| CFCUL member webpage | |||||
 |
Alexandra Van-Quynh
|
||||
| During ten years Alexandra Van Quynh has been using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance for fundamental physics investigations, namely for the probing of the order parameter in superconducting systems and for the investigations of molecular dynamics in complex macromolecules and liquid crystals. Her current interests are related to the broad subject of "Intuition and serendipity in scientific discoveries". A project dedicated to this research area will be submitted to the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Tecnology (FCT) and will be carried out in collaboration with the Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée (CREA) at the École Polytechnique of Paris and the Pôle de Psychiatrie of the Sainte-Marguerite Hospital in Marseilles (France). This investigation will be based on protocols that permit to probe the pre-reflective conscious. More details should be given later on that web page. Additionally she has been following courses on a short-therapy method called biopsychology that uses Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and insight of emotions. At times she organizes evening casual conferences on subjects related to "science and something" with the systematic aim to please her curiosity and to present some of the exciting (and surprising) aspects of fundamental science to a non-initiated audience. [cv] | |||||
| Situação actual no CFCUL | |||||
 |
|
|
|
|
|
| Post-doc FCT | |||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Research |
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The project of research of
Alexandra Van-Quynh is somehow the natural consequence of ten years of
research in fundamental physics during which she has faced several times
the delicate, fruitful and truthful experience of “having an intuition”. The desire of broadening here
knowledge beyond pure physics, made her start – still being a researcher
in physics – to take an interest in psychology of sciences. In
particular, she began to read on psychology of intuition and followed
courses in NLP (neuro-linguistic programming). One of the great consequences of
that additional education was to reinforce her high respect for the way
important scientific discoveries and ideas emerged or were developed.
So, she decided to organize sessions devoted to the “promotion” of a
certain idea of science, in words “how science is implemented in our
whole life and not only locked in the dark rooms of smart professors”.
The French-Portuguese Institute (IFP) of |
|||||
|
Project of investigations |
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The project is carried out in the Centre for
Philosophy of Science of the Lisbon University (CFCUL.
It is included in the project “Poincaré, Philosopher of
Science” (funded by the FCT) and it aims to elaborate a
psycho-phenomenological description of intuitive experience in
mathematics. This researchis made in close collaboration with the
Centre de Recherches en Épistémologie Appliquée (CREA) of the École
Polytechnique of Paris where Alexandra Van-Quynh does a Ph. D in
philosophy of sciences (for which the scientific programme is that of
the project detailed on this page). This phenomenological investigation will use recent
methods, namely the interview of explicitation, allowing for a rigorous
analysis of the process of pre-reflexive consciousness in an intuitive
experience. The protocol will be focused to the case of the intuitive
experience in mathematics. The global unfolding process of the
intuitive experience obtained from the interviews will be put in
perspective with different philosophies of mathematics. We will consider
mostly the opposition between Platonism and Constructivism. According to
Platonism, mathematics involves discovery: mathematical objects being
objective and ideal entities ready to be contemplated, whereas according
to Constructivism mathematics involves invention: mathematical objects
being subjectively constructed. Is the preference that a mathematician expresses
for one of these two philosophies connected with the way he perceives
and lives through the nature of his own work? Considering these
different kinds of positions and the results of the detailed analysis of
the interviews, we hope our work will give a hint of what the
mathematician really experiences as his consciousness grabs a new
mathematical concept. We believe that it is worthwhile to draw from
the methods used by phenomenology in the description of the different
modalities of consciousness (reflexive and pre-reflexive). We also
believe that these methods can be used in the description of the
experience of scientific findings and in the deeply subjective origin of
the objective unfolding of knowledge. |
|||||
|
State-of-the-art |
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Throughout the history of human thought and in
every field of knowledge, intuition has played an essential role that
has been acknowledged both by scientists and artists. The history of the
sciences is full of testimonies of scientists belonging to various
traditions of thought, telling about how a new idea came to them in a
sudden, unexpected manner without any discursive activity. A lot of
attention has been paid to the content of these intuitions and a
considerable energy spent on exploring their consequences. But very few
studies have been consecrated to describe the subjective experience
associated with the intuition and the intimate experience of discovery
itself, i.e. to what the scientist is living through at the
moment of the intuitive breakthrough. A reason for this silence around the intuitive
experience could be its character of immediacy. Indeed, intuitive
knowledge is first of all direct, immediate knowledge, which cannot be
reached through an intermediary reasoning process. It is not understood
progressively, at the end of a deductive process consisting of the
accumulation of middle terms. On the contrary, intuition shows a
character of discontinuity: it surges forth, unexpectedly, out of our
control. Nonetheless, does the direct character of an intuition
eliminate all possibility of description of the intuitive experience? Many philosophers of intuition agree on the
existence of a pre-intuitive gesture: platonic conversion, Cartesian
doubt, phenomenological reductions are inner movements that allow for an
unlearning process, a break in the usual manner of looking at the world
that liberates an interior space for intuition to spring forth. Among
scientists, the mathematician Henri Poincaré is probably one of the
greatest examples of awareness of the role of intuition in mathematics.
In a famous conference given in 1908 at the Société de Psychologie de
Paris, he emphasized the role of intuition in mathematics research. In
fact, Poincaré dedicated himself to analyze the inner psychological
processes that allowed him to discover the fuschian functions. Further,
he drew a general model for mathematical discovery consisting in four
steps: conscientious preparatory work, unconscious work during a resting
or diverting time (incubation), illumination (intuition), and
conscientious work on the verification of the appeared idea. |
|||||
 
 |
|||||