Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the thirty-eighth installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I’m conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.
I acknowledge that the land on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional territory of the Haudensaunee and Anishnaabeg peoples, covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and directly adjacent to Haldiman Treaty territory. I offer these interviews with respect and in the spirit of reconciliation.
My guest today is Eric Winsberg. Eric is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida, where he has taught for seventeen years. Eric’s research focuses on philosophy of science, especially the role of models and simulations in science, the role of values in science, the social epistemology of science and, in particular, the philosophy of physics and cosmology, and the philosophy of climate science. When he’s not writing or teaching philosophy, you can often find Eric paddle-boarding, playing with his dog Chloë, lifting weights, or playing the harmonica. He lives in Tampa, Florida, with his partner Jessica Williams, who is also a philosopher.
Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Eric! Let’s begin this interview at the beginning. Although you were born in New York, you spent your childhood and early adolescence in Montréal, where your father, a physician, worked in a hospital, and your mother earned her Ph.D. in Psychometrics, subsequently teaching university. Tell our readers and listeners how your upbringing shaped your desire to study the sciences.
Growing up, I always thought that I would be a physicist. It was overdetermined that I would be interested in the sciences. Although my father was a physician, he never really projected much enthusiasm for what he did for a living. The people he held out as examples to emulate were not his colleagues, but rather the people who had designed and built the machines that he used in his practice—he was a very early adopter of the use of ultrasound in diagnostic radiology. My mother had pursued a Ph.D. in Physics at Columbia in the 1950s, when it was full of Nobel Prize winners and the like, and I think that she always had regrets about not finishing. She passed that ambition on to me fairly successfully.
My mother’s backstory is pretty interesting. As a kid, I had always assumed that she had dropped out of her career in physics because of her kids. But, in fact, she left her graduate program at Columbia several years before my older sister was born. I don’t think it was fashionable in those days to talk about how academic cultures were inhospitable to women. Or, at least, it wasn’t something my mother felt comfortable talking about to us. Nevertheless, I think it was lurking in her background and played a role in her wanting me to pursue the goal that she had abandoned. As I will explain, I struggled with reading and writing, but my mother frequently reinforced the idea that those struggles were O.K., so long as I kept up the minimum literacy that I would need to be an effective scientist.
She used to tell a story all the time—as if it were just a hilarious anecdote—about how a certain Nobel-Prize-winning physicist in her program had scolded graduate students for using the telephone in the lab: “If your personal lives have such complexity that they require a continuing contact with family and friends in time that should be devoted to physics, I very much doubt that you have the makings of a good physicist.”
When my mother died, I discovered that she had kept the blue fifties-style mimeographed memo that contained this warning. Although she never once—in the hundred or so times that I had heard her tell the story to dozens of people—explained what the story meant to her, the fact that she had kept the memo was a clear sign to me that it symbolized for her the message, which I’m sure came in many forms, that “physics isn’t for women.” Weirdly, though, this recognition led her to convey to me that physics was the most important and exciting thing that one could do in life.
I did very well in math and physics at school, much better than I did in anything related to the written word. I think that, as a kid, I relied heavily on cognitive strategies that weren’t very popular with my teachers, especially in non-science classes like English and History. I’m definitely not a traditional learner. I don’t take notes. I don’t read things linearly. I don’t have the patience. I think that I never could have become a decent writer without the help of modern word-processing technology because I can barely read my own handwriting and I lose track of physical papers almost instantly.
So, I had to rely, a lot more than most other kids, on both my memory and my ability to absorb information orally. I also had to do well enough on the kinds of tasks that required quick thinking and on-the-spot performance to balance out the fact that I was never doing much work on my own. Even in math and science class, if I had the you-have-to-show-your-work kind of teacher, this was a disaster for me. In a nutshell, keeping things neat, organized, structured, or anything like that is nearly impossible for me. Absorbing information in face-to-face exchanges, and performing well under time pressures, test-taking conditions, and the like, were my forte.
These qualities made me a very poor student in subjects that revolved around reading and writing. I wasn’t very good at sitting still to read things. I could never turn in any homework—or even remember what was due, or what happened to worksheets or written homework instructions that I was supposed to complete. I couldn’t take notes in class. I could never be expected to have a pen or pencil on me or a notebook. I couldn’t write an essay that my teachers found legible. I realize that most kids have poor time-management skills and are terrible procrastinators, but I took these traits to extremes.
I definitely couldn’t spell. I still can’t spell. It took me fourteen stabs at the auto-correct in MS Word to get legible to come out right, and eight times typing teh...teh...teh...teh until it came out the—and it happened again at the end of the sentence. Argh…
So, I think that I almost certainly had some pretty pronounced attention limits, as well as some specifically orthographic disabilities. I did well in math and mathematical science because it was really easy for me—partly, I’m sure, because my mother had pre-taught me everything that I was supposed to learn in school. I managed to get good grades in subjects that required reading and writing because, even though I never turned in any homework, or read anything, or took notes, I could do very well on tests, and I suppose that was hard to ignore.
In high school, you took a humanities course that provided you with an introduction to philosophy. You were also motivated to study philosophy because you like to engage in argument with others. Why did these engagements in argumentation convince you to pursue a career in philosophy rather than physics or engineering?
I did have a one-semester philosophy class in high school. I really liked the teacher that I had that year, but I would never have walked away from the class thinking that I would want to study philosophy. We did philosophy in that class as an example of a great, western cultural product, something to be studied carefully and revered from a distance. That really didn’t do much for me. It wasn’t until I was quite a bit older that I began to appreciate anything from high culture for its aesthetic or cultural value. That just wasn’t at all my thing. I mostly rolled my eyes in my high school philosophy class when we read Mortimer Adler’s Six Great Ideas.
In any case, I was terrified of having to take classes in college that revolved around reading and writing. I had performed so poorly in theses areas in my schooling up until then, in my “low-brow” public schools, that I thought for sure that I would do much worse at a very competitive college. I guess that I hadn’t really thought this through when I decided to go to college at the University of Chicago, because, famously, Chicago had a pretty heavy “common-core” requirement that involved taking a lot of such classes.
Philosophy classes in college turned out better for me than I expected. The first philosophy class that I took at college was part of the common-core requirement in the humanities. It centered around Plato’s dialogues, some Hume, and a few other things. I did pretty well in it. I was quite surprised by this. I think it was due in part to fact that we studied the Socratic dialogues. It was easier for me to sit still and read them than most of what we had read in high school. I also discovered, I think, that there was a crutch that I could use in the humanities, if the humanities class was philosophically oriented--and that was my love for arguing.
I discovered that if you were around enough other smart people and you argued with them enough, you could absorb a lot of the things that you had been expected to learn by quietly reading in the library—something I’ve only ever gotten partially good at. I also found that once I actually got sucked into something—usually by getting engrossed in an argument about it—my attention for reading could become quite focussed. I tend to jump from text to text, skimming over things to find the bits that interest me, but I found that I could do this with quite a bit of stamina. So, philosophy ended up suiting me, even if I’ll probably never be noted for my careful scholarship of historical texts.
It wasn’t until my senior year that I decided not to pursue physics any further. The reasons for this decision were complicated. I didn’t like the social culture of physics, as I saw it at the time. But a bigger factor in the decision was that the further along I got in my education, the less it was about being sharp on my feet and doing well on tests, and the more it started to be like all the other activities that I was really bad at: it required patience, organizational skill, careful notetaking and data collecting, and all that sort of stuff I just didn’t feel wired to be good at. At that point, I was lucky to have had been forced to take all my common-core classes, most of which I had fulfilled with philosophy, history of science, and philosophy of science classes. It gave me an out: to transition to history and philosophy of science.
Indeed, Eric, you did your graduate work at Indiana University in a department of history and philosophy of science where you wrote a dissertation on computer simulation and explanation, influenced by Ian Hacking’s work on styles of reasoning. How would you describe this project? Do you think your interest in Hacking’s claims about styles of reasoning is related to your own nonnormative cognitive styles?
What a great question. I never really thought about it that way. I don’t think the answer to that question, exactly, is “yes.” But, there is a nearby claim that might be true. My work on computer simulation focused a lot on what I saw as a lacuna in the philosophy of science. I thought that, as a discipline, we had paid insufficient attention to calculation in the sciences. It’s a truism in some areas of psychology and psychiatry, I think, that people in those disciplines tend to study “disorders” that they themselves exhibit. Maybe something similar was going on with me. For some of the same reasons that I did poorly in subjects that focused on the written word, I was also a terrible calculator when I studied physics. You do have me wondering now if there’s something similar going on here. Although I wish that my physical organization was better, I don’t think that I should have some “normal” set of organizational skills. As someone who is terrible at standard ways of calculation, I was fascinated by a method that was revolutionizing that very activity, namely, calculation in science.
Hacking was definitely one of my biggest influences in graduate school. I’m not sure if I could say entirely why, but I liked everything about his work at the time: the writing style, the careful attention to scientific practice, the desire to look at topics that were outside of the select few scientific problems that were taken by the community to be “philosophically interesting.” I was always interested in foundations of physics topics, but also not very confident that I would have much to contribute to them. I wanted to work on stuff that wasn’t “worn out.” By the time that I was looking for stuff to work on of my own, the little sub-sub-discipline of “philosophy of experiment” seemed to be over-crowded and over-explored. I decided that I wanted to do for simulation what I thought Hacking had done for experiment—make it relevant to philosophy of science.
I think that the topic also suited my own style of reasoning itself. Working on most topics in philosophy requires that you read a lot of philosophy—very slowly and carefully. You’re trying to dig deep into a debate and follow all the arguments to stake out a little niche for yourself between P and not-P. I can of course do this, if I must, but I think it’s harder for me than most people to do this kind of careful reading without a particular goal in mind.
On the other hand, I think I’m especially good at looking over a bunch of scientific literature and jumping quickly from piece to piece, looking for examples that can help me flesh out a philosophical point. Once I have that, then and only then, can I look back over the philosophical literature and figure out where the point that I want to make fits in, who I need to argue against, who I can use as an ally, as a foil, etc.
I also got lucky insofar as the internet exploded as a source of scientific research during the time that I was writing my dissertation—the late 90s. I really don’t think that I would have managed very well in the days of going into the stacks, finding journals, photocopying them, etc. In fact, I think part of the reason that I took a bit longer to finish than is typical is that I was waiting for this technology to catch up with me. If I had been born five years earlier, I might not have finished.
[Description of image below: Coloured photo of Eric who is sitting on a beach in a rocky Mediterranean cove on a bright sunny day, looking directly into the camera, and smiling. He is wearing dark sunglasses, a t-shirt, and baseball cap turned backwards. Adults and children can be seen in the background, along with rocks and plant life on the rocks.]
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