The Geography of Philosophy Project
The University of Pittsburgh administered $3 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, spanning research on knowledge, wisdom, and understanding across cultures and societies globally.
I had the priviliege of executing and helping steer this project, working under Distinguished Professor & Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science, Edouard Machery. His work primarily explores the replication crisis in psychology, and he uses experimental philosophy methods to obtain data-driven results to back philosophical claims.
What is knowledge, wisdom, or understanding? These are age-old questions to philosophers, and the underpinnings of cultural practices, socialities, and language.
In some ways, the GPP attempts to answer these questions by surveying populations globally on what they think. Surveys were co-designed by 10+ sites and translated into 20+ languages, sampling populations from major industrialized cities to small-scale and indigineous populations. Are there similiarites in how people think about & use these concepts?
Or, are there discrepencies in how we talk about and approach these topics as scientists? Western traditions of philosophy postulate, and perhaps speculate, what knowledge is. Experimental philosophers question whether their concepts in epistemology, which are founded in an armchair, apply cross-culturally. We don’t know as philosophers what a working concept of knowledge would be coming from a bottom-up approach, but through experiments and diversified methods of framing the question, we can begin to include voices on, about, and of knowledge that have long been excluded by the academic tradition.
The GPP weaves in a multi-disciplinary approach. Philosophers, anthropologists, cognitive and behavioral scientists, linguists, economists, informed by emerging scholarship in experimental studies, have created not only a new way of uncovering ‘knowledge’, but also a new approach for framing the quest.
By exploring the presence of ‘what is knowledge’ in language and culture, our 20+ studies collect a very broad range of data:
- the translation of knowledge-words into 15+ common and less-commonly spoken languages
- cross-cultural differences in wise-decision making
- whether gestalt defintions are universal
- language corpora
Importantly, my role was to manage the contracts, communications, and progress of 11 global sites and a collective dispersed network of 100+ researchers to work in coordination together.
I coordinated, at times, for 10-20 extremeely busy academics across the globe, with complicated teaching and travel schedules, to be on a zoom call together.
I primarily worked as the project’s internal liason. I handled meta-organization of the project and was the go-to person with any questions about status, tech assistance, beaurocratic, financial, and more. I handled subawards China, Ecuador, India, Japan, Morocco, Peru, South America, South Korea, Slovakia. I stepped in for any role that was needed. I learned video editing, international shipping standard for electronics, beaurocratic invoicing, and was invited to attend a bi-lingual workshop in Peru. (Candidly, my job looked like what a post-doctoral fellow would do, without the “intellectual contribution” only a PhD could add to the research itself, combined with a project manager, executive assistant, and digital media lead.)
The were, at times, political barriers to working internationally, and working barriers to work in tandem with 11+ universities to collect data. Each time was unique in its set-up, survey populations, and academic framework.
My personal flair to the project was to insist on more all-team meetings, newsletter communications, and creating content for a public ‘lay’ audience. We navigated working across time zones and varying academic schedules across five continents, almost always a-synchronisticly. I insisted we have more all-team meetings.
If the GPP was a vehical on the road, I helped Edouard draw the map. I faciliated and soaked in direction from all perspectives to synthesize the project in collaboration with his co-PIs, the foundation, the institution, teams, advisors, and more.