My name

is assistant professor the school of

complex adaptive systems here Arizona

State University uh enrolled member the

DA tribe and I'm going to be talking

about my work and going through a bunch

of projects that are ongoing uh

incomplete and at various stages of

development. All right. Right. So, I'm

going to start off by introducing

myself. Then, I'm going to talk about

some of my different projects. And if

there's time at the end, I'll get into

some of my peculiar interests and some

provocations to encourage discussion.

This is me 10 years ago. I got my PhD

here at Arizona State University at the

Center for Biology and Society. And I

wanted to know what's the meaning of

meaning? But that's too broad a question

uh to do a dissertation on. So, I

narrowed it down here. into what's the

meaning of meaning in the context of

behavioral experiments aimed at

discovering physiological

mechanisms and I feel like I found some

clarity in trying to answer that

question but I still want to know more

so that's ongoing this is a little brief

map of my journey after ASU I was a

visiting graduate fellow at the

Minnesota center for philosophy of

science then I was a posttock at the

University of Kentucky and then I was a

posttock at the Santa Fe Institute

before coming back here uh and starting

in August last August

2024. And now my office is right here in

this building where the people who are

in person are sitting. It's all nearby

here in the

ECA. And uh my research at this point

basically has two main areas. One is the

history and philosophy of science.

That's what I've been doing the longest.

And then the other one is research

relevant to indigenous data sovereignty.

And I'll get into sort of what that is

later on in the talk. And the way I see

it, the sort of

connecting tissue between these two

areas of my research right now, it's

methodological and it's me using the

same methodology to clarify the meanings

of complex concepts.

So, I'm going to start out with the

history some some history and philosophy

of science stuff I have going on before

moving on to the indigenous data

sovereignty stuff.

Uh so last semester uh I collaborated

with Pedro Marquez Zacharas and Max

Stressowl on sort of coming up with

something to submit to this event that

was happening at the Minnesota Center

for Philosophy of Science called

Philosophy of Science Past, Present,

Future. And you can see that the call

was asking for people to reflect on the

current state of philosophy of science

and its history while setting an agenda

for future research. So I got thinking

about sort of philosophy of science

history and philosophy of science

and what's been happening where is it

going and where do I see myself in that

story. So just a little brief background

here for people. History of science and

philosophy of science can be separate

things. There's departments that are

just history of science. There's centers

like the Minnesota Center for Philosophy

of Science. They're just doing

philosophy of science uh at least

nominally. And what's the basic

difference between these two sort of

areas of inquiry? Historians of science

tend to make narrative arguments about

why science happened the way it did. And

they're much more likely than

philosophers to bring in contextual

factors like a scientist's biography,

their life history, how that influenced

the kind of science they did, the

technology that was available to them,

politics, economics, culture, place,

tradition, all as sort of influential

factors shaping science.

Philosophers of science

traditionally are into reconstructing

the logic of scientific practices,

scientific theories and scientific

explanations and then assessing those

theories, practices and explanations

according to sort of logical

norms. Sometimes they bring philosophy

problems to science. So for instance a

classic philosophy question is what is

the truth? What's reality? And they'll

sort of take these questions that have a

long tradition within the western

philosophical cannon, bring them to

science and sort of come up with

arguments about like well what does it

mean to say that science is getting at

reality or that it uh generates true

statements and then sometimes they bring

science to philosophy problems. So for

instance, you know, philosophers have

been uh trying to figure out what

consciousness is for a long time and

some philosophers of science will say,

you know, recent work in neuroscience,

for instance, is probably relevant to

this long-standing philosophical

question. And so they'll try to bring

empirical evidence from science to bear

on the philosophical questions. And I'm

someone who believe, you know, I do both

of them. I like doing both of them. And

I believe to do a good job at one,

you're going to have to engage in the

other to some degree. So I'm like an

integrated history and philosophy of

science

guy. Uh and so in thinking about the

history of history and philosophy of

science, uh I was looking at sort of

different trends that have happened

historically over the last 200 years or

so. And I came up with this spectrum

across which you can categorize some

things happening. And one end of the

spectrum is the stance that scientists

and philosophers are basically

indistinguishable like doing the same

kinds of stuff. And then on the other

end of the spectrum is this view that

philosophy is separate of or outside of

biology. Don't let them touch each

other. They're totally different things.

And so there's some different um styles

or movements and where they fit on the

spectrum in my opinion. And by

biological philosophy, I'm talking about

a continental European tradition, maybe

people like Shelling, where they are

looking at sort of developments in the

life sciences. They're thinking about

the theory of evolution and natural

selection, and they're like, what does

this mean

for man's place in the universe? Like

that kind of philosophizing. And then

there's historical epistemology. This is

like a mainly French tradition. You're

looking at scientific concepts.

uh and they still see, you know, look,

we're different than the scientists

we're looking at, but it's not quite as

separated as at the other end.

Philosophy of biology, I would say, you

know, that's what's happening in most

places today comes from an Angloanalytic

tradition. They're closer to seeing

themselves

as interacting with scientists and

working on problems that matter to

scientists. And then at the far end the

early 20th century organicist and

theoretical biologists uh who you know

saw themselves as scientists but were

also saying a lot of very abstract

theoretical very philosophical things

and um that's where I see myself on the

spectrum currently the kind of history

and philosophy of science I'm doing. Uh,

and then I started thinking it'd be nice

to get some kind of empirical evidence

to bear on this question of what is

going on in the history and philosophy

of science as a discipline. And so I

thought, how would I do that? And here

was the entryway. I picked a

professional academic society called

ampersand HPS stands for integrated

history and philosophy of science. So

it's a bunch of people who like me think

you got to be doing both at the same

time to do either well. Um, and they're

a pretty new organization. They had

their first meeting in 2007 and they

meet once every other year. So, they're

coming up on their 10th meeting here uh

sometime this

spring. And what I did is I collected

and read every abstract for every

presentation that's happened uh in the

first seven meetings. I wanted to do

them all, but I severely underestimated

how long this would take. Also had

trouble getting all of the abstracts.

They're not all just out there on the

internet, so I'm, you know, hounding

people to send me things.

uh but I can present some of the results

from analyzing the first seven meetings

of integrated HPS. And so one of the

things I did is I came up with a coding

system where after reading a bunch of

them I thought about what are the main

things people are doing these

presentations or at least claim to be

doing since I didn't watch the

presentations themselves just the

abstract describing

um and this is a list of things I came

up with. So one presentation can do

multiple things

simultaneously. So like programmatic

meta history and philosophy of science.

These are presentations where there's

like making arguments about how you

should do the history and philosophy of

science or a sort of H for P case

standing for history for philosophy

case. This is uh using a historical case

study from some time in the history of

science and using it to justify more

general philosophical claims usually

about how science works. So they're like

you know this is how this kind of

scientist does things. Look here's a

case that shows

it and these three are the most popular

things that historians and philosophers

of science are doing.

uh PERH concept that's there it's mostly

like a historical narrative argument but

the narrative focuses on abstract

philosophical concepts so it's sort of

like telling the history of a

concept and then P4 big was popular uh

this is sort of like history of science

is important whatever topic they're

working on is just important for its own

sake and what this really represents in

the literature is uh like the

fascination with big figures in science.

So like Isaac Newton for instance, no

one feels the need to justify getting

into the extreme minutia of anything

Isaac Newton ever did because it's just

assumed that it's going to be important

because it's new. And so there's a lot

of history and philosophy of science

that falls into that kind of category.

Hey, Kelly. Yeah. What's philosophical

cleanup? philosophical cleanup

uh is that there's some episode in the

history of science which is sort of

widely regarded as confusing or uh

messy. People like don't know what's at

stake or what's even going on. And then

the philosopher comes in is like I'm

going to clean up this situation. I'm

going to draw a bunch of distinctions

and say this is this was this this was

that. And uh you know they may not solve

the problem but they'll at least be like

here's at least a framework for thinking

clearly about what happened in this

episode because everyone's using you

know often the same word maybe in

different ways across a whole bunch of

different disciplines that study science

like a sociologist of science historian

of science trying to philosophers trying

to step back like here's the once and

for all way of thinking about what was

happening

And I haven't had a chance to turn these

into graphs yet, but this it's just the

numbers on it for different meetings. Uh

like I said, one presentation can do

multiple

things. And you know, when I talk think

about myself and what I'm up to, this is

basically what I do as a historian,

philosopher of science, the

philosophical cleanup. Uh Paul was just

asking about new historical evidence. I

like to go into the archives, find

something that people have never talked

about before and then use it as evidence

in some kind of argument. I like telling

the history of concepts and uh you know

I'm very sort of anxious that the things

I do matter to scientists. I think that

that's

important. And so an example is this

paper that I wrote. Uh it does all the

things highlighted there. That's the

style of HPS it is and I'm very happy

that uh it's my most cited paper and

almost all the citations are from insect

navigation experimentalists. So it did

make contact with scientists

predominantly. So when are HPSers

thinking

about what sort of span of dates within

the history of science? These are graphs

that are specific to each

meeting. I also compiled them into one

where you can see general trends. You

can see that uh you know the 20th

century by far the most popular time to

be thinking about

science and that's basically true for me

too. I fall into this trend. But I'm

trying to expand on both ends. I'm

trying to get closer to the present, but

I'm also trying to push back into the

late 1800s where I have my

research. What sciences are HPSers

thinking about? So again, one

presentation could be about multiple

disciplines. Uh, and the first thing to

note here is that the x-axis is

logarithmic. So, you know, it looks like

physics is ahead, but it's actually

really really far ahead. There's like

complete domination of physics in

integrated HPS.

um biology is next with half as many and

then after you know physics, biology,

chemistry, Newton just the person is the

next most popular thing. So that's what

I mean about like why the what was it P4

for H big category is so

popular and you know complexity not on

there doesn't appear but I'm going to

change that. I'm doing history and

philosophy of complex system science.

And so one of the projects I have going

on in this area is asking the question

what happened to

cybernetics. So it's one of the sort of

forerunner disciplines I would say of

complex system science and there is

consensus around that. People agree it's

also a sort of forerunner to today what

we're calling dynamical systems theory

or control theory.

uh and it sort of really made its first

splash in the public with this book

manifesto published I believe in 1948 by

the American mathematician Norbert

Weiner cybernetics or control and

communication in the animal and machine

and you can see by the subtitle that I

had sort of vaunting ambitions from the

start says a study of vital importance

to psychologists physiologists

mathematicians psychiatrists etc so

cybernetics made a lot of promises for a

lot of different areas of science but

within theh behavioral sciences, which

are what I like to think about. One of

the big promises they made was that they

were going to use newly formalized

notions of information, feedback, and

control to create a general maybe

universal theory of behavior that would

apply just as well to humans, animals,

and machines, any kind of behavioral

system. And so, this is a sort of run

through I like to go through just to

emphasize the contested nature of

cybernetics within the history of

science. So this is a encyclopedia entry

from the USSR 1956. It says,

"Cybernetics is a reactionary

pseudocience arising in the USA after

the second world war and receiving wide

dissemination in other capitalistic

countries." Here this is a quote from

one of Kennedy's top aids that he wrote

to the president. It says based on CIA

reports in October 1962, President

Kennedy's top aid wrote in an internal

memo that quote, "The all-out Soviet

commitment to cybernetics would give the

Soviets a tremendous advantage." He

warned that by 1970, the USSR may have a

radically new production technology

managed by closed loop feedback control

employing self-eing computers. If the

American negligence of cybernes

continues, he concluded, we're finished.

So this is probably familiar to a lot of

us right now. China and AI for instance

repeating itself history repeating

itself here. Also we have uh Salvador

Aend's government in Chile socialist

government. Uh he creates something

called cyersin. It's this room and it's

supposed to be a sort of central

planning and control zone for the

economy. And so it's supposed to be

hooked up to factories to keep track of

production, uh, stores to keep track of

demand and to keep all of his

people. And it was largely created by

this this crazy English guy named

Stafford Beer. He was a cybernetician

and he consulted for Aendai's government

and he got into a fight with some sort

of US government officials in print and

one of the things he says to them is

perhaps it's intolerable to sit in

Washington DC and to realize that

someone else got there first in a

Marxist country on a shoestring. As to

the horror of putting computers to work

in the service of the people, I would

sooner do it than calculate overkill,

spy on a citizen's creditworthiness, or

teach children some brand of

rectitude. Cyber sin was destroyed uh in

the next regime change in

Chile. Here we have a continental

philosopher Ponti from the phenomen

phenomenological tradition. He says in

the ideology of cybernetics, human

creations are derived from a natural

information process. It's self-conceived

on the model of human machines. If this

kind of thinking were to extend its

reign to man in history, if we were to

set out to construct man in history on

the basis of a few abstract indices,

then since man really becomes the

manipulandum he takes himself to be, we

enter into a cultural regimen where

there is neither truth nor falsity

concerning man in history into a sleep

or a nightmare from which there is no

awakening. Then here we have a

television show from the 80s called The

Greatest Thinkers. They did one episode

on cybernetics and Norbert

Weiner. It's like I don't have Oh, it's

just I also don't have audio. That's all

right. They don't say that much

specifically except that's it's going to

be a really big deal for the future.

They use the phrase complex systems in

the

episode. Where did my cursor go?

I'll skip the next one clip from here

too. But the host just concludes the

episode by saying uh cybernetics and

complex system science is the next step

in human

evolution. Here's a historian and

philosopher of science more recently

from 2010 also looking at cybernetics.

He says that it was rep it uh it stood

out in the history of science because it

it pursued a non-modern ontology that

rejected the people thinks dualism and

the detour through representational

knowledge.

Uh the English documentarian Adam Curtis

has a documentary series called All

Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

where he looks at cybernetics. Says that

this is the story of the rise of the

dream of the self-organizing system and

the strange machine fantasy of nature

that underpins it. And then there are

even more recent papers talking about

cybernetics leading to sort of

neoliberal capitalism.

And so to sum up here, depending on who

you ask and when you ask them,

cybernetics was something that was going

to produce a universal theory of

behavior. It was capitalist

pseudocience. It was an engine of

socialist economic planning,

dehumanizing nightmare, the next step in

human evolution, missed opportunity for

a new way of doing science, strange

machine fantasy that worked our view of

nature, harbinger of the rise of

neolithical technocrats. And so I bring

up this list here because I think you

know that these many

perspectives could also be sort of

leveled against complex system science

today and that depending on who you ask

people might have these opinions of

complex system science and and that's no

coincidence, you know, because it's

coming out of the cybernetics

movement. But if you ask most academics

today and they've heard of cybernetics,

they're likely to say that it's a failed

movement and that it's dead.

Nevertheless, many complexity scientists

continue to see the concept of

information as sort of harboring

revolutionary potential in the

behavioral

sciences that it can help us solve big

problems revolving around behavior and

decision-m. So I'm on the case trying to

find my own answer to uh you know what

was cybernetics? What did it

mean? Why does it matter to us today as

complex systems

people? And the basic framework that I

use when I do this that I'm also going

to be bringing to my other work in

indigenous data sovereignty is that

scientists do science, scientists make

claims, people use the claims to guide

their future action and the connective

tissue between these steps is

interpretation justification. Right?

Whatever the scientist does is supposed

to justify their claims and for those

claims to be able to guide action, they

need to be interpreted. And I focus on

these connecting tissues to make sense

of everything else going on in science.

And another way to show this is a here's

a a framework like capturing the way I

think about science. It's a research

program developing over time. There's an

initial state of doubt. Scientists

design an investigation uh to produce

evidence that will ameliate that state

of doubt. Sometimes they're successful

and they the results of their

investigations they say justify a new

belief. The new belief is targeted at

the initial state of doubt and then once

they have this new belief it guides

their future research in new ways and

you know causes them to have new doubts

and the process continues

on. And so this belief fixation, new

belief formation stage is usually the

only stage that's publicly accessible uh

to people because scientists make claims

in research articles or they go to

conferences and they give

presentations. And so that's the sort of

handhold I usually use to grab hold of a

problem in the history and philosophy of

science. But then I try to get at

everything surrounding that claim to

make sense of the concepts that were in

the

claim. All right? And so, as I said,

it's iterative. The process keeps going.

There's multiple research programs

happening at any given time. So, they're

running in parallel. And the claims of

one research program can influence the

future research actions of another uh

research program community. And the

reason it can do that is

because these scientists are existing in

a sort of interpretive cloud with each

other. They've received similar

training. They have similar implicit

assumptions. And so they're able to read

the research reports of their peers and

uh it gives them new ideas for research

in a way that it wouldn't for other

people. So for instance, like if my

uncle read a research paper, he's going

to have very different ideas about how

he got his future action than someone

who's working in that same scientific

discipline.

uh and I like telling big picture

narratives about these interpretive

clouds, these traditions by focusing on

the minutia of

experiments. These are some of the

favorite concepts I've been thinking

about within the context of the history

and philosophy of complex approaches to

behavior, behavior, motivation,

instinct, information, cognition. They

may seem sort of straightforward or like

you may say, "Well, I know what those

concepts mean." But I think you don't

really know what those concepts mean.

Uh, and so just for motivation and

instinct, here's a recent publication

I've come out at the end of last year

that deals with both of these concepts

in the behavioral

sciences. And just a point about why any

of this matters. So scientists, you

know, they're not born scientists. They

become scientists. And before they were

scientists, they were part of a whole

bunch of other communities and cultures.

All right? And so there's this

reciprocal relationship between broader

society and popular culture and

scientific research communities. The

ideas from one area inevitably filter

through to the other and then back

again. So the example I usually use for

this is that at one point the idea of

dopamine as an important

neurotransmitter for feeling good or

having pleasure that was just some

technical sort of niche thing happening

in a laboratory somewhere. And today the

language of dopamine hits the pervasive

in the culture. And so that's how you

know scientific work on behavior colors

how we think about ourselves, how we

think about

others. And so scientific concepts that

promise to control and predict behavior

concern everyone. I argue because

they're bound to reenter society and

color the way we deal with ourselves and

others. All right. So that a little

piece of the history and philosophy side

of the research that going on right now.

going to switch over to indigenous data

sovereignty ethics and policy. How did I

even get into this area of research?

Happened in 2001 when I became a

consulting bioethicist for the native

biodata consortium. It's the first uh

nonprofit bio bank and research

institution led

by indigenous scientists and sort of

intellectuals. And it's located on the

sovereign land of the Cheyenne River

Sue. That's also a first for an

indigenous bio bank just to be located

on sovereign indigenous land anywhere in

the United States. It's never happened

before. And so they put me on all kinds

of projects since then. In one of the

projects I was working with Morona

Vanali and Fernando Fischer and they

said, "Well, what would it look like if

you could try to wipe

away sort of like western assumptions

and philosophies and come up with a

white paper on how to do indigenous

genomics research that was based on

indigenous philosophies and cosmologies

from the

beginning. And that that was a

hard problem to think

about. Sort of put me on this direction

I'm at now where so I'm already a guy

who clarifies complex concepts. That's

what I've been trained how to do. That's

what I like doing for my historian in

Blossburg science side. And so I'm

bringing that over into the context of

indigenous data sovereignty. I'm

thinking about concepts like data. For

instance, how does something become

data?

has a lot of philosophical implications

to that question. What determines the

meaning of a

datim? Sovereignty another complex

concept rights human rights uh are sort

of invoked everywhere in the indigenous

state of sovereignty literature. So I

started thinking looking into the

history of this idea thinking how useful

is it for the goals indigenous data

sovereignty and uh so if I have time I'm

just going to get into I have projects

going on all three of these concepts

right now but I'm just going to try to

get into the data and the sovereignty

ones. So

data uh the stage of this project is

that there's a paper that's under

review. And so what I sort of note in

this paper is that proponents of

indigenous data

sovereignty they say that the concept of

data is contested. It's valuel laden.

It's philosophically complex without

ever really engaging with what an IDS

sort of view of data should look like.

So they'll say things like the concept

of data is imbued with a host of

meanings within and across contexts. To

some it is simply information while for

others is the very pulse of a

revolution or the idea of data is a

broad concept but in the context of this

chapter we define data as information

that may be recorded in various

forms. Right? And so from the sort of

philosophical perspective of trying to

answer questions like this which I

believe are sort of central to any

philosophical account of data uh

defining data in terms of information

doesn't really get you anywhere. Uh

because information has the same

philosophical ambiguities as data. It's

also you know what's the difference

between information and not information?

What makes information about anything?

These continue to be philosophically

mysterious questions.

uh and so what I want to go through is

two different views uh that sort of

offer answers to those two central

questions about what data is and what

determines its

meaning. And so here's the first one.

It's one that I don't like and I argue

against in the paper called the

correspondence view. It says data are

reflections or snapshots that

straightforwardly represent some aspect

of the work. So I have a camera and a

mirror here because that's the analogy

that data are like little mirrors or

little photographs out there and they

just like represent some aspect

of all right and so it's pretty clear

that it's this correspondence

relationship whatever it is that

determines the meaning of data. And

sometimes to articulate what this

correspondence relationship is, people

draw on mathematical ideas like

homorphism or isomorphism where they

just say things like, you know, it

preserves the structure of the world

somehow and that's why the data is about

this aspect of the world and not that

other aspect.

And so when you think about data in this

way, it leads you to ask questions like,

is our camera, our mirror, our recording

device, is it good enough to accurately

represent the way the world really

is? Are we clever enough to interpret

these reflections and representations?

Right? So on the correspondence view,

the sort of two main areas for failure

are that scientists are using faulty

measuring devices or that they're

stupid. But if if they're smart and they

have good measuring devices, then we're

off to the races and we're going to be

learning things about the

world. The other view of data um coming

out of the pragmatic tradition, let's

call it the pragmatic way. That is

something I endorse and I think that

it's a good view of data for realizing

the ends of indigenous data sovereignty.

It says things only become data when

someone uses them as evidence to support

claims or actions. So I'm drawing on the

work here of another philosopher of

science, Sabina

Leonelli. And what this view of data

does is it reintroduces human agency

into the

picture. Causes you to ask questions

like what do we want to accomplish by

quote unquote representing the world via

data? What sorts of claims are we trying

to

justify? What relations are created by

using something's data? Right? So on the

correspondence

view sort of like scientists are

innocent passengers being carried along

the line of inquiry by the

facts. The pragmatic one we foreground

scientists agency intentions and values

in the scientific

process. And so I got three reasons why

I think that this pragmatic view of data

is the best for indigenous data

sovereignty. First reason it gives a

better perspective on the future

trajectory of science which is important

for indigenous data sovereignty because

I should step back I guess I never said

what that is or defined it loosely even

uh it's a pretty recent I would call it

intellectual political movement and the

basic idea behind it is that indigenous

peoples in their history of interactions

with colonial forces uh there's a

similar story that plays out that

indigenous peoples have something that's

valuable, it gets extracted by outside

colonial forces and the indigenous

people don't get anything in return and

sometimes are hurt in return. Right? So

a lot of people are saying that you know

the next thing where this is going to

happen is data that data is like the new

oil. It's the new gold and there's going

to be a data rush on indigenous peoples

and they aren't going to get anything in

return to improve their material

conditions. in the indigenous data

sovereignty movement sort of saying we

need to to leverage this notion of

sovereignty, the idea that indigenous

peoples at least in the United States uh

have some version of

sovereignty to make sure that we benefit

from the value of our

data. All right. And so what how does

the pragmatic view of data lead to a

different view of the trajectory of

science? This is just a sort of you know

rinky dink network graph thing. It

doesn't actually represent anything

right now. But the basic idea behind

this is that the nodes are discoveries

and they're connected by edges to other

discoveries because in the process of

science discoveries make new discoveries

possible. And on the correspondence view

you have this view of science

progressing where all the data is

already out there with human independent

meanings. It's sort of like a scavenger

hunt view of science and scientists are

in the process of discovering those

meanings. So the nodes are sort of

waiting out there for scientists to

connect the dots.

uh the pragmatic view of data, there's a

lot more contingency because you have to

take into account the sort of things

scientists value because the things

scientists value determine what they're

willing to call a problem, what means

they're going to use to try and solve

the problem and then what they're

willing to accept us in a solution to

that problem.

So there's just way more nodes all of a

sudden because you know there's way more

variables basically in what's happening

in a given scientific

investigation. And when you think about

know scientific progress in this way it

leads you to ask questions like well how

many problems could people possibly

solve using the same data?

And this is just speculative but I think

humanity's capacity for generating

problems and accepting solutions is

infinite. So the problems that could be

addressed are infinite and so the

meanings of data are

infinite. Uh but the main point here is

that science could have progressed

differently and the pragmatic view of

data really underscores that

contingency. it can still progress

differently. And the indigenous data

sovereignty movement needs institutions

that can bend scientific progress

towards its own goals. And another way

of saying that is that they need

institutions that are going to support a

tradition of biological inquiry as

guided by indigenous values and concerns

when it comes to these moments of

identifying problems, picking methods

and accepting

solutions. Uh and the native biodata

consortium is such an institution. you

know as a bio bank they preserve data

for future use they create and enforce

rules about who can use the data and

they selectively facilitate the use of

that data. So another way of saying that

under the pragmatic view here is that

they're investing in the future meanings

of data which are unknown because we

don't know what uses people will come up

with for them. Uh they're controlling

the current meanings of data by

controlling how they're used

now. And then another question all comes

up here is well

how ought

they control current uses of

data. And this is the second way that I

think the pragmatic view of data is

going to help indigenous data

sovereignty. It provides a more

penetrating vision of science that's fit

for indigenous judgment. When for

instance if you're the native biodata

consortium and you have to make a

decision, oh this group wants to use

this data for this purpose. thumbs up or

thumbs down to put it in a very

simplified

way. So, here's an example that uh I

made up so it would be clean, but it's

very similar to things that have

actually happened. We got a plant

varietal here with droughtresistant

traits found only on sovereign

indigenous lands, outsider scientists,

uh and they want to study the plant,

right, for this trait. So, they're going

to need to extract this biodata off the

indigenous communities land. And what

narrative is the scientists going to use

to justify that extraction to their

funders, to the indigenous community, to

themselves? Say something trying to

understand the genetic basis of drought

resistant

traits. Why? To help solve problems of

global warming, right? There could be

famine in the future with global

warming. And understanding the genetics

behind drought resistance and

agricultural crops could be really

important for feeding people and

preventing famines in the future.

And so these twin goals are sort of like

forever being claimed by scientists.

They want to understand the world and

they want to improve the

world. You might say something here

like, you know, it just happens to be

the case that this plant on indigenous

lands is part of the solution to a

humanitywide problem. I wish it wasn't

like this. Everything's messed up. But

this is the situation we're in now.

And the indigenous community is put in a

situation where it's like you can either

stand in the way of progress that's

going to help everyone or you can be

selfish and like not let someone study

this

plant, right? But when you take the

pragmatic view of data, it sort of

changes this phrasing. You're forced to

say, well, I want to use this plant on

indigenous lands as part of the solution

to a humanitywide problem. And that I

want opens the door to a series of

further

questionings

that puncture the veil of these

generically virtuous goals. So I'm not

arguing here that scientists are

dishonest about wanting to understand

the world and improve the world, but the

these are just sort of too vague to

really be inputs for good decision

making about whether a scientist should

be able to do something with data.

So for instance, I think understanding

is a fake goal. Uh and you know to see

how it's a fake goal, just think

about you know how will you answer a

question about how do we know when the

thing is understood? How will the

scientist demonstrate that they've

achieved their goal of understanding?

And the answer to this question is

always going to come down in my opinion

to the scientist's ability to do

something relevant to the thing they're

trying to understand. Right. So in this

case with the plant it's probably

something like the scientists can claim

they understand the base gen basis of

droughtresistant traits when they're

able to manipulate that trait by

manipulating something about sort of the

genetics of

plants and that's an actual specific

goal right it's not just I'm trying to

understand the world now we're talking

about things the scientist is actually

trying to

do similar for improving the world you

know start to think well you know what's

it actually within a scientist power to

do. So they don't legislate trade

agreements, they don't marshall the

forces of industrial agriculture,

uh they don't control supply chains. So

to say that they have this goal of, you

know, stopping famines in the future,

it's sort of like a tire manufacturer

saying they have the goal of building a

luxury automobile. It's like what you do

might be necessary for that, but it's

far from

sufficient. So third reason, this is uh

the shortest one here. I think that the

pragmatic view of data is more in line

with certain at least North American

indigenous philosophies. And in so far

as indigenous data sovereignty is about

indigenous peoples using their own ways

of knowing, their own cosmologies to

inform the way they control the use of

their data. I think it's important to

try to get at that somehow, which was

the project that originally put me on

this path. Remember, was trying to come

up with this white paper that's based on

indigenous philosophy.

And uh I haven't explored this that much

yet, but the basic idea here is just

that the pragmatic way of thinking about

data really emphasizes

relationships and so does a lot of

indigenous philosophy especially when it

comes to the the task of defining things

which is always very important to

philosophers. And so indigenous

philosophies uh that I've been looking

at in southwest of America are often

going to define things in terms of its

relationship to other things. So for

instance, you know, I have the medicine

wheel here because that's often used as

a I don't know, visual metaphor for this

way of thinking. But to be a person, you

know, it depends on your relationship to

things like other people, the place

you're in, your own thoughts, your own

body. And you can contrast that with a

more traditional western way of defining

things. Got Aristotle here as a

representative of it. And that's of

defining something in terms of necessary

and sufficient properties or conditions

for the realization of that thing. And

so on this way of defining things, you

know, things possess properties. And so

to be a person, you have to be a kind of

thing that possesses certain essential

properties such as maybe a rational

thought being five people. I don't know.

Different people come up with different

lists. All right. So that's the end of

the data one. What about this concept of

sovereignty? This one is even newer in

the developmental stage of research. I'm

just trying to write some grant proposal

about it right now. Going to be

collaborating with Trevor Reed. He's a

law professor here at Arizona State

University, a member of the Hopi tribe,

has a PhD in ethnomusicology as well as

a JD focusing on federal Indian law. And

all of that's relevant to the way that I

want to get at this question of like

what would it mean to clarify indigenous

notions of

sovereignty. So just some notes here uh

to foreground this problem. Sovereignty

it's not just one concept. There's many

different concepts of sovereignty just

within the western European political

tradition. And these concepts don't

stand alone. They sort of travel in

packs with related ideas like uh views

of human nature, views of nationhood,

views of human rights, ideas of

individual and collective freedom.

And so different sovereignty concepts

support different visions for how

humanity ought to organize itself and

make decisions as a corporate

entity. And the question I'm asking and

pursuing here is well how do we clarify

indigenous conceptions of sovereignty?

And there's really, you know, some major

philosophical problems sort of

uh waiting to jump out at anyone just

even within the the way I'm phrasing

this uh research aim. And so one of the

big problems is just a general issue of

comparing concepts. So here we got two

things, not concepts. We got a screw and

a banana. And we can compare them

because we can characterize them in

terms that sort of apply to both that

are appropriate for both. So like

hardness, right? How hard is the banana?

How hard is the screw? The idea of

hardness, the

operations we perform to assess hardness

are the connecting bridge that make the

comparison between a screw and a banana

puzzle. Same with something like taste,

color, etc.

But there's no consensus way to

characterize concepts. Uh different

philosophical traditions have like

radically different ways of doing this.

And so as a result, it's like unclear

how to compare concepts. For instance,

the concept of a screw and the concept

of a banana because the concept of a

banana isn't yellow. It doesn't taste

like a banana, right? It doesn't have

these sort of properties that make

comparison possible.

And my solution to this problem right

now uh is that I believe that every

concept has a pragmatic dimension which

I is a way of saying that all across

time and space people use concepts to do

things for reasons. I think that's

general enough to apply. I'm not making

too many prior assumptions uh when I say

something like that. And so the

different variables and factors

surrounding a person using a concept to

do a thing for a reason can provide the

sort of connected bridge that will make

comparison

possible. So this is my visual example

try to get at this right now. Like we

can compare these

things via the framework of problems and

uses because in this case, you know,

they can both be used to attach two

pieces of wood. And so we can start to

talk about, well, this one's better than

that one in terms of attaching two

pieces of wood because it attaches them

in this way.

And so with the this problem I'm trying

to get at indigenous conceptions of

sovereignty, we have the issue that like

right from the outset uh sovereignty is

a western concept. And so you don't want

to assume that there's going to be some

concept in indigenous philosophies and

cosmologies that corresponds to

sovereignty in a straightforward way.

And this pragmatic dimension of concept

solution helps us get around this issue

because we can reframe it. It's not it's

no longer a research program about

indigenous conceptions of sovereignty.

It's about this problem or use frame of

reference of how to organize human

collectives which again I think is a

problem

that's universal across time and space

with our species that we live in groups.

Uh figuring out how to do that isn't

obvious. And so I think any group of

people is going to have developed

conceptual tools for confronting this

issue of how do we organize ourselves

and make collective decisions. And so

then the question is within the

indigenous philosophy cosmology, what

set of concepts have been developed for

addressing this

problem? And then furthermore, I think

it's super useful when two different

philosophical conceptual systems come

into conflict. And I know this through

my work as a historian and philosopher

of science that scientific debates are

some of the most enlightening episodes

for philosophers and historians because

scientists are forced to sort of make

their assumptions more explicit and they

attack each other's weak points and they

emphasize their own strengths. And so

it's sort of like opening a window into

the conceptual workings of science that

usually remains closed. And I want to

take advantage of conflict in the same

way with this project.

So, you know, whereas a lot of times

with a project like this, people

would endeavor to get rid of all

colonial influence to try to recover

like an untouched philosophical state in

indigenous peoples. I'm trying to sort

of flip that on its head and leverage

what I was just talking about with

conflict between systems as well as the

well doumented textbased nature of legal

conflicts. So, I'm going to use legal

conflicts as the sort of handhold to

grab onto, just like I use scientific

claims from research reports as the

initial thing I grab onto. And then I

look at everything surrounding that to

make sense of what was happening there.

And so, I think, you know, indigenous

peoples had concepts that they used to

address the problem of how to organize

themselves, how to make collective

decisions prior to contact. And no doubt

those influences

uh were present in the way that

indigenous peoples sort of made

arguments in the western court context

uh which were often about sovereignty

and ownership of property. And then I

want to look at sort of how the

different ways they confront these

concepts play out historically. I'm

still working on the details of this. I

just put this here so you can see the

sort of connection here and how I'm

trying to bring the methodology from the

history and philosophy of science into

this new

area. All right. Uh so I just got 10

minutes. I'll zoom through this and it's

short. Just peculiar interest

provocations. I like adobe building. I

would like to incorporate that into my

work eventually somehow. I like

hydraulic models of neurohysiology. I

think it's a really interesting way of

thinking about brains and behavior. uh

it still invokes this idea of a

representation but it does it in a non

digital computer way which is the norm

currently I think to think about like

discrete variables that computers have

or a circuit board these are more like

analog computers and I like when

scientists use this model of thinking uh

when they investigate brains and

behavior I like puppets I was once

making a uh

online series of classes about the

history and philosophy of animal

behavior research. I was using puppets,

but I underestimated how long it would

take me to write the scripts and just

get all the resources together. Like, I

had voice actors with the puppets. But

I'm teaching a new class next semester

here, history and philosophy of complex

system science. And maybe I'll find a

way to get the puppets involved. It's a

New Mexican fences. There's something

going on here.

uh huge amount of variety and diversity,

more than I've seen in any other state

in the US. And it's not just poverty,

which I think a lot of people probably

jump to, that they're just using

whatever materials are at

hand. Very interesting. I got a whole

collection of photos of New Mexico

fences. And then something I've been

doing lately, just

ending my presentation with a list of

provocations to get the audience going

and asking some questions. Golf instinct

concepts are unfairly maligned. Learning

is overhyped. Brains are not obviously

just computers manipulated symbols

repetition to sort of constrain the

scientific imagination just as much as

it pathways for

investigation. I think meaning is

determined by use. Probably know what I

mean by that now since I keep endorsing

pragmatic approaches to problems of

meaning.

As a result of adopting the pragmatic

view, I think desire, purpose, and drive

are the most mysterious ingredients of

meaning. Things correspondent theories

of truth are European

mysticism. Behavior is the only solid

foundation for theorizing about brains

and minds. Human rights are fake and

insidiously undermining the indigenous

data sovereignty movement. I didn't get

into that this presentation. And the

trajectory of scientific progress is

extremely contingent, more so than is

commonly appreciated.

I don't think that last one's a

provocation. Thank you.