NSF Grant Aids Janack in Objectivity Study
Conventional wisdom tells us that our experience of the world is selective — that we only "see" what we have been taught to see. Is this true? And how does that relate to the way we experience the world? These are the issues Marianne Janack, the Sidney Wertimer Associate Professor of Philosophy, plans to examine while working on her project The Educability of Experience: Value, Theory and the Problem of Objectivity, funded with a $93,348 grant from the National Science Foundation.
The grant will enable Janack to complete a manuscript examining the various theories from philosophy, psychology and the social sciences that relate to realism in scientific theory and moral knowledge.
"Experience as a concept occupies a central place in the humanities and the sciences — it appears in discussions of identity politics, religious studies, political theory, history, and in discussions of empirical methods in the sciences," Janack says. "But underlying those discussions are some really difficult problems about the relationship between mind and world, and those problems are the ones I'm interested in addressing." She hopes her book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars, including philosophers, anthropologists, social scientists, cognitive scientists, psychologists and those interested in feminist theory.
"Since the concept of experience plays a vital role in a number of disciplinary debates, and since its fate is tied both to theories of mind and discussions of realism, it is my hope that the analyses I give will contribute to a variety of disciplinary debates," Janack says. "I hope, above all, to clarify the issues and to show both how theories of mind contribute to the problems about experience and how attending to work in psychology about the relationship between mind and world can contribute to a clarification of those problems."
NSF is not generally thought of as an organization that funds philosophers, but the foundation does indeed support the work of ethicists, philosophers, anthropologists and other social scientists who are interested in examining the relationships among science, technology, engineering and society. Under the Science, Technology and Society (STS) Program, NSF encourages scholars to apply who are interested in the historical, philosophical, social, cultural, policy and ethical questions that arise in connection with science and technology and their respective interactions with society.
Janack's award wasn't won easily. She first submitted the proposal to NSF in August 2007. While that proposal received good reviews, the program officer was unable to fund the project but encouraged her to resubmit the proposal. The STS program at NSF, like almost all of NSF's programs, had been receiving a record number of proposals while its budget remained essentially flat.
"Using the reviewer's comments, I made substantial revisions to the proposal, which ultimately made the project stronger," Janack says. "Additionally, I took advantage of the Grant Activity Fund, administered by the Dean's Office, which enabled me to lower my request from NSF." The Grants Activity Fund has recently been reconstituted by the Dean of Faculty's Office to provide more flexibility in how the fund is used to support grant-active faculty. She resubmitted the NSF proposal in February and received word in April that the proposal had been recommended for funding.
The National Science Foundation is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950. With an annual budget of about $5.92 billion, NSF is the primary funding source for approximately 20 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by America's colleges and universities, particularly in fields such as mathematics, computer science and the social sciences.
— By Amy Lindner
