E is for Epistemic Insight
Science has a vital role to play in the study and advancement of human flourishing.
Flourishing is experienced when people achieve growth that pushes their boundaries in a range of directions, for example, emotional, social, artistic, metaphysical directions.” “Flourishing occurs when people move from a point of inner knowing to taking right [outward] action effortlessly, swiftly and with ‘a natural flow’” (Senge et al., 2005, p.88–92; emphasis added)
Recognised areas of scientific investigation include questions about a neuroscientific basis of happiness and wellbeing. Science is also the basis of significant technological advancements in medicine and healthcare, alleviating pain and suffering and opening the door for many to a flourishing life.
Another important and underexplored link between science and human flourishing is the role of creativity in science. Creativity is assumed by some people to be an exclusive domain of the arts — but consider the creativity that goes into inventing a new way to test a hypothesis — or in imagining entities that are too fast, too tiny or too distant for our everyday senses to detect.
So, if there is a common misperception that creativity has little or no place in science, then what might be the causes of this misperception? One likely cause is the focus in schools given to science as a source of factual knowledge, combined with an overuse of what might be called ‘recipe investigations’. This pedagogy has the unintended consequence of teaching young people that theories in science are tested and proven by asking one question, performing one investigation and coming up with one agreed right answer.
The Epistemic Insight ‘knowledge about knowledge’ approach to learning (Billingsley, 2017), views creativity as vital for individual and societal flourishing. Curiosity, creativity and the urge to communicate are important aspects of human personhood and for us to flourish we need opportunities individually and collectively to express them. But for these expressions to be for the common good and our own good, they must be informed by knowledge and ‘joined-up thinking’. As we grow in our capacities to influence our own and each other’s futures, we need to be and to become wise and compassionate ‘epistemic agents’: By epistemic agent, we mean someone who has the confidence and understanding they need to ask questions, work with different types of knowledge and share or act on their solutions.
How then can and should creativity transform how we teach the next generation of scientists and scientifically engaged citizens? Firstly, astonishing moments of creativity can be sparked by bringing people from different disciplinary specialisms together to work on a shared problem or opportunity. For educators, this is a call to give our students spaces where disciplines can work together and reasons to discuss what makes each discipline distinctive and its strengths and limitations (Billingsley and Hazeldine, 2020).
Secondly creative minds are open to multiple sources of knowledge and have a range of individual experiences to draw on. This point was made in a speech that Steve Jobs gave to the Academy of Achievement in June 1982. Jobs was presenting his view on the signs of high intelligence and argues that these include being able to come up with solutions that other people are not seeing. The requirement for this highly intelligent thinking is:
You have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does, or else you’re going to make the same connections and you won’t be innovative … and so what you’ve got to do is get different experiences than the normal course of events.
Successful innovators, Jobs explained, are people who have a variety of experiences to draw upon and solve a problem in a unique way.
The development of epistemic insight is a key element of a multidisciplinary education that links science with multiple forms of knowledge and prepares future citizens who are ready to think critically and creatively about our shared journey towards flourishing. Describing the role of creativity in science leads us to the heart of ‘what makes science science’ — and encourages us to embrace the Big Question of what makes us each unique.
As we see, then, with this intimate link between science and creativity there are boundless opportunities for us to develop an understanding of how science is central to the broader notion of human flourishing. Science involves the emotional, social and metaphysical dimensions of the human person and provides opportunities for us to gain a deeper understanding of these, as well as being informed by them.
Written by the team at the LASAR Research Centre — LASAR carries out world-leading national and international research to investigate the relationships between science, religion and the wider humanities in education.
Further reading:
Billingsley, B. (2017) Teaching and learning about epistemic insight, School Science Review (365). pp. 59–64. ISSN 0036–6811.
Billingsley, B., & Hazeldine, L. (2020). Shattering the subject silos: learning about big questions and epistemic insights. Impact: Journal of the Chartered College of Teaching, (9).
Goodwin, M. and Sommervold, C.L. (2012) Creativity, Critical Thinking, and Communication: Strategies to Increase Students’ Skills. R&L Education.
Senge, P.M. et al. (2005) Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
Tay, L. and Pawelski, J.O. (2021) The Oxford Handbook of the Positive Humanities. Oxford University Press.
