PoS Seminar 30.11. with Michiru Nagatsu

At the next PoS seminar on Monday 30.11., Michiru Nagatsu (UH) will give a presentation titled “Sustainability science as a management science: Beyond the natural-social divide”, based on a paper co-authored by Henrik Thorén (UH). The seminar takes place in Zoom from 2 to 4 pm. 

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT, the Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

To join the seminar please contact tatu.nuotio@helsinki.fi for the Zoom invitation.

Author bio:

Michiru Nagatsu is an associate professor of Inter- and Transdisciplinary Methodologies of Sustainability Science, at the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science and Practical Philosophy, Faculty of the Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. Nagatsu works on, among others, philosophy of cooperation, philosophy of economics, experimental philosophy of science, and sustainability science.

Abstract:
 
We argue that in order to understand the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary dialectics in sustainability science, it is useful to see sustainability science as a kind of management science, and then to highlight the hard-soft distinction in systems thinking. First, we argue that the commonly made natural-social science dichotomy is relatively unimportant and unhelpful. We then outline the differences between soft and hard systems thinking as a more relevant and helpful distinction, mainly as a difference between perspectives in systemic modeling toward models. We also illustrate that the distinction is methodologically useful to advance sustainability science by enabling us (i) to suggest novel ways of using existing theoretical, experimental, and computational resources of the sciences for renewable resource management, and (ii) to disentangle disciplinary disagreements in climate science.