Simplifications in Science with Mazviita Chirimuuta

In this episode of Agile On The Mind I was delighted to welcome Dr Mazviita Chirimuuta to the podcast. Mazviita is a senior lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of award winning The Brain Abstracted (available for free at that link).

I heard Mazviita being interviewed on the Brain Inspired podcast and invited her to join me in conversation about the philosophy of science, the simplification strategies that scientists use in their work and how this can apply to people working with teams.

As agilists we often think about our work as if it’s science - running experiments with teams and trying to measure to determine reality. So in my classic mode of taking things way too seriously, I was thrilled and honoured to welcome on a Philosopher of Science to discuss this properly. I’ve written about some of Mazviita’s work before on this substack so I was extra excited to have her on the podcast.

In this episode Mazviita brought the philosophy, and I brought the team practitioner perspective. It was a blast. We covered some fascinating topics, including:

* What does cognitive science rely so much on the study of vision? 

* What is colour? 

* How is the study of philosophy useful for scientists?

* Simplification strategies in science 

* Simplification 1 - mathematisation

* Is a team more like a biological system or a physical system?

* Simplification 2 - analogies

* Mind as computer, and cognition as computation 

* Teams and analogies 

* Simplification 3 - Reduction

* Parts and wholes, the reductionism of Pavlov

* Kant and starting from the basics of knowledge

* Haptic Realism - what do we bring to our observations of reality

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