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Ecological Thinking in Science and Public

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Organic Public Engagement

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Abstract

This chapter traces a broad history of ecological thinking, starting with the early proto-ecological natural scientists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After laying out some of these early conceptions of ecology, we then turn to the social sciences and humanities, exploring how ecological thinking influenced sociology, anthropology, psychology, ethnography, and philosophy. From this foundation, we suggest that ecological thinking can be used to revisit the concept of ecological validity, originally developed in the mid-twentieth century by psychologists Egon Brunswik and Kurt Lewin. This chapter concludes by explaining how ecological validity and ecological thinking in general provide public engagement with science both concrete guidelines for better research and heuristics for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of competing engagement methods.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For an example of this research, see Beach, Steven R.H., Gene H. Brody, Alexandre A. Todorov, Tracy D. Gunter, and Robert A. Philibert, “Methylation at SLC6A4 is linked to Family History of Child Abuse: An Examination of the Iowa Adoptee Sample,” American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B: Neuropsychiatric Genetics 153, no. 2 (2010), 710.

  2. 2.

    Lewin, Kurt, “Defining the ‘Field at a Given Time’,” Psychological Review 50, no. 3 (1943), 306 (292–310). It’s not entirely clear, but it seems that Lewin is referencing “life world” (recall Garfinkel was influenced by Schütz use of lebenswelt), so we should probably clarify that this term originates with Edmund Husserl. Husserl first used the word in his Crisis of the European Sciences published partially in 1936, and partially later in 1954. Husserl’s use of the term lebenswelt is used to describe how European science had taken on a perspective grounded solely in purely “objective” or mathematical law. As Husserl defines it, the lebenswelt is both pre-behavioral and pre-theoretical and therefore resistant to mathematical representation—a kernel of reality before action and before conceptualization. Brunswik tentatively agrees with this presupposition, but Lewin thinks that this zone is methodologically “closeable.”

  3. 3.

    See E.J. Gibson’s 1960 “The ‘visual cliff’,” her most famous experiment where she demonstrated that many (but not all) animals have an innate ability to perceive depth.

  4. 4.

    See Darrin Hicks, “The Promise(s) of Deliberative Democracy,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5, no. 2 (2002), 223–260, and Darrin Durant, “Models of Democracy in Social Studies of Science,” Social Studies of Science 41 (2011), 691–714.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, USA

    Adam S. Lerner & Pat J. Gehrke

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  1. Adam S. Lerner
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Lerner, A.S., Gehrke, P.J. (2018). Ecological Thinking in Science and Public. In: Organic Public Engagement. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64397-7_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64397-7_2

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