To continue our series of interviews with OASIS 3 / SPE 12 invited speakers, today we're talking to Professor Joshua Shepherd, a philosopher who works on issues in action theory and the philosophy of psychology. He is starting a position as an ICREA Professor at the Univerisitat Autonoma de Barcelona.
OASIS: Tell us a little bit about yourself.
JS: I was trained in philosophy, but I'm interested in issues that span philosophy, psychology, neuroscience. I'm interested in how the mind works, and there are other disciplines involved in that. I'm interested in how best to collaborate across disciplines and sub-disciplines with people who have different skills and knowledge bases.
OASIS: How do you fit and not fit into the discipline you got your degree in?
JS: I got my degree in philosophy, and I fit into philosophy in some ways. So my mind tends to go to the most abstract place, the conceptual foundations of things, which seems to be a philosopher's impulse. When I work with more practically-minded people from the sciences, my questions can seem impractical or irrelevant or something like that. I am also interested in traditional philosophical questions, such as the nature of things, the fundamental categories that organize our thinking.
I don't fit into philosophy in lots of ways as well. I'm very happy to discover when a question can be answered empirically. I think we share questions across the sciences and there's still ways that philosophy can contribute once a question is entirely empirical.
I'm interested in broad-scale collaboration across different areas of science. That necessarily means you're often just one small part of a bigger team, so you have to figure out unique ways to contribute to these bigger projects. You may not be doing the heavy lifting in terms of making the argument, so you have to find ways to contribute. You may see this kind of collaboration in philosophy of science, but in the traditional philosophy I was trained in, you don't see that at all.
I'm also comfortable in posing questions, but less interested in staking out a view.
OASIS: Tell us how your career trajectory turned out in an unexpected way.
JS: I actually started out as a journalist - I majored in communications as an undergraduate. I wrote for a newspaper for a year out of college. For a time I didn't know that philosophy was a thing you could do as a career. So I really enjoyed philosophy and would read it on my own, but I wasn't aware of the academic system - I didn't grow up in an academic family.
When I decided to leave journalism and go to graduate school, I guess I wasn't really sure what was going to happen. Since then I've gotten lucky in a lot of ways, but also there have been things I never could have predicted. So I did a post-doc in England after I got my PhD in the US, and after England I took a tenure-track job in Canada, and then I got a grant from the ERC that brought me to Barcelona, and while I've been here, I've found my way to the job I'm starting here in May. I don't think I ever thought I'd live or work in any of those places.
OASIS: Tell us about an interdisciplinary event that you enjoyed because of its structure.
JS: The one I have in mind was very non-traditional. The last three years or so, I've had this fellowship with CIFAR, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. They have these meetings where they bring the fellows together across the programs that they fund. There was one in particular where they asked us to get together with other fellows and brainstorm about a problem that confronts humanity, and think of a way we might solve it, in terms of a research question and how we might approach it. In the room there were engineers, physicists, neuroscientists, and microbiologists, and that was kind of scary and it felt a little silly at times, but at the end of two days when we gave presentations on what we had done, there were a bunch of research projects that got generated. My experience with it says that we all have different skill sets and different intuitions about what makes a research project important or interesting, so part of what we had to do was to try to get on the same page, at least enough to move forward together, to make a project proposal. That's not really something you'd ever do so it made this event kind of unusual.
OASIS: Finish this joke: A linguist and a philosopher walked into a bar...
JS: ... the neuroscientist saw the bar coming and ducked.
OASIS: Do you work step by step or follow hunches (or neither, or both)? Explain?
JS: For me it's both. I think I follow hunches when I'm thinking about my research in big-picture terms, what's interesting, what approaches haven't been tried. You have to trust your instincts sometimes, because sometimes questions haven't been asked because they're not good questions. So if you move toward questions that have been missed by others, that's a little audacious.
When I'm actually making progress in terms of writing papers and books, it's really normal science - step by step. You know what the process is when you've done it before.
OASIS: Thanks for joining us for this interview. We look forward to your talk at OASIS 3 / SPE 12.
JS: Sure. Thanks.