How do we know what we know?
Reflections on my science education and learning to trust my intuition.
I love the concept of intuition. I look up the word this morning on the etymology site and I’m surprised that they call it a ‘spiritual perception’. An inner knowing. Mid-15c., intuicioun, insight, direct or immediate cognition, spiritual perception. Today is May 31, 2025 and the Saturday papers are filled with chatter about the role of AI in our collective future. The latest fear is that somehow we are no longer going to know what is real and what is fake. All this discussion of AI has me reflecting about the transformative learning that occurred during my time in graduate school. I don’t know if these reflections will be in a memoir someday but I am finding it quite cathartic to dive back into my early years in the university.
It’s the late 1990’s and I’ve been teaching for a few years after my MSc in the first year biology program as a Lab Faculty. It is a progressive program as we take students on 3 field trips on campus to local ecosystems - forest, pond and intertidal. Some students tell me that they have never been in the forest - they had walked beside the forest but never taken a turn down the path. Many had never turned over the rocks at the beach to find barnacles and the scattering of tiny shore crabs. I grew up with a nature loving mom so I found it hard to imagine how many folks had not experienced the joy of exploring natural ecosystems.
As a student of ecology, I had been immersed in conversations about the state of the planet for many years. I understood we were in a delicate time of species and habitat loss, overfishing, clearcutting and our ecosystems were overloaded with environmental toxins and plastics. As an instructor in the first year biology program, I notice that I am getting more pissed off at how we are teaching biology to thousands of students every year but we are not talking about environmental issues. Biology 101 is taught to thousands of undergrads as a required course but we are not focusing on the connection between biology and environmental issues.
I wanted to talk about toxins and emissions as well as solutions like organic food, composting and bike lanes but I was told that these topics were not part of the biology course. We were spending time taking the students to the forest but we were not allowed to talk about the encroaching condo developments or marine pollution from the tankers in the harbour.
We teach students about biology as if humans don’t exist.
Let me say that again.
We teach students about biology as if humans don’t exist.
We slice the world into parts so it is easier to teach in small boxes. The courses are boxes that fit together into semesters and then fit together to build a program. The calendar is divided into boxes and each week and day into smaller boxes. Its a factory model of knowledge delivery. Once you understand one box you can move onto the next. Simple.
I was told that if I wanted to teach ‘environment’ that I needed to find my way to environmental science where a small group of students focused on these issues during their degree program. As you can imagine those students chose that program because they were already aware of the problems. It felt absurd and confusing. UBC had 1000’s of students going through biology, chemistry, calculus, psychology and economics with very few conversation about the interconnectedness of these concepts/programs. I had so many ideas about what I wanted to teach first year students including how we can plan our cities for well being but I was told ‘you need to get a PhD if you want to change curriculum at the university’.
It was pretty clear that Biology 101 was going to take a long time to change so I set out to find a PhD program. I was passionate about opening up the minds of young people to global environmental issues and at the time sustainability was barely on the radar of the university.
I had completed my Masters degree in Zoology at UBC in the Ecology Huts - the professors at that time were wildly passionate about publishing papers on birds, sea lions, voles, hares, salmon and more importantly the complex dynamics of ecological systems. The coursework in theoretical population dynamics was WAY over my head. I wanted to connect with humans about the problems and not just write papers about hummingbird wings. I was lost in the world of behavioural ecology when I realized that humans were the ones with behaviours that needed to change.
I found myself following in the footsteps of Dr. William Rees who also studied in the Ecology huts and moved over to the School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP). He was passionate about convincing humans that we need to think differently about how we build our cities and the massive reality of our ecological footprints (among many other topics including ecological economics). If you were at UBC during that time you would definitely have heard Bill give an incredible lecture on the subject. Here’s a link to an audio recording if you are interested to one called “Is humanity fatally successful?”.
I was accepted into the SCARP PhD program with Dr. Rees with a Masters degree in Zoology and a strong interest in education and curriculum. How might the university become a place the enabled sustainable futures through its programs? I had lots of big questions and it was time to start the research portion of my program.
As a trained scientist I was thinking about experiments, data gathering and analysis. I remember that the scientists wanted me to have 2 classes of students - one as a control and one as a test course. I had other committee members who were asking questions about methodology, ethics and other ways of knowing. I was starting to feel quite confused about how social scientists think about research. I was existing in an interdisciplinary space with both natural and social scientists on my committee who had rarely had the conversations we were having. There were a few folks starting to talk about indigenous ways of knowing and TEK (Traditional ecological knowledge) but at the time these were not central conversations.
As there was no methodology course being offered at the School of Planning, my supervisor suggested I look around the university for other offerings. I landed in a Feminist Methodology course in a small classroom on the north side of campus in a realm that I had never before encountered in university. I found myself taking my first course in the Department of Women’s Studies. This course would change the direction of my thesis and the way I understood research, knowledge and reality. This course would change my life.
Feminist Methodology is no bird course. I am handed a huge pile of photocopied readings to put in a 3 inch binder and I am encountering words and concepts that have been completely missing from all my previous degrees. I am drowning in literature that feels like a foreign language. I understand hypothesis testing, standard deviation, rigor and the scientific method but that’s not what we are talking about here. I’m way out of my comfort zone. I can hardly keep up with the dialogue, the perspectives, the range of types of methods and methodologies. Narrative inquiry, participatory action research, institutional ethnography, collaborative research…my mind was exploding with possibilities.
I find myself putting the words EPISTEMOLOGY METHODOLOGY and ONTOLOGY in bold letters on the inside cover of my notebook so that I could etch them into my brain forever. I’m so embarrassed and confused.
I’m thinking about the male professor who said to me “are you sure you are PhD material?”. Sigh.
What am I doing here? Who am I to walk across the campus from sciences into this program? I’m not even sure that the planning school understands what they mean by a PhD in Planning (but that’s another story for another time).
How is it that I’ve been going to university for so many years and I have never encountered the word epistemology? How is that not the first thing we learn in school?
I get multiple definitions from multiple sources and this is also deeply confusing to a science student. How can a definition be so unclear? I keeping begging my fellow students for more simplification as my brain likes to understand concepts fully. My scientific brain likes to understand. To know. I am highly skilled at memorizing content and applying it on tests and exams. My scientific brain likes order and control and boxes. I can understand things when I understand how they fit together. My brain does not like definitions that are filled with other unclear words and concepts.
I learn the word tautology around the same time. I get told that my definitions are tautological (ie. I’m using words to define things that mean the same thing). I am later told that my arguments are tautological. I feel queasy and confused most days. The scientists on my committee are questioning the use of the word methodology as something that is even necessary. I am later told that the word feminist could easily be removed from my dissertation (to make things easier for readers).
And over the next few years of thinking about my thinking and how I know what I know and how I want to think about my dissertation, I start to understand that epistemology is what will unlock my voice. Epistemology will slowly unlock my soul.
How do we know what we know?
I think this might be the question that will keep universities in business as we float into the AI era.
EPISTEMOLOGY- “How do we know what we know” - the theory of knowledge
METHODOLOGY - the theory of methods including the principles and rationale for the methods used. Often described as the approach to research.
ONTOLOGY - the study of reality - the study of being.
I didn’t love these definition because I didn’t really understand what theory was. Spend a bit of time googling theory and facts and your mind should be spinning quite quickly. We have so many complex problems that need our attention and I found myself wanting to solve problems and prototype solutions so my career focused on designing new programs instead of diving deeper into theoretical frameworks.
I am part way through my PhD when it is time to write the comprehensive exams. I learn that I have to write two comprehensive papers - a theoretical paper and a methodological paper. I’m completely confused as a science student who has never come across the concept of theoretical paper or methodological paper. There is only one method- the scientific method …so what on earth are they asking me for?
I had been taught that things are the way they are until someone publishes another study that is peer reviewed and shows data that proves or disproves the last version of the theory. The scientific process is ongoing as scientists attempt to understand how things are the way they are. It’s pretty clear. You need to have strong data, strong analysis and the graphs will demonstrate whether or not you need more sample size or if the trend is holding.
My first assignment in my Biology undergrad at McGill (pre internet and world wide web) was “what is the heart rate of an arctic fox?”. I had to go into the literature to find folks who had studied the heart rates of arctic fox and find the latest study that showed what those results were. This was knowledge. Understanding the reality of the world.
In science, I had never questioned reality or my understanding of reality or considered that the scientists might be influenced by their position in the world or their background or privilege or anything else about them. We wore white coats in the lab. We wore plastic protective glasses and we washed our hands before we touched the specimens. We were told not to become attached to our research animals. Do NOT name them or think of them in a way that causes you to be attached. You are to be OBJECTIVE. We are doing everything we can to reduce subjectivity and bias. Look at what happened to Jane Goodall they would say - she’s not been taken seriously as a scientist after she named her chimpanzees. I was even more confused as I had read all her books and Jane was a huge part of why I was interested in animal behaviour!
So now it’s the year 2000 and I find myself deep in the feminist literature on standpoint epistemology with Dorothy Smith. Her writing is making me weep. She’s talking about what it feels like to be a woman in the academy and it’s the first time I think to myself ‘what have they done to me?’. When did I stop feeling? When did I stop asking if this was how we need to look at the world? What if there was another way to study hummingbirds? I can’t believe that someone might be interested in my experience of the university. The hidden curriculum that makes me feel so misaligned.
Dorothy Smith is saying the thing out loud that I felt in my body but it’s so far deep down that I don’t know how to speak it yet. It will take decades before I write about this unearthing.
I hated bringing the hummingbirds into the lab. I dreaded seeing them die on the way home in the truck. I wept knowing that they deserved to be free in the wild. I was studying animal behaviour because I was trying to save the birds and I was stuck in a lab where birds often died ‘for the good of science’. I was feeling a lack of alignment in my bones but I wasn’t able to articulate it at the time. I was too focused on my experiments, my data and getting through the Masters degree. My dad wrote me poems about holding a hummingbird in my hand when I graduated. I remember how they felt in my hand weighing only a few ounces. I don’t remember how fast they flew in my experiments.
I remember vividly the pilot whale dissection in 3rd year marine mammals class at Dalhousie. The baby whale had been caught in a Fishermans net that morning. I remember opening the stomach to see the white liquid - its mother’s milk. Of course I understood mammals drink milk but I had never thought about what would happen when we opened its stomach. It was a baby. Its mother would be mourning its loss. I wanted to cry but there was no room for emotion in that dissection. It was time to learn and dissect not think about why this baby whale was in the room. How it was caught in the fishermans net and how anyone let that happen? Would someone be charged for negligence? Unlikely. We were told that these things happen sometimes and that we were very lucky to be there.
Epistemologies are theories about knowledge construction that answer questions about who can be a knower, what kinds of things can be known and what tests beliefs must pass before they are considered knowledge (Harding 1987).
A Sandra Harding quote from my paper Living in the Basement of the Ivory Tower (fun face: this was the paper I wrote for my comprehensive exam).
Feminist methods opened my eyes to understanding that there were other ways to think about the world. Other ways to know. We talked about valuing women’s experience, lived experience and other ways of knowing. I started to question everything I had experienced in science. The scientific realm was a world that often lacked empathy and feeling. Science was something that I could ‘do’ but it wasn’t something that I felt when I was conducting experiments. I was to be objective, scientific, unbiased in my thinking. I was to focus on the work in order to get good results. I’m not suggesting we need to throw out science and the scientific method! I love science! I’m suggesting that by opening up our minds to the range of ways of knowing that we can more deeply understand each other and the planet we are a part of.
I found ways to practice participatory and collaborative research, I wrote with red ink in my comprehensive exams. The theory was in black ink and my reflections on the transformation I was experiencing appeared in red ink. I learned about pleated text in the course on feminist methods. I co-wrote a chapter with my committee members and they asked ‘can we do this?’ and I put the question back to them. I think we can. We can do this.
So what do we do when science is exactly what we need to show the world that it is on fire? We use multiple methods and methodologies to understand ourselves.
I think it is important for all of us to think about our thinking. I’ve been spending the last 20 years thinking about mind-body connections and what it means to know something in your body. What does it mean to re-educate yourself after so many years of not knowing?
This week was not just about AI it was also about the start of the fire season in Canada. Manitoba and Saskatchewan have already declared a state of emergency and its the end of May. I feel the 27 degree day on Wednesday in Vancouver deep in my bones. It’s too hot, too early. I’m no longer looking forward to summer like I did when I was a kid. So yes of course we need science and climatologists and all the folks dedicated to studying ecology. We also need folks to feel change in their bodies and to connect to the deep wisdom of intuition. Lots more to say about that but for now I’ll leave you with a simple question.
How do you know what you know?
