work?

Step 2 talked about methodology, and about why familiar stepping stones will only work up to a point.

—> Can you say in your own words what that was all about?

Step 3 is going to put forward some general ideas on how successful knowledge transfer between paradigms might work. (Later steps are then going to talk specifically about the two paradigms in question - Indigenous and contemporary Western ones - but not just yet.)

—> Off the top of your head, how do you think people comparing notes on two different paradigms can make sure they don’t talk past each other?

At the beginning of a chapter about questioning some of the assumptions we tend to make, it is important to say that contemporary Western science is not suddenly “wrong”. No one is going to romanticise “New-Age” ideas at the expense of rigorous scientific enquiry: in fact, several of the authors referenced (for example, Gregory Cajete and David Abram) have been quite scathing about “New-Age” romanticism.

—> When steps 1 and 2 said where the bibliography is, did you get a chance to have a look? Remember, it is there if you want it.

What is at stake here (rather than romanticism) is that the closer we look, the more it is going to turn out that contemporary Western science is just one piece in a jigsaw of relating to the world - no more, and no less. It is a valuable piece: after all, just recently, it gave us a Covid vaccine that many of us owe our lives to. But it also focuses on some forms of evidence more than it does on others. That means there are some things it is going to be less likely to relate well to. For those things, it can be better if scientists and people outside science manage to learn from each other. In step 4 below, this is going to happen between Indigenous academics and Western theoretical physicists.

For now, it is worth taking a look at the experience of earlier groups knocking on an existing mainstream’s door with their different ideas. For example, philosophy used to be a male-dominated discipline. Then, feminism came along and, soon after that, people started thinking about intersectionality. Established philosophers and non-traditional new arrivals to the discipline soon ended up talking past each other, because their tacit assumptions could be quite different.

Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding published an edited volume giving us an opportunity to learn from this experience. Their contributors come up with some pitfalls they found when working across paradigms: “othering” each other was one, especially when there had been a long-standing conflict between the people involved. Misunderstanding each other was another.

Then, there was a particular tricky one! We have just said we want to learn from each other across paradigms. That means we are going to have to be open to some things that are going to sound quite strange to us at the start. But what happens next? Do we automatically throw out anything that doesn’t sound right to us? Or do we automatically accept anything that doesn’t sound right to us, and throw out our existing ideas instead? And, whichever way, do we automatically believe that whatever we think now is going to apply everywhere?

—> Can you think of an example of when someone told you something new that didn’t sound as if it made sense at the start? What happened next? If it happened again tomorrow, would you respond the same way as you did at the time, or have you changed your mind? Why?

Narayan and Harding’s contributors didn’t manage to come up with a one-size-fits-all response - and that is probably a good thing. After all, we are all fallible: when a new idea looks at odds with an old one, it is, on the one hand, of course entirely possible that both “sides” are right in a way that seems difficult to reconcile at the beginning (but that later makes sense) - but, on the other hand, it is also possible that one “side” has made a mistake. We are not going to want to respond the same way every time this question comes up.

One point the authors stress is that only some things can be universalised, while others can’t. Newton’s apple will fall, reliably, every time, and it will fall in the Andes just as it will fall in the middle of London. Other things behave differently in different contexts. Remember the memory card from step 2: if it is not in its mobile phone or tablet, it can’t help us retrieve any pictures stored on it.

The long version of all this, available here, has a longer example in section 3.c that can help illustraate these ideas: it talks about the buchu plant being taken out of context, and about the way the perpetrators managed to disrespect Indigenous knowledge and Western science both at the same time. Unsurprisingly, with now two counts of cultural appropriation under their belts, they didn’t get very far with the plant in the West: with two contexts disrespected, things just turned out not to work the way that they thought they were going to.

For this short version here, it is probably enough for now to close with some generalised elements of successful knowledge transfer between paradigms that Narayan and Harding’s volume suggests. They don’t say these elements are going to be enough every time, but they do say that they are going to be helpful every time.

Context is one of them - and to get this context right, they say it is important to make sure there are experts involved on both “sides”. Then, in order for the experts to be heard, they say it is important to make sure there is respectful dialogue.

This last point sounds easy, but it stops being easy when respectful dialogue doesn’t usually happen the same way for both “sides”!

Step 4 is going to talk about a series of academic conferences now known as the Dialogues, where Indigenous academics and Western physicists talked about shared ground between Indigenous worldviews and the findings of quantum theory. The facilitator, Leroy Little Bear, took great care to use a blend of contemporary Western facilitation techniques (for example, presentations) on the one hand, and elements of Indigenous talking circles on the other. This was to make sure that everyone could contribute on their own terms, without having to “translate” their contribution into a system where it was going to lose some of the context that it needed.

—> What do you think might be lost if there are just presentations, and nothing else?

—> What do you think might be lost if there aren’t any presentations?

It might be interesting to revisit your answers to these two questions after the end of step 20.