Brian Hepburn, Dept. of Philosophy, WSU.
My undergraduate degree is a BASc, or Bachelors of Arts and Sciences. At first I was disappointed in this weird combo-degree since I thought I was working towards two degrees: a BA in philosophy, and a BSc in physics. But at the University of Lethbridge, my undergraduate alma mater, if you complete the requirements for two degrees concurrently your are automatically given the BASc. There isn’t, any provision for granting two degrees in LAS at the same time.
So off I trundled to graduate school feeling disappointed in my degree.
I enrolled in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. It was during my graduate studies that I came to truly appreciate what Arts and Sciences truly mean. The guiding principle of that department is that, in order to truly understand science — its achievements and its justification — you need to think both philosophically and historically. You need to think about both together. These perspectives need to be integrated into a long, analytic, view. The History and Philosophy of Science is not part-time History of Science, and part-time Philosophy of Science. HPS is an integrated research perspective.
Which, I came to appreciate, is just like my BASc degree. It’s not Arts and Sciences. It’s not doing two things in parallel. I have a Bachelors degree in the discipline of Arts and Sciences. My research covers the role of formal languages in the sciences, and the connections between language, explanation, and problem-solving; and now, more and more, I think about the role of normative language, and normative reasoning, in engineering and other STEM fields.
A liberal arts background, in engineering and physics and philosophy, allows me to look at these topics from a humanities perspective, and from a science and engineering perspective. But a true LAS perspective is also different from each of those. The LAS perspective sees things in its own way.
Here’s why this matters.
Liberal Arts — philosophy in particular — is a focus on questions. It’s often said that the humanities are important because in the humanities there are no right answers. This is an attempt to make a strength of a weakness and a perceived difference from science and engineering. Science and engineering and other STEM fields are taken to have a corner on right answers. Given that view, claiming that you also need skills for when there are no right answers is an attempt to address a criticism, or make a feature out of a perceived bug.
This is wrong-headed in two ways. Firstly, there are actually very few “right” answers in any STEM field. No engineering solution is unique or perfect, for example. STEM fields are full of design choices, real world constraints and compromises and trade-offs. Where there are right answers it’s only because the questions are idealized and very precise. Precise answers only exist for precise questions.
Which points to the second way to be wrong-headed about the importance of the Liberal Arts: focusing on answers rather than questions. An education in Liberal Arts doesn’t teach you what to do when there are not right answers. LAS teaches you how to deal with imprecise questions. An education in Liberal Arts teaches you how to look at a question from many different perspectives; how to frame a question in different ways, and to see a whole range of precise question / right answer possibilities.
The really important questions are at the intersections of many kinds of expertise. The real challenges facing problem solvers of this generation and the ones to come are global and existential. Every person on the planet is a stakeholder. Since these grand challenges have many dimensions and require several perspectives, there will be many “right” answers. What looks possible, and what looks right will depend on which perspective you take, and on which values you emphasize. “Right” is not just a technical concept. “Right” is first and foremost normative.
At the intersections of expertise is also where innovation takes place. Established domains have “the” right answers to questions because they have fixed perspectives on those questions. Perspectives which straddle disciplinary boundaries are new perspectives. It’s only from there that one can look at a problem differently.
So the upshot is that not only is an LAS perspective an advantage in addressing the grand challenges which this and next generations must face. LAS perspectives are necessary. Without LAS graduates we cannot hope to find answers to global, existential questions which are effective, responsible, and just.
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