CURVES: The Creative Abode of Vibrant Science

Deborah A. Davis

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DOI: 10.2190/SH.4.3.a

Abstract

To have a better understanding of helping the self and self care, a better understanding of our culturally situated knowledge of science is proposed and elaborated upon. Not only is science a culturally situated knowledge and rule-governed form of story-telling, where "facts" are actually "artifacts," it is also a re-presentation of all of the more or less developed human perceptive and epistemic practices—sensory body-knowing, story-telling/singing, valuing, imaging, conceptualizing, and theorizing—the habits of mind of each, particular scientist. Conventional Western habits of mind, especially, are reductionist, compartmentalized, and frozen by beliefs—all of which pollute clarity. Science will be coherent and vibrantly whole when the perceptions of more scientists become unfettered by false assumptions such as: the universe is made of matter, life forms are machines made out of matter, evolution is based on competition rather than cooperation, and scientific research is best guided by patriarchal politics and economics. When accurately perceived, science will be more consonant with a poetry that is ultimately beyond what theories can portray. Beginning with a democratic model of the heart—the heart as anatomy as well as the core of consciousness—this article embraces some new and emerging methodologies, which uncover how scientists create themselves and their sciences. It presents an ecology of knowing and being that is life-centered, dynamic, and grounded in the human body and its inner techniques: knowing-through-the-heart, root epistemologies, and imagination.

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