Sense and Scientific Sensibility

Catalog description

Scientific inquiry is generally considered an endeavor conducted primarily using one’s sense of vision: researchers peer into microscopes, gaze through telescopes, and stare at charts, graphs, diagrams, photographs, and glowing screens. But on what other senses do scientists rely? Might they also gather data using senses of hearing, smell, taste, and touch? Or, for that matter, the other perceptual systems that physiologists and cognitive scientists have posited in recent years — among them, our senses of balance, temperature, movement, pain, and time? Central questions addressed in this class include: why non-visual senses historically have been devalued in the sciences and what a sensuous and embodied approach to studying historical and contemporary scientific practice might be. This course offers a historical and anthropological perspective on the status of the senses as both objects of research and modes of investigation in various scientific fields. Students will learn how human senses and their mediations constitute and precipitate different modes of apprehending scientific objects. Each week is keyed to a different sense: after two introductory weeks on sensuous approaches to the social study of science, students will spend weeks three through seven examining the canonical five senses. The next unit delves into less acknowledged human senses, including pain, balance, and synaesthesia. The final unit first explores non-human senses, then appraises how extrasensory perception and psychedelic experiences may operate as both tools and objects of scientific investigation in, for example, quantum information sciences and biotech research. Throughout, students will examine critical questions regarding how the senses are culturally and historically constructed, technologically mediated, and evaluated as trustworthy, suspect, refined, base, or cultivated. Readings…