FRIAS Lunch Lecture: Blind Spots and Human Factors in the Sciences
Just as in our private lives, blind spots exist in any discipline or field of research. Why is it that certain things or phenomena cannot be seen, or are hidden from our view, in our academic work? How (and when, where) do we lose certain aspects out of sight, or how do we blank them out? Is this because of selecctive attention, negligence, unawareness, biases, world-views, narrow focus, time pressure, specific ways of asking questions, or because of the blinkers we have put on?
Scientific knowledge production only succeeds with enormous efforts to formalize and explicate. This is the face of science we are all familiar with from public accounts, science communication and academic training. But other aspects also play a role: language ambiguity, associations and metaphors, personal preferences and interest, experience, implicit knowledge, intuition, creativity, flashes of inspiration and the suspicion that there is much we do not know – or perhaps can never know. Personal stories from researchers across all disciplines, along with science studies, suggest that those aspects constitute an integral and constructive part of scientific (academic) inquiry.
