Megan Stacey

Western’s Rotman Institute of Philosophy recently hosted the Summit on Interdisciplinarity. Presented in partnership with the Centre for Humanities Engaging Science and Society at Durham University in the United Kingdom, the event brought together international scholars to explore what it means to create, support and excel in interdisciplinary research. Interdisciplinarity — drawing on two or more academic, scientific or artistic disciplines to address problems no single field can solve alone — has been the foundation of the Rotman Institute since its inception in 2008, following a generous donation from the late philanthropist and former Western chancellor Joseph Rotman. Western News asked Rotman Institute director Dan Lizotte, a professor in the departments of computer science, and epidemiology and biostatistics, to explain how philosophers use interdisciplinary research to tackle some of society’s biggest challenges.

Western News: How do you explain the role of philosophy in today’s world?

Dan Lizotte (DL): To me, the role of philosophy today is to make space for thinking carefully and questioning our assumptions about how we make sense of the world and how we make sense of our values. Philosophy helps us reason through our knowledge and values to make decisions — when we face a question that doesn’t have a single “right” answer, we still don’t give up on careful thinking. And the world needs careful thinking now more than ever.  

What do you think people misunderstand about the study of philosophy?

DL: I should say that I’m not trained as a philosopher. I came to philosophy when I joined a Rotman Institute reading group on AI and Ethics in fall of 2020. I always get a little sad when I hear people describe an idea as “just philosophical” to mean it doesn’t have a connection to the world around us — thinking about the world and trying to understand it is exactly what philosophers do. The world is a big place, so some philosophy can be very specialized and hard for non-experts like me to understand, just like physics or sociology or whatever other discipline you might think of — but the philosophers I work with all care deeply about trying to better understand ourselves and the world we live in.  

Tell us more about the work at the Rotman Institute. What do members and their collaborators do?

DL: So many things! Our members work on what we call “deep” problems that require a fundamental shift in thinking, like the shift from Newton’s laws of motion to Einstein’s theory of relativity. They also work on “wicked” problems, which can’t be solved without combining knowledge and values from many different viewpoints, like how to adapt to climate change. Both of these challenges require the kind of careful thinking that philosophers are trained to do, and they require interaction among experts from many different fields. We have projects on topics ranging from education to history to physics to AI and those teams have members from all across Western’s campus and beyond.  

Tell us how you define interdisciplinarity. Why is it so important?

DL: The word “interdisciplinary” gets applied to many different kinds of things — a research institute, an individual scholar, a project. There are lots of definitions, I think of it as a way of having ideas from different disciplines all informing each other to understand a phenomenon or solve a problem. It’s like a conversation rather than a bunch of people all talking at once. This sharing of ideas is necessary to make progress on the deep and wicked problems we work on at Rotman.  

What results came out of the inaugural Summit on Interdisciplinarity?

DL: For me, the biggest result is a new international community of interdisciplinary institutes and scholars who are excited to be connected. We’re already making plans to re-convene in 2028. With so much knowledge and enthusiasm at the meeting, we’re planning several reports to take that collective wisdom and make it available to support conversations across disciplines and out into the wider world. We’re also proposing programming to allow students and faculty to visit other institutes to learn and share so we can strengthen these new connections.

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How can philosophy help to tackle our biggest problems?

DL: The careful thinking I mentioned earlier is the cornerstone. Trying to solve any of our biggest problems — poverty, climate change — comes with a deeply ingrained collection of assumptions about how the world is and what the possibilities for action are. Recognizing assumptions and seeing the potential for new possibilities is extremely challenging work. Philosophers of science especially study how we as humans can do this, how it has happened in the past and how we can help each other make bold intellectual shifts to solve deep and wicked problems.  

How has the field changed in the last five, 10 or 15 years?

DL: Giving you the perspective of an outsider, I think two important ways it has changed are its increasing openness to new connections with other disciplines and research traditions, including field philosophy, and its growing openness to new participants, like public philosophy. Both signal the discipline is becoming more expansive and inclusive. It’s a great time to engage with philosophy.  

What parts of philosophical research appeal to you?

DL: I’m trained as a computer scientist and statistician and have always been interested in mathematical models of decision making, like reinforcement learning. My own work has looked at modelling decision making when there is more than one competing concern, such as prioritizing symptoms or side-effects when choosing a medication. In this example, making the decision requires knowledge about how the world works. What does each medication do to symptoms and side-effects? And what about the values of the decision maker? Am I willing to be very tired if a medication makes my migraine go away? The interplay between these considerations, which some philosophers think can’t be separated, is a useful example of how we think about decisions more generally. I’m just now learning through the philosophy literature about how I might think differently about my own research. At some point, I may have some ideas to give back.   Learn more about how Western is turning curiosity into solutions.