How is Who. Evidence as clues for action in participatory approaches.
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Sixth European Advanced School in the Philosophy of the Life Sciences (EASPLS), University of Bordeaux, France
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How is Who. Evidence as clues for action in participatory approaches.
- 1. How is Who Evidence as Clues for Action in Participatory Research Interventions Federica Russo and Guido Caniglia @federicarusso | @GuidoCaniglia
- 2. Preamble 2
- 3. Sustainability and public health challenges Complex and wicked real-world problems 3
- 4. The Covid-19 pandemic as a stress test • Our conceptual and methodological apparatus is insufficient to quickly respond to the needs of the health-environmental crisis world-wide • No breaking news, but the pandemic made the ‘old’ set up evidently obsolete: • Approaches that are too much reductionist in character • Biological causes of health and disease • Too much reliance on the idealisation of ‘one cause – one effect’ • Univariate causal model • Manipulationist assumptions • Not enough attention for the needs of specific groups • Blanket interventions (one size hoped to fit all) 4
- 5. What other epistemologies are needed? 5
- 6. “Diverse voices for equity, diversity, and inclusion in the scientific process and to increase quality and effectiveness of scientific knowledge”
- 7. Joint work in progress to develop fallible but useful epistemologies “Diverse voices for equity, diversity, and inclusion in the scientific process and to increase quality and effectiveness of scientific knowledge” Elements of useful but fallible epistemologies • Scientific knowledge: • Evidence as clues • Clues to describe and intervene on mixed mechanisms • Diverse voices: • Inter- and multi-disciplinarity as a way of increasing diversity of voices • The need of ‘complexity’ approach • Equity, diversity, inclusion • The value-promoting character of methods and of interventions 7
- 8. Outline of the talk • Participatory research • Understanding and acting upon mixed mechanisms • The HOW and the WHO component • Re-thinking knowledge and evidence through Haack’s theory • Clues and crosswords puzzles • A proposal for procedural criteria: evidence as clues for action • Procedural criteria and practical objectivity 8
- 9. Participation in in SuS and PH interventions 9
- 10. Sustainability and public health interventions 10
- 11. Participation and mixed mechanisms • Participatory research: • Generates evidence / knowledge of mixed mechanisms: • How and why of phenomena • Includes bio-social-political-cultural-demographic-historical-technical-… factors • Happens in mixed mechanisms • The research and the intervention take place is itself a mixed mechanism: • Types of actors, of institutions, of factors • Our understanding of mixed mechanisms: • They are not machine-like engineerd objects • They carry explanatory power • Thus we can go beyond mere description of phenomena • We are forced to specify activities and organisation • Thus we are encouraged to specify HOW and WHO 11
- 12. HOW: Action-orientation for design and implementation in context • Mixed mechanisms: • Their organisation and structure helps design participatory interventions • Context has crucial role: • As background conditions / supporting factors, • As an integral part of the reasoning leading to decisions and actions • Requires specification of WHO – see next 12
- 13. WHO: Actors-orientation through power and learning • List and map all agents involved: researchers and citizens/patients • Who are they? • Not passive, but active epistemic agents, part of the mixed mechanisms • What relations are in place among them? • Considerations about values, culture, experience, … • All these considerations are part of the participatory process to generate evidence and to design interventions 13
- 14. What concepts of knowledge and evidence do we need to support and enhance participatory interventions in sustainability science and public health research? 14
- 15. What knowledge and evidence are not Knowledge: ● We cannot reduce knowledge to a thing that is possessed, but need to look at knowledge generation and mobilization in complex individual and social learning processes. ● We cannot look at knowledge and action as separate, but as tightly entangled and mutually reinforcing. Evidence: ● We cannot reduce evidence to a place holder in the probabilistic relation of hypotheses, theories, data. ● We cannot restrict the meaning of evidence to the one generated by the ‘top methods’ of evidence hierarchies 15
- 16. Clues from Susan Haack 16
- 17. Mobilizing: Academic fields and disciplines, A plurality of voices, Ways of knowing from society From mechanisms to crossword puzzles 17
- 18. Mobilizing mixed mechanisms for agency: Enhance, Empower Using clues, like in crossword puzzles 18
- 19. The role of epistemic agents • Evidence is inherently actor- / agent-oriented • Who carry out the research / design interevention • Who participates / has a stake in the research / intervention • Who is a target of the research / intervention • By putting agent / actors at the center, we • Empower researchers, citiziens, patients • Enhance interdisciplinary exchanges • Acknowledge the fragility of evidence 19 “Warranted scientific claims are always warranted by somebody’s, or somebodies’, experience, and somebody’s or somebodies’; so a theory of warrant must begin with the personal and then move to the social before it can get to grips with the impersonal sense in which we speak of a well-warranted claim or ill-founded conjecture” (Haack 2001 253)
- 20. Procedural criteria of evidence as clues for action 20
- 21. The how • Foundherentist, as evidence generation combines the insights we use as clues (as foundations) and considerations about their coherence (or lack thereof) with other believes • Gradational, as clues do not provide certainty or solutions that are absolutely true, but provide different degrees of warrant • Quasi-holistic in the sense that, although evidence is clearly complex and ramifying, not everything is relevant to everything The Who • Social, as the generation and mobilization of evidence are embedded in interpersonal relationships as well as societal institutions and structures. • Personal, as it emerges from the commitments, interests, passions, ideological positions as well as from the struggles of actors • Experiential, as it can be traced back to perceptual and embodied cognitive processes of actors as epistemic agents 21
- 22. HOW - Founderentist • Evidence is founderentist: • A question about foundations, grounding and about coherence • Balance considerations: • Where do clues come from? • How do they relate to different worldviews and knowledge-systems? • Look at how those clues emerge from empirical research • How are clues generated? Through what methods and practices? How have they been assessed? … • Clues should be evaluated in relation to the other reasons and beliefs • Is there coherence? Partial overlap? Incompatibility? 22
- 23. WHO - Social • Evidence has an inherent social and interpersonal dimension • We learn from feminist and sociological analyses: • The social organization of the scientific community, power and gender relationships, peer review processes and reward systems, …, all have a bearing on the evidence produced in science • Evidence generation and use are permeable to socio-political factors and dynamics, which may obstacle or enhance empowerment • Power and interpersonal dynamics are internal to the generation and evaluation of evidence • They influence: what is acceptable evidence, what evidence is available, and what role evidence will play in driving policies or in re-directing decision-making processes 23
- 24. From procedural criteria to practical objectivity 24
- 25. How procedural criteria can generate clues for action • Procedural criteria: • can help direct inquiry towards the integration of • multiple insights (e.g., from different perspectives and standpoints) • multiple pieces of information (e.g., from multiple studies) • need to be balanced against each other, especially those related to the how and those related to the who • An exercise often disregarded in science-driven interventions: • Strict and rigid protocols do not work, hence insufficiency of evidence-based approaches • What is needed: • Participation and inclusion of different actors in (ideally) pluralistic, democratic, and reflexive mutual learning processes 25
- 26. Practical objectivity: beyond terchnical rationality and use • Evidence as clues for action: • Combines action- and actors-oriented procedural criteria • HOW and WHO are intertwined and influence one anothe other • Goes beyond technical and rationalistic tendencies (evidence-based policies and solutions in PH and SuS). • Moves away from the need of certainty and control • But what ensures quality and objectivity of decisions and interventions? • Evidence for action needs practical objectivity • There is no ‘best decision’ • The six criteria help generate clues that support decision-making and interventions: • feasible and appropriate, • inclusive and just 26 Practical objectivity is built on a balance of intervening factors and on an open dialogue among the parties” (Montuschi 2017, 61)
- 27. Summing up: HOW is WHO • Participatory approaches in SuS and PH pose a challenge to existing accounts of evidence • We need to give content to Evidence, in a way that supports research, the design of interventions, and the interventions themselves • We propose an account of ‘evidence for action’, inspired by Susan Haack’s account • Six procedural criterial help identifying clues for understanding and for action • In detailing the how, researchers need to detail the who • The ‘who’ conducting the research are part of the ‘how’ 27
- 29. Gradiational • Critically evaluate the criteria used to assess the strength of different kinds of clues as evidence for action • Evidence is not categorical, as responding to yes or no, but rather a matter of degree • think about how we determine what makes some clues, stronger or weaker, better or worse, than others, not in absolute terms, but depending on the problem addressed and on the relevant features of the mixed-mechanisms in which research takes place 29
- 30. Quasi-holism • As multiple perspectives and methods provide different clues for action within complex mixed mechanisms, develop integrative ways to deal with them • a middle ground between atomism (focusing on one claim or one situation at the time in isolation) and holism (where the full complexity of a situation is kept into consideration) • “The evidence relevant to a claim is usually complex and ramifying; but not everything is important to everything” (Haack 2014, 15). 30
- 31. Personal • Consider that personal motivations and interests as well as the positionality of different actors influence what evidence is generated or how existing evidence is used • Evidence justification is personal as it depends on the quality of the evidence that leads them to have a certain belief, to believe in something • This aspect of evidence resonates with scholarship that emphasizes the situatedness of any type of knowledge 31
- 32. Experiential • Look for clues not only in forms of explicit knowledge, but also in tacit, embedded and embodied forms of knowledge • Experiential evidence consists of perceptual events, which are often tacit and not expressed in propositional language • Individuals’ and groups’ experiences (of seeing, hearing, tasting, and remembering) play a role in influencing or even in determining what one believes to be true • Considering tacit and experience-based knowledge can improve our ability to generate evidence that is more appropriate to the complexity of the issues at hand, rather than pretending that not considering them makes research more objective 32
Notas do Editor
- Origin of the paper and collaboration: We come from different fields in phil sci, and tackling different problems. But found out the our respect areas and their problems (sustainability / public health) have much in common. Here, try to say what they have in common (= types of challenges, generation/use of knowledge), and how we think these problem should be addressed, especially in terms of offering a notion of evidence that can support interventions. V.Briefly put: in conceptualizing evidence for interventions in participatory SS and PH [How] need to put agency at the center of the discourse [WHO]
- SS e PH similarly deal with complex real-world challenges, not easy to frame or solve, also called ‘wicked’. In both cases they regard wide sectors of the population and affect the most vulnerable, such as those disadvantaged due to race, income, abilities or gender. In the case of sustainability, often it is towards adaptation and mitigation of these challenges that one can move. In the case of public health, often it is towards addressing health and socio-economic inequalities.
- In the difficult times of the Covid-19 pandemic, we observed the insufficiency of our conceptual and methodological apparatus to quickly respond to the needs of the health-environmental crisis world-wide
- Why Participatory research Increasingly practiced in SuS and PH. Especially in PH, this is on the rise (SuS has more established tradition) Clear need to base decision non just on expert, technical knowledge, but to co-create decisions with those concerned (citizens, indigenous communities, patients, …) Hallmarks of participatory research: Interdisciplinary: researchers often from different fields / areas / backgrounds Intersectoral: active engagement with local communities, public bodies, NGOs, private sector, …
- Here focus the discussion on SuS and PH, and especially on participatory research in these fields The similarity of the challenges also leads to recognize similarities in how those challenges can be addressed, that is the decision-making processes and interventions that can contribute to addressing them. Both in the case of sustainability challenges and in the case of public health challenges, it is important to understand HOW and why they might contribute to addressing the problem; WHO is involved at different stages of research, decisions and interventions (often require the collaboration of many societal actors, such as community representatives, people working in administration, scientists and more). These two dimensions of the HOW and of the WHO are inextricably interconnected. In the following: Show that these two dimensions (HOW, WHO) are even more interconnected in participatory research Present a framework to conceptualize, generate, use evidence in participatory contexts, and that explicitly considers HOW and WHO
- It is of utmost importance to understand who these agents are, how they relate to resarchers, decision-makers, and other actors in the process
- We raise the need to find epistemological frameworks that better relate knowledge and evidence to the peculiar nature of sustainability and public health interventions. We start to develop ways of understanding knowledge and evidence that better connect/combine considerations about the HOW (How and why does it work?) and about the WHO (Who are the actors pursue such interventions? Who is in charge?) as interconnected and interdependent. We ask: What knowledge and evidence do we need about sustainability and public health interventions to enhance “shared agency” and “collective action” ? Why is this question relevant? Because, a lot of the knowledge generated through research is not conducive to agency enhancement after all. Examples of cutting-edge research that is not actionable, agency-enhancing, and therefore not empowering: (1) Biomarkers in public health (2) Climate modeling and how to deal with and address the consequences of climate change. So, the question is relevant, and likely to impact not just the domain of action (how are public health and sustainability interventions conducted and evaluated), but also the domain of knowledge generation (what kind of research format and funding lines are used to generate what kind of knowledge and evidence). Philosophers will recognize that this is the long-standing question of the relation between knowledge and action.
- [here basically read the slide] Knowledge: We cannot reduce knowledge to a thing that is possessed, but need to look at knowledge generation and mobilization in complex individual and social learning processes. We cannot look at knowledge and action as separate, but as tightly entangled and mutually reinforcing. Evidence: We cannot reduce evidence to a place holder in the probabilistic relation of hypotheses, theories, data. We cannot restrict the meaning of evidence to the one generated by the ‘top methods’ of evidence hierarchies While a deep philosophical analysis shows differences between evidence and knowledge, for our purposes we can treat them as largely synonymous, and focus on evidence
- Why Susan Haack A philosopher largely neglected in Phil Sci circles Her contribution on evidence mainly in legal settings, but in our reading of her work, useful and applicable to scientific and policy settings more broadly We develop a framework for thinking about, and using, evidence largely based on Haack’s work, and that explicitly considers HOW -- WHO
- When we start working with mixed mechanisms and trying to understand how to use them, the work we do is similar to what goes into solving a crossword puzzle. Susan Haack’s work is useful to explain what this means. She uses the analogy of crosswords: the crossword represents the structure of relations of evidential support between different pieces. The crossword should also illustrate how different pieces of evidence offer mutual support to each other. The crossword idea serves to illustrate how we come to establish *more or less* certain beliefs, on the basis of evidence. It is to support empirical knowledge, acknowledging that it is fallible. It is to defend the work of science, because it is about understanding what support what. The form of justification that the crossword puzzle suggest is gradual: There are some foundational aspects (what the world is ‘really’ like) and also some coherentist aspects (how the pieces of evidence ‘hang on’ together). But we need to understand the the practice of science is more complex than just one or just the other. MORE ON THIS IN A MINUTE That is why we need to work with an analogy, that guides us through salient aspects of establishing evidence of mechanisms. Evidence of mechanisms works exactly in the way Haack describes. There are no mechanisms out there to be picked like cherries on a tree. Whatever we claim about mechanisms -- biological, social, bio-social -- is the result of multiple studies, done at multiple times and in multiple places, and at times with contradictory results. The whole point of mechanism is not to crack the code to open the opaque box and see exactly how things work, but to co-construct knowledge and understanding of these biological, social, and bio-social workings. With crosswords, we care of putting the right word in the appropriate place, following the clues we are provided with.
- Central to Haack’s theorisation of evidence is the notion of ‘clue’. To understand what a clue is, contrast with familiar notion of ‘triangulation’. Triangulation different from crossword Full triangulation means that different studies point to the same result (for instance, it is used in some lab practices or in some economics contexts) Instead, thinking in terms of clues crossword about interventions and decision both in sustainability and in public health implies understanding How different pieces of evidence belong to the same puzzle for instance how the biology of the virus interacts with and within social environments (epistemic) The implications for this knowledge for how certain sectors of the populations might deal with it (action-oriented) How different pieces of evidence provide clues which can direct towards further investigation for instance … why certain ethnic groups are more vulnerable (epistemic) And how to create conditions and opportunities so that those groups can be protected or protect themselves (action-oriented) These considerations, both the epistemic and the action-oriented ones, need to be co-developed if we want to understand how different pieces of evidence, placed in a given crossword puzzle, empower some actors to design, implement, policies, and other actors to receive and realize such policy interventions
- [Read slide and add:] HOW is WHO In detailing the how, researchers need to detail the who: epistemic element The ‘who’ conducting the research are part of the ‘how’: agency element We think that this way of looking at interventions, and at the agencies that are involved therein also calls for more collaborations between science and society too.