A session on Interdisciplinary approach to Education | #SaiUCohortConnect | Class2021

0:00 [Music] good morning everybody welcome to a series of engagement events intended for students who will be attending psy university first of all let me welcome you to the psy university family uh together we are entrepreneurs because we are launching a university in india like no other

0:46 we say it's based on the harvard model the reason for that is because it allows you to combine subjects and disciplines based on what your interests are if i will just contrast the mit model with the harvard model uh the if you want to for example major in computer science at mit you have to take this full load of courses including chemistry and other subjects

1:32 very much like the engineering any engineering institute or engineering uh college and so it's very difficult then for you to pursue any other interests but just two kilometers away at harvard you can major in computer science but you can also combine that with music or with uh some other subject you could combine that with economics because computer science and data science are now languages and they can be applied to anything right

2:18 any subject or discipline provides data and that means that you can better understand that whether it's economics whether it's music whether it's uh even history or even literature those methods from computer science and data science are now being deployed to look at all of these texts in the case of literature the the ancient text the literary text to to look at patterns it's one way of analyzing it or in the case of music digital music and artificial intelligence systems that

3:04 even can create uh music or in the case of economics uh as you know professor swaminathan here at professor of economics and dean of social science at sci university that does work in in public health public health is going to be involve a lot of data so that model allows you to really follow your passions even if they don't align uh neatly with what traditional systems provide i have great confidence that at sciu we will quickly emerge

3:50 as a leader in india in this model and certainly the reason i returned from the us to india was because i think right now the country in the world that has the most talent among youth and has the best opportunity and has the a democracy as well to support their their freedoms is india and we are building a university in india that will be on par with any of the ivy league institutions of course we're starting it'll take some time to build but the quality and the character

4:37 of it will start right away this is a session on what a discipline is and what it means to be interdisciplinary and i'm delighted to introduce the session leader who is a faculty member at sciu professor siddhat who is a remarkable thinker and a scholar who has adopted the very analytical approaches to thinking about big philosophical issues but he is also got the intellectual breath

5:22 to tackle a whole range of other issues and his style of teaching is very much in the spirit of what we want at sciu which is more the iv model of interaction getting students to speak to solve problems to think to take intellectual risks rather than just sit in the class and listen uh to lectures of course some lectures uh you know are necessary and uh before i hand over to uh professor siddharth let me just make a few personal observations for me and i think for quite a few in of those of you uh who have

6:09 accepted our offer this is a very personal thing because i know for many of you whether in the school of computing and data science or the school of arts and sciences uh it will be one integrated ecosystem where you can get the best uh of mixing and matching things obviously uh the students in arts and sciences and the students in computing and data science will have your own uh requirements of your own majors that's necessary by being interdisciplinary we're not giving up specialization all we're doing is saying that at the undergraduate level the specialization

6:55 uh has to be built on a broad platform a broad base why do i say it's personal because certainly for me i had so many interests uh i wanted to taste and savor and sample before i decided you know what i wanted to do you can always specialize further at the postgraduate level and but the undergraduate level those three or four years you will never get in the rest of your life it's really important for you to express yourself uh find where your passions are and push the faculty and the deans to say can i do this and can i do this as well

7:42 whether you're in arts in arts and sciences it's a very natural thing to mix and match the liberal arts model uh in computing and data science i would say we are the first university in india uh to do that and i can assure you because of that every single one of you is going to be in demand when you graduate and it is our job as the faculty as the management uh even the governing board international advisory board we're all committed to your success individually personally because we think education is not just some stamp that you get it's a personal journey of professional development

8:29 and personal growth if i were to say a little bit more about that i know some of you have talked about being entrepreneurs uh entrepreneurs it could be tech entrepreneurs could be social entrepreneurs it could be change makers uh could be leaders in environmental change could be leaders in social change could be uh you know people who are interested in the arts and literature and so on i think that our model will prepare you for success

9:16 simply because the world is changing so fast today there may be a lot of good jobs in this subject but tomorrow they may not be we've seen this again and again and again the world round uh and particularly in india where it can suddenly the jobs can suddenly evaporate from one subject and reappear in other subjects but i can tell you that the employers whether you're in the arts and sciences or you're in computing and data sciences when the employers see that you've had the preparation and the training to think critically you've had a broad exposure you can discourse about quite a few subjects

10:01 and you are articulate in communicating uh you will be in demand whether it's as a job or in the entrepreneurial space where you have to pitch your ideas to investors or if you want to go on to postgraduate study so i think i'll close these introductory remarks and hand over to professor siddart all the best to all of you and we will connect with you often don't hesitate to get in touch with any of us if you have questions or comments thank you very much thank you professor baruch for those one

10:47 words of welcome i hope i'm audible yeah thank you and uh good afternoon everybody uh especially the students and welcome to psy university as professor baruch has said this is a sort of an uh a session to sort of uh introduce you all to the spirit of the university itself but before i begin i thought it would be good since i have met i think some of you probably during the selection process but it will be nice if each of you could perhaps switch on your video and maybe take a minute to quickly introduce yourself one by one maybe

11:32 uh just your name and buy your from and perhaps what your interests are first can we probably can i request you all to switch on your videos go on okay i see a few of you switching on the others as well okay thank you uh can we maybe uh have a round of

12:19 introductions from the students i mean you're all going to be batch mats and cohort mates so perhaps it'll be nice to know each of you may be quickly your name and where you're from uh okay i'll probably call out people as i see them rishita mata you want to maybe start hello sir hello yeah i'm rishita mathur and i'm from new delhi okay um and what are your interests maybe you're part of the cds or the arts and sciences program here i have applied for the computing and data sciences school

13:05 um i'm interested in artificial intelligence and cyber security okay welcome thank you sir anyone else wants to go next quickly maybe an introduction in a few seconds before we get started hello sir hello everyone um my name is dakshija and i'm from mysuru i have applied to the school of arts and sciences and i am passionate about literature psychology and i love reading so i can't wait to meet you guys welcome thank you sir anyone else come on you don't have to feel shy hi i am

13:53 and i'm interested in cognitive neuroscience um psychology and biological sciences and i've applied for arts and trying to [Applause] hello yes hello hi uh i'm ananya i'm from chennai i've applied for the arts and sciences course and i'm interested in biology and botany in specific oh thank you

14:39 you're welcome hello everyone i'm kaushik uh i'm from chennai i update for computing and data science i i am interested in sketching uh cubing which is solving ruby's cubes as well as programming thank you thank you and welcome kashak anyone else i see a few others hi everyone i'm jagal i'm from chennai and i'm interested in artificial intelligence and machine learning and yeah and i also like training okay thank you i think mahalakshmi wanted to go hi mahalakshmi mahalakshmi i'm from

15:26 chennai over actually and uh i'm interested in the literature and i prayed for the arts and arts arts athens college okay thank you mahalakshmi uh anyone else i see quite a few others lakshmi sahithi lakshmi do you want to introduce yourself okay hi i'm lalit aditya i applied for artificial intelligence and data science in the

16:12 school of computing and data science my interests are on economics and robotics okay thank you and welcome thank you ah anyone else who who's yet to introduce themselves hi everyone i'm coming phil i'm from i've applied for the school of arts and science and my interest is basically into physics thank you kevin and welcome to the session and the university anyone else uh good evening sir good evening uh my name is abhinav

16:58 shankar kalasam i am from chennai uh i am interested in uh artificial uh artificial intelligence and data science from the school of uh computing and computing and data science and i very much enjoy programming overall so that's really nice now thank you and welcome i uh guess we are done with the round of introduction or is anyone else there who's yet to introduce themselves okay so look i think the course of computing and data science and my huge interests are

17:44 sketching and i really love to play table tennis okay where are you from sauna before i'm from wildcat why isn't it okay thank you thank you and welcome i also see you with what's mother oh as well uh thank you and uh welcome everybody uh just introduce myself again in case you missed prophet jamshed said i am siddharth i'm an assistant professor in

18:30 philosophy here at uh sar university and today i want to be talking about uh a topic or an idea that is both something quite common i mean something you've all encountered as well as something that is sort of central to the vision at sci university itself it is about this idea of academic disciplines and what is this new idea perhaps it's new to some of you the idea of interdisciplinarity i'm sure you've all come across academic disciplines and you've all had academic subjects right from class one i mean maybe the subjects have all uh changed over time but you i mean are learning and the knowledge that we've all been gaining has been structured

19:17 around these concepts of disciplines or subjects right um so today i want to maybe uh discuss a little bit about what exactly makes a discipline what is a discipline and what is the idea of disciplinarity which seems to be the cornerstone around which our learning and knowledge human knowledge itself and education seems to be sort of centered and why do we need this relatively newer idea of interdisciplinarity so let me just i have a small presentation let me share my screen okay i hope you can all see the slideshow yes

20:02 okay that's nice all right so this presentation will have me talking for a while and in between i would urge you all to participate as well there are some moments where i i'll be asking you all for your responses and your thoughts but otherwise please feel free to sort of stop me and ask me if you want any clarification or any anything that comes to your mind all right so the topic today is for about the idea of disciplines and interdisciplinarity so let me begin with the question for you all i mean as we all know we have all studied various disciplines presumably during our schools and

20:48 i'm sure you all thought about a bit about i mean how are these disciplines different from each other so can you each of you quickly maybe uh share what are some of the disciplines you've studied and how do they differ from each other whatever comes to your mind just to sort of get the ball rolling and get you all thinking about a few things what are some of the disciplines you've studied and how are these disciplines different from each other in your sort of impressionistic understanding go on anybody for one there's social discipline and it means uh discipline towards

21:33 society and uh okay who's this sorry mahalakshmi okay yes mahalakshmi says there are social disciplines right yes okay and then i assume perhaps you mean the social sciences i was talking about doing services to the society okay social service in some sense okay so social service as an academic discipline okay and what are some of the other disciplines that you've studied um academics or academic discipline like can you give me some examples um studying regularly for one no no okay uh here by disciplines of

22:20 course that is the discipline of our own life i mean having a particular routine and things but we also studied academic discipline in the sense that okay there is this discipline of humanities that is the human discipline of the sciences right yes those kind of disciplines i am asking about in terms of what are some of the disciplines that you have studied [Music] okay like for example uh you all i'm sure you all looked up the departments okay what are some of the subjects that you've all studied can you all share that with me [Music] so i had taken science discipline in 11th and 12th okay what are some of the subjects okay

23:06 so you studied physics chemistry and maths uh what are some of the other subjects you've studied in your schooling instinct we had all the subjects compulsory social sciences okay social science includes history okay civil civic civics and political science geography okay uh can you quickly share what in your opinion sort of is the difference between say biology and social science like history i mean biology is a discipline and history is a discipline right you have two different disciplines you've studied it at different times but what as for your understanding is the difference between these two disciplines so biology is about the human

23:53 and animal anatomy it's about a body whereas history is about the nation and about other nations how did we gain independence okay what our culture was um okay so broadly you're saying biology deals with living entities and their bodies such as human bodies and animal bodies whereas history is a discipline that deals with say something different nation and culture thank you that's a very interesting thought rishita anyone else maybe we will have a couple of other responses anyone else wants to say what what are some of the subjects or disciplines that you have studied go on i'm sure you all studied at least 10 different subjects through

24:39 your schooling right anyone else wants to share i mean whatever thought comes to your mind because it's only when you share your thoughts that you start thinking further go on anyone else wants to share something about what are some of them hello subjects but i think we can consider them as a discipline like business related accounting okay subjects okay yeah okay but you studied science subjects right yeah yeah okay commerce and science are different disciplines and what do you think is the difference between them

25:26 um i think commerce deals with the business aspect of our society and science in general uh you know uh understands the nature of our world with the nature of the world okay nature of the universe of the universe okay and but biological sciences deal with human bodies so human bodies are part of this universe that you are talking about right yeah okay thank you so kaushik draws a different kind of distinction between commerce and sciences which are probably two popular streams that we have to choose in 11th and 12th and he says they differ in what the objects of their study commerce studies deals with business but science deals with the nature of the universe and

26:12 that's what according to kaushik uh is makes these disciplines different okay we'll have one last response from anyone who wants to talk about maybe slightly different disciplines or anything that any of the disciplines that you've studied um i don't know if languages could be considered as a discipline as well okay because we have been studying languages ever since we were in primary school and we had to choose a second language and third language and um i think what i think that language is something that is really essential since it shows how communica how people used to like how the evolve how languages have evolved and

26:58 the grammar and all of that i think it's really important um and but i'm not really sure if that would fit into the aspect of uh being called a discipline okay that's fine yeah but we've all studied language perhaps english and a second language in the third language or sometimes even a fourth language yes can you maybe uh think a little bit about how was the study of language in in school how was it different from studying some other discipline or a different subject you could take the example of any other subject language i think it it made us get connected to the human aspect in society uh to how to human emotions and to our behavior and to how we think

27:44 so i think um languages is something that is that made us analyze how humans have conducted themselves all these years and also about how um we have communicated about other disciplines as well because it is definitely essential to communicate about other disciplines okay but you feel perhaps some of the other subjects let's say the sciences or even the social sciences don't deal as much with something like emotions okay exactly i think that the other disciplines deal more with the technical aspect about of society and everything in the world okay and uh this is more towards this leans more towards humans and our behavior and the way we um okay

28:30 interact with each other okay okay uh thank you that's i think that's quite an interesting thought uh so some of these responses that we've got here we see largely uh many of you seem to think that the disciplines say biology versus history or commerce versus science or language versus any of the other subjects seem to differ largely in the objects of their study in terms of what they study the thing that they study for example rishika said biology studies living bodies whereas history doesn't study living things at least it studies nations and cultures uh similarly uh said language studies human beings but studies of particular attempts to focus on a particular aspect of human lives say

29:15 their emotions and behavior whereas perhaps some other subject like biology might not talk much about emotions it might talk more about the bodily functions it might talk about digestion it might talk about reproduction it may talk about respiration and things like that but perhaps does not really focus on human emotions and behavior i think what you've all said is partly true in some sense the disciplines differ in terms of what they seek to study but it's a little more complex than that at this juncture i'd like to sort of introduce two slightly heavy terms

30:01 ontology and epistemology i don't know if you have to come across these terms no okay i mean they are fairly technical in some sense they are terms in the theory of knowledge so a good way to understand disciplines is of course they differ in what the object of their study but in some sense many of them seek to study the same objects for example when you differ i mean when you draw the distinction say between biology and history both biology and history deal with living beings for example human beings right biology studies human beings as i mean and the same way history also studies

30:47 human beings and their actions but perhaps at a different scale right it talks about groups of human beings but at times it talks about individual human beings as well it talks about a particular ruler it talks about a particular politician it talks about a particular prominent personality historical figure right so in some sense it is not completely true that they talk about different objects in some sense biology and history both talk about human beings but it is different aspects of the human reality that both of them talk about right so while talking about the same human being or the same kinds of human beings they carve out different sort of domains

31:32 of human life or human life itself which they want to talk about and this carving out of their domains they do by creating certain concepts and in some sense the word ontology is sort of a technical term to define these concepts or what or the kind of entities they carve out from the reality and which they seek to study for example biology identifies certain processes and calls them biological processes right and then says there is this biological process of digestion that is this biological process respiration and so on and then it says biology is the study of these processes this is a rough sort of a definition on the other hand

32:19 history it studies the same human beings but it does not carve out these processes such as digestion and respiration rather it says i want to understand how did this human being act in such and such political environment right this perhaps this ruler invaded this country and there was this warfare or there was this political action of sacred india movement and things like that so it says i am going to study human beings and their actions but not in terms of biological processes but i am creating a different kind of category called say there was this political entities called nations or there were these political entities called kingdoms and they are using these concepts so in

33:04 some sense each discipline creates its ontology or it creates its concepts which it uses to describe the world and then they say that this discipline or history of biology or physics is the study of the world using these concepts or and that is how they also sort of delineate which aspect of the world that they are going to study so the first sort of uh distinction between different disciplines is in terms of the concepts they use to carve the world into different sort of entities and then study those entities and the second aspect in which disciplines differ is how do they gain knowledge about these

33:51 aspects of reality that they carve out for example biology says there are these processes biological processes their autology consists of biological processes and then they say we are going to know more about these processes using certain methods to gain knowledge for example a biologist might say i am going to conduct some experiments in the lab or field biologists might say i am going to go out into the wild and perhaps study animals and how they behave and things and how that affects their biological processes i'm just giving broad examples on the other hand a historian might say i gain knowledge not by going out to the field because of course a historian cannot travel back in time nor can a

34:36 historian conduct experiments in a lab right so historian says my methods of gaining knowledge are different i might go and study historical records in an archive or a library or a historian might rely on archaeological evidence or historians might study books that were written hundreds of years ago to understand what were happening in those particular times so in some sense the two disciplines also differ in terms of the method they use to gain knowledge or to make certain claims so to sort of quickly summarize a discipline at least in an abstract understanding of discipline differ in terms of the concepts they use

35:22 to sort of describe the world and the methods they use to gain knowledge about the world so when we go back and look at some of your responses itself say for example uh when kaushik said commerce deals with business whereas science deals with the nature of the universe we can see that while this is partly true it might not be completely true i mean a first objection might be to say businesses are also part of the same universe that we live with right but then so why doesn't science deal with businesses i mean business is also part of the same universe that human beings inhabit so why you say the bodily movements of human beings the object of study of science but not

36:09 say the commercial dealings of human beings right that's because i mean broadly science has carved out its domain of study in terms of the concepts it studies whereas a different subject such as economics or economics might has carved out its different domain of study using the concepts and they both differ in terms of the methods they use to study what they seek to study so broadly this is a first level understanding of what makes a discipline that is each discipline is broadly defined by the concepts it uses its ontology and its epistemology the method use uses to gain knowledge this of course is only a sort of a theoretical and abstract definition of discipline in reality

36:55 this definition might not fully capture the distinctions between a discipline right what we need to understand are disciplines or science as a discipline of social sciences as a discipline or say philosophy as a discipline or as a subject are all socially created let me quickly unpack what i mean here by socially created say for example uh can any of you say if you want to understand more about say history what would you do can anybody quickly respond what would you if you want to know more about history go to historical library

37:42 okay you would go to a library and what would you do in the library [Music] uh they want to do but you real okay you see a book written by a famous uh historian for example and then you want to go meet that historian what would you do then i'll give an email okay first i'm gonna [Music]

38:31 appointments yeah yeah that of course is the practical aspect but what we would do is we would go to a university and visit the history department perhaps the historian is and go meet them right so in some sense what we see already is this discipline of history apart from being of having an abstract ontology and methodology and things this discipline of history is developed in a social location called the department of a university and is communicated through the world right through social means through writing books which are kept in libraries what i'm saying is sort of very very intuitive and obvious in the sense that okay different disciplines are housed in different departments

39:16 in a university and different disciplines have different ways in which they communicate what their knowledge is for example a historian might write a book right which is kept in the history section whereas a scientist might write a paper or a book which is kept perhaps in the science the physics section or the chemistry section or the biology section so what this shows is while there are these abstract distinctions these distinctions in the real world play out in due to the different social setting in which these disciplines are housed right and this we can see uh of course the most obvious is that each different there are different departments for each of these disciplines practically and somebody could just define science and

40:02 history as said that whatever is being done in the history departments is what history is you might talk about all these abstract distinctions between history and say geography of history and political science but practically one can say i define history as what is being done in these ten departments in these hist universities or somebody might say physics is only what is being done in these 10 departments or 20 or 100 departments so that is in some sense a social definition of a discipline right but again that's just another perspective of looking at the discipline this does not exhaust the definition of a discipline and but this highlights how a discipline such as physics or history is a social institution and again by

40:49 social institution i mean that whatever their abstract definitions might be the in reality they work in a social setting a social setting such as a department in a university right apart from departments there are also these various learned societies for example science in india has this organization called insa or indian national science academy which consists of scientists and which runs journals journals like academic magazines where when a scientist does some research they write a paper they write an academic article which gets published in this journal right so there are these organizations which runs journals and only if you are able to publish in this journal are you

41:36 called a scientist right so whatever on the other hand can also say whatever gets published in these science journals is what is accepted as science right you could write an uh you might think that you made a breakthrough discovery and you might write a brilliant article but practically if none of these journals sort of accept what uh you want to say that will not be recognized as science similarly every other discipline has its own learned society for example there's the indian council for historical research there is the indian council for medical research which is in the news which is now saying what is the right kind of medicine and it gives its opinion and advises governments on which is the right kind of treatment and

42:22 everything right so what is the science behind treatment of code 19. now icmr defines that for india and similarly there are various other organizations in different countries which defines the treatment that has to be given for various illnesses in different countries so in some sense it is these organizations learned societies and university departments which regulate and practically define what sciences what physics is what history is what philosophy is what literature is so we see that there is already on the one hand we have this abstract definition based on ontology and epistemology on the other hand you have this social understanding of a discipline a discipline is defined by

43:08 okay what sciences is defined broadly practically by indian national science academy or similarly as the royal society in uk which was a very influential society in the history of science if you see and similarly what is history i studied in india is regulated by the indian council of historical research they publish books and they have the bigger memberships for various people and people become historians when they are members of indian council of historical research and another way in which the discipline is regulated in universities is of course by giving degrees now if you want to learn science what do you do you go and study bsc in a university so whatever you learn in a bsc in a university then becomes scientific knowledge right so this is

43:54 the social structure that defines what a discipline is so we can see that there are two different uh sort of ways of looking at disciplines itself one is in the abstract and once this is understanding the social uh structure of what a discipline is and broadly these are some of the disciplines i mean there are these are again broad classifications of natural sciences which consists of physics chemistry and biology and social sciences which consists of economic sociology anthropology political science psychology and humanities which consists of art literature philosophy and history again there are some disagreements and some might say psychology is part of humanities or even sciences or

44:40 again we don't know where to place mathematics because it's sort of traverses that is used across various disciplines and some might say it's part of the natural sciences and things like that now at this juncture are there any questions or anything any thoughts that you would like to share try it out yeah go on so on so uh what exactly is anthropology about i mean okay anthropology broadly defined is the study of human beings and it's not the study of human bodies or things like that it is part of study of human culture it's a study of human societies and again it varies country to country for example in india anthropology is largely understood as social anthropology that is how how do human

45:26 societies form what is human culture for example in india then it goes on to study what are very various communities in india various tribes in india or how do various i mean for example there is urban anthropology which studies how do human beings settle in the form of cities and things like that which is slightly what is slightly different is perhaps in the u.s a discipline like anthropology might also include something like uh primatology right the study of uh primates which are primates are i mean like different kinds of monkeys and things like that and their society is also part of sometimes part of anthropology and similarly the study of historical settlements of human beings

46:13 and say there were other i mean say there was this neanderthal man and things like that though all those also comes under the study of anthropology in the us so this discipline again this is a good example to show how a discipline itself is defined very differently in different countries because of the way that discipline has developed and because of these organizations such as ichr or icmr which regulate what the discipline itself is but broadly to answer your question anthropology is the study of human being and human societies thank you sir uh basically in u.s it it's basically more broader idea of anthropology oh it's like different broader there some topics which are focused more on

46:59 i mean which are included in anthropology which are not so much focused on in india and it might the situation might be different in europe and other countries and that was just one example that i took okay but broadly anthropologists consider the study of human society and how humans live and human culture and things like that uh any other thoughts or questions that any of you might have i'm sure you all have something okay i think some of you have sort of there is a bit of ambiguity on the use

47:46 of the term discipline i think the most common way in which we have all understood discipline is okay these are the rules that you have to follow punctuality manners and things like that right i'm of course using it in a slightly different sense here discipline to mean academic disciplines but if you actually see there is a lot of similarity between the two usages what we normally think of discipline in our every life is what i mean following these rules and norms of good conduct waking up early in the morning being polite and things like that in some sense what they try to do in academic disciplines is also not very different each discipline is trying to bring in certain rules in which people think and gain knowledge

48:31 right so it is disciplining your mind to gain knowledge in a particular way so academic disciplines is also kind of this other kind of discipline so yeah so when somebody when when in our everyday life when we say he is a very disciplined boy we mean to say that he follows certain rules and norms and similarly when you say he's from the academic discipline of say economics what we mean to say is that they gain knowledge in a particular disciplined sort of a way and that particular way is what we describe as economics so if you see that i mean the terminology itself that's how it emerged okay before i proceed any quick questions or any thoughts that people want to share feel free i mean

49:17 uh any question that you have or any thoughts or anything you disagree with what i said or what from your experience is different anything at all okay let's then move on okay so broadly we see that these disciplines as social institutions okay before i move on i see that there is a question from he asks me these institutions and societies what methods they follow in bringing the exact truth about the articles of papers published

50:04 uh thank you uh lalit i think that's a very very sharp question and of course in one sense if you think about what how can people these articles scientists write research articles how can the people who publish these articles how can they ascertain the exact truth the thing is you cannot ascertain the exact truth but today what is considered the gold standard in ascertaining if at least this paper is good enough to be published or is at least partly true or partly correct is this process called peer review right and the peer review is i mean is nothing but actually that if if somebody wants to publish an article and they send it what happens is the editor of the journal sends it out to two or three other

50:50 different people working in the same field for example a physicist writes a paper the editor says okay who are the other physicists in the world who are working on the same area and then they say ask this they send this papers to those other physicists and those other physicists read it and say okay this is a really good paper this seems to be correct let us publish this or somebody might say no i think what this person is saying is wrong for the following reasons either their experiment is not correct or their reasoning is not correct or there is some other error so when these other experts who they send out the papers to they recommend for publication then they publish such articles and the hope is that while going through this review process

51:36 the claims that are made are correct or accurate as far as possible of course such truth cannot be ascertained exactly and that is exactly why scientific theories keep getting revised right i mean hardly has any scientific theory lasted for even a few decades without uh being challenged or at least partly being replaced by a better or more accurate theory and that's how knowledge all knowledge itself develops but to quickly sort of answer your question there is this process called a peer review where whenever anybody wants to write they say they have a new finding they write an academic article which is then reviewed by other experts and say okay now this can be published or at least partly

52:21 accepted or things like that a very sort of condition statement is to say a person becomes an expert only when other experts get together and say that okay this person is an expert so similarly when they write an article it gets accepted only when others who have written articles already get together and say okay this article is fit to be published uh we saw that disciplines have different concepts or ontology and different methods of gaining knowledge called

53:08 epistemology and of course all of this is in a social institution such as the universities there are various other societies and things which mediate this knowledge but there have been some sort of limitations of this system and this is how largely we have been gaining knowledge at least for the last few hundred years and some of these disciplines have been changing and newer disciplines such as linguistics and all have come up but broadly that is how our knowledge processes are mediated that is how universities are organized and that your subjects that you study in school are organized along disciplines and things like that but there have been various limitations and shortcomings of

53:53 the system or the structure of organizing our knowledge itself historically if you see one of the sort of criticisms of disciplines is that while these disciplines are when science started gaining prominence in the 1600s and the 1700s and it was initially called natural philosophy and then later it became called science and then you started having scientists and then you have started having physics chemistry and biology and as you got more and more specialized and you had different disciplines such as history and things like that there was this discontent that oh knowledge is becoming extremely specialized people do no longer have this kind of a wide ranging and a

54:39 unified understanding of the world what is required is a general we need more general forms of knowledge where people don't study something very narrow like physics physicists carve out nature and say i want to study these small entities which i can't even see such as atoms or historians say i want to study only these things that happened say a few hundred years ago using these methods and then i mean focus is good but some people felt what we need is more general forms of knowledge while specialization might be good for a few people who focus only on those things and do high-end research what even at universities what we need for undergraduate position even post graduate is more a general understanding and a lot

55:25 of people especially at the beginning of the 20th century and before they started talking about started voicing their discontents about the specialization of what they felt was too much specialization but of course i think knowledges have become more and more specialized especially when more and more knowledge is sort of being produced it is impossible for anybody to keep track of what is happening in a particular discipline let alone across disciplines so but that's it's important to understand that that is one of the motivations for or the shortcomings of this idea of disciplines itself second is that is a more practical thing is that a lot of the problems that we face in life a lot of the questions that

56:11 come up in life in society or whatever do not actually fit into this traditional framework of disciplines right for example somebody might say that we see a lot of human suffering in the world that is poverty reliability and things like that and these are the problems how do we solve it an economist might say we'll have to do this or somebody else a sociologist might say we'll have to do something else or a scientist may give a different solution but these limitations of the economic method or the scientific method are the critic says something we impose right the problem itself doesn't say this is economic problem so they say that okay

56:56 these problems that we face in real life do not fit into these traditional disciplines so we might have to reorganize them or find some a new way of looking at these problems so that is another motivation for uh uh or motivation for people who appoint to shortcomings of this disciplinary framework and the third is draws from the social nature of knowledge itself and they say that the fact that different disciplines are housed in different departments in universities and the different disciplines have different learned societies uh which sort of regulates what can be done in the discipline or done at that subject what this tends to do this kind of

57:43 organization tends to do is that it makes every discipline into a silo a silo is sort of a closed uh it's sort of an enclosure so what they say is that this kind of organization of different disciplines and different departments makes each department insular there is no dialogue between these departments and over time some sociologists of science have argued that each department or each discipline develops its own culture develops its own values and develops its own language or technical terms that produce that they almost start becoming resembling a tribe so there are the tribes of physicists there are the tribes of sociologists there are the

58:28 tribes of philosophers there are the tribes of historians and then these tribes the fact that they are in different silos and they are not talking to each other makes them very in some sense closed and there is just a rivalry between these tribes and things like that so in some sense they say this the disciplinary nature when the organization of knowledge into disciplines and then into departments and things like that leads to a certain kind of tribalism which is of course not good for knowledge because when we want to understand the world we just want to understand what is happening as far as best as we can and if there are these different silos which are going to look at the world only in a very limited way that's perhaps not the best way to go about also say the critics of disciplinarity

59:17 how any of you sort of come across any news where prominent person from one a scientist is uh sort of criticizing a social scientist or a social scientist is criticizing a scientist or philosopher or things like that have you come across any prop any such prominent news items okay no but i'm sure some of you have heard of stephen hawking the physicist yaguwa wellington want to say something no no that's fine you can all speak out you need not send messages i mean you can send messages on the channel as well yes who was that that's kaushik

1:00:03 yes sir yeah okay have you all heard of stephen hawking can anybody tell me who he is or what is he famous for he was famous for um this theory on black holes okay who is this stephen hawking was a physicist he was known for his he worked on black holes and things like that largely astrophysics or cosmology uh he i'm sure he has written some famous popular science books uh i mean which talks about cutting edge theories in physics meant for a popular audience now any of you read his books or can any of you name a famous book office uh it's known as the brief history of time okay thank you who is that uh coming friday come in okay have you

1:00:50 read the book coven i remember you mentioning that yes i am reading it okay that's fine so of course uh stephen hawking is one of the most famous physicists that we've had in the last 50 years and things like that but and he's of course a brilliant physicist but i don't know i mean perhaps it's not very popular news but in the last few years sometimes he in some public forum proclaimed that the discipline of philosophy is dead and uh i'm sure you've ever heard of neil degrasse tyson he's also a famous uh physicist who's so also sort of a science popularizer and comes in documentaries and things and he also was in the news for discussing the

1:01:36 discipline of philosophy as useless so what do we see here in some sense uh it is at this sort of this sort of exemplifies partly the tribalism that disciplinarity might lead to there are these people physicists who are brilliant physicists and have done part breaking work in the disciplines but they want to say okay this other discipline or the other way of understanding the world is perhaps not so useful and some people have sort of felt that this is a result of the tribalism that disciplinary i mean having different departments and each department developing its own culture or each discipline developing its own culture and there are these various in some sense a turf war between

1:02:22 disciplines between which is the best way to understand the world and things like that which leads to this kind of rivalry and sort of a tribal attitude or that so the critics say and through the 1980s and 90s there was this whole debate that was happening between scientists on the one hand and others who were studying science for example there were sociologists who were studying science or there was philosophers who are studying science so scientists themselves for example study nature broadly right but there are these other disciplines which study science science studies say physical objects or chemical entities or biological objects but there are this for example sociologists who study science and understand what are the social dynamics

1:03:09 which shape science as a discipline or there are philosophers who study philosophy of science that is to understand what is the philosophical underpinnings of science in the 80s and 90s there was this whole debate between scientists and people who study science the philosophers and sociologists of science as to what really the scientific method is or what can how do we define science and things like that this was broadly called as the science wars so again this can be seen as a symptom of the tribalism that they say that happens when you have different departments and disciplinary silos right i mean people have gone as far as calling it the science person it was a very uh sort of a debate that went on for

1:03:55 more than 10 years and there were lot of criticisms from the scientists telling no the sociologists don't understand what science itself is on the other hand sociologists and other people telling oh the scientists are not really reflecting upon what their own discipline is and things like that so it became sort of a cultural movement especially in europe and america and to some extent there was some part of it in india as well not as prominently as the u.s and europe but it was there in india as well but again this goes back to this point of disciplines working in silos and developing this kind of a tribal attitude over time it is not any one individual but the discipline as a whole which tends to happen also some people have argued

1:04:41 so these for these reasons for these limitations of this idea of disciplinary framework is why the idea of interdisciplinarity and has come up in some sense interdisciplinarity can be understood only in sort of a relative term it's only if you have the idea of disciplines that you have these limitations and then you can talk of this thing of interdisciplinarity right so broadly understood interdisciplinarity is an approach where you have a dialogue collaboration and interaction between disciplines now at what level can this happen this can happen at the abstract level of you can have dialogue and interaction

1:05:27 between the concepts of history and say concepts of biology or the methods of history and methods of biology or you can have the more practical thing of historians working with biologists i mean which is interaction and collaboration at the level of people right so interdisciplinarity is broadly is a term that is used for any such collaboration which happens at either at the level of ideas or at the level of people and again it's a sort of an umbrella term for that and of course it's it assumes that we largely have the disciplinary structure knowledge is already organized in terms of disciplines and it's only in relation to that that we have this idea of interdisciplinarity

1:06:13 some of the prominent interdisciplinary fields of study that have emerged in the last 30 40 years is now there is energy studies i mean earlier energy and energy systems was part of physics or electrical engineering and things but now energy studies and environmental studies have become extremely interdisciplinary areas where you have anthropologists who study for example how do human beings interact with energy sources and of course there are this engineers who have to talk about fuels and things like that but there are also economists who study about okay what is the economics of having these energy sources distributing these energy sources how is that interacting with other sectors such as farming and industry and

1:06:58 things like that another prominent field of interdisciplinary field of study science and technology studies i'm sure you've all come across area studies that's not so popular in india but especially in the u.s there are departments which focus on particular geographical areas for example there is study of african studies there are south asia studies or there is earlier there was a study of east asia which covers china and japan and things so they study particular areas and study it from various disciplines for example there is the i mean cultural studies of india or there is a study of history of india and then their study of how what is uh i mean

1:07:45 history of knowledge in terms of what was the ancient sciences and philosophy studied in india and things like that so these are some uh interdisciplinary areas and broadly the motivation for this were the limitations of disciplinarity that we just discussed again here at this point any queries or questions that any of you have so even you know even in high school we have different sections for different discipline for different disciplines like you have the humanities section you have the commerce section and you have the science section so we find tribalism even in high school okay can you share some interesting incidents of what resulted from this tribalism

1:08:30 humanity students they're like uh they they feel that science students are teachers favorites oh okay is that something that others have also faced me uh thomas students they copy the question paper they pass science don't oh who's that that's me oh uh uh anyone else i mean have this kind of science classes commerce and those kind of in my in my school uh science students conscious uh commerce students are easy going and they have the easy okay see we already see that tribalism in some sense begins even at the level of school and there is this huge misunderstanding of uh

1:09:16 okay what is the other kind of thing commerce is perhaps not as difficult as science and things like that and i hopefully as you go through your university program such misconceptions are cleared and we realize that each discipline or each subject is equally as hard or as easy or as any other subject right and what you also hopefully will understand is the social i mean all these disciplines are developed in a particular social setting right for example now there is as you also said some people said oh commerce is easy going whereas science is hard or things like that just a common misconception that a lot of people have right but how did that come to be so i

1:10:02 mean that's why perhaps to understand the nature of knowledge itself you need to understand what are the social reasons behind such a conception developing over decades offer right and that this has been one of the criticisms of disciplinarity is often when you have this different disciplines which lead to a certain kind of tribalism what also comes along with it is a certain hierarchy either in terms of hierarchy or which is a better subject harder subject and things like that or a discipline of oak this sub this subject is more fundamental in some sense i mean there is this thing of physics being the fundamental science in some sense being prior to every other discipline right i'm not saying that is right or wrong at

1:10:47 this moment but i'm saying such a development might happen or for example the notion that every discipline has to aspire to become like physics like the physics is the model sort of uh discipline which you will have to aspire for but is that right or not it's something that will have to be discussed and perhaps we'll discuss it another day but we can already see that this kind of tribalism occurs even in schools and it becomes much more entrenched and much more rigid as we go into higher education and those are some of the criticisms of the idea of disciplinarity and organizing uh subjects along disciplines sir i had a physics teacher

1:11:33 who once was telling the class that we all said rishita this side okay so once the physics teacher tells us that you always study about the physical world you never study about a chemical world or a mathematical world so physics is the most important subject he himself was telling all the students okay see of course that's a common sort of uh understanding uh that there is in some sense a certain theories and physics are more fundamental but that itself is slightly something that has to be understood a lot more and even if physics i mean some of the debates that go on as even so what if physics is more fundamental does it mean certain theories in biology

1:12:20 can be understood in certain in terms of certain theories and physics and so on so those are all extremely complex debates and the part of philosophy of science goes into all of this like what is the place of physics and what is the place of biology are they two in some sense autonomous sciences or things like that but i think this shows the larger sort of uh the idea that uh some one of the negative negative outcomes of having this disciplinary silo seems to be a certain kind of tribalism and a certain hierarchy that might develop over time okay all right but as we saw here that there are various interdisciplinary research areas which

1:13:07 have emerged in the last few decades and i want to maybe quickly talk a little bit more about this discipline called cognitive science have any of you heard of what cognitive science or have some idea of what cognitive science is only heard of it okay but not much too much of an idea of what it is no clue okay uh anyone else um yes sir i have heard a little more about it i think it is um a multi-disciplinary approach or towards psychology as well as chemistry so there is um it's the study of the nervous system and how it impacts human behavior

1:13:52 okay if i'm right i'm not really sure but no that's fine you can share what you heard so far okay thank you for that uh yes uh yeah anyone else have you heard of what cognitive sciences or come across this term it deals with how our brain works in different situations how our intelligence responds to different scenarios which we come across in daily life different chemical reactions which take place in our brains anyone else wants to share something else yeah yes it's in some way related to neuroscience and psychology okay so it's related to neuroscience and

1:14:39 psychology and of course it talks about how the brain works uh anyone else anything else that you've heard of cognitive science some of you expressed an interest in studying intelligence right perhaps not intelligence but you qualified it with some dash kind of intelligence what was that ai said it was artificial intelligence artificial intelligence okay anyone else i think quite a few especially the cdf students mentioned they were interested in artificial intelligence right so i mean cognitive sciences also in some sense a study of intelligence perhaps but the kind of intelligence that we at

1:15:24 least think that is more uh sort of apparent to us the kind of intelligence that we ourselves have human intelligence and animal intelligence uh but yeah cognitive science has emerged especially in the night since the 1950s and 60s as in so one of an interdisciplinary area of research and it draws from as many of you pointed out some of the disciplines that some of these disciplines for broadly defined cognitive science is the study of the human mind and human intelligence which that is how do we cognize the world to cognize the world is how do we gain knowledge about the world how do we understand the world and how do we act based on our knowledge of the world and this itself draws from all these disciplines such as psychology

1:16:12 which traditionally was considered as the study of the human mind but again psychology especially in the beginning of the 20th centuries in the early decades of the 1900s took a particular kind of method psychology said that we would only study human behavior we will not understand this behavior in terms of mental states rather we will study the behavior and using that behavior understand how the human being is going to behave further i am just simplifying it but that was a particular method that psychology followed so cognitive science grew from that it also importantly drew from computer science and this particular sub discipline of computer science

1:16:57 called artificial intelligence and there was this paradigm in studying the human mind they said okay the brain and the mind are related the same way that the computer's hardware and software are related for example they would say we have all these mental processes where okay i am thinking that 1 plus 1 is 2 or 5 plus 7 is 12 and things like that all these mental processes are the result of my brain which is the hardware running on some kind of software so what we really need to do to understand the mind is to understand broadly the program which on which our brain operates and on which our mental

1:17:43 operations occur right so again neuroscience which studies the brain itself and the structure of the brain and the various processes and the discipline of anthropology also informs cognitive sciences so for example a lot of the i mean one important understanding of the mind is that how we think is dependent on various social factors or the culture in which we have been brought up a culture in which we have been taught how to understand the world so how do we understand the social nature of how our mind itself works is broadly studied by anthropology and there was this discipline called linguistic which studies the development of human languages which again informs cognitive science and above all that is the discipline of

1:18:29 philosophy itself which asks very fundamental questions about what is the mind itself how do we represent the world how do we perceive the world and things like what is the relation of the mind and the brain and things like that so in the 50s and 60s this interdisciplinary area of cognitive science developed as in some sense a confluence of these various disciplines psychology neuroscience artificial intelligence linguistics philosophy and anthropology and it is one of the more thriving interdisciplinary areas of research and now while i don't know if there are any places in india which offer an undergrad program in cognitive science

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