Why rethink interdisciplinarity

If so, then the same should be true or interdisciplinarity: the notion may be useful to describe specific interactions in this disciplinary age of the sciences.

Of course, this would make the notion useful enough. Nothing to rethink. Sperber offered us a few examples, most because of the dissapointment they provided, the last two with a welcome air of optimism. As a student in a field interdisciplinary by definition Cognitive Science , I sadly identify with the student example he gave us. The important distinction I did not find in Mr. Sperber's paper, but later on appeared in Ms. Klein's discussion, is the one between multidisciplinarity impossible due to terminological and methodological barriers and interdisciplinarity possible only in communities of people who keep an open mind and can see meaning beyond the literal reading.

There's nothing to rethink about interdisciplinarity. What we have to fight is the animal fear of the unknown, of the different, of the 'other' which still plagues us. The basic problem is not limited to science. Generation after generation of philosophers, theologians, artists have struggled with it throughout history and across civilizations. What happens is that people are limited by many factors, the harshest of which being time.

Social constraints are also very powerful. So we tend to work in 'established disciplines'. And whenever someone comes in with an idea we don't understand, the first reaction is to say "it's wrong".

Here's an example. Coming from a neuroscience background, David Marr spent most of his tragically short carreer writing on the ideas that the cognitive processes can and should be described at different levels; the three levels currently codified under the term Marr's tri-level hypothesis especially in MIT circles , are the computational, algorythmic and implementational. Between with Tomaso Poggio and he was working on a book on Vision which got published two years after his death.

If interdisciplinarity would have been as popular then as it is now, Marr would have benefitted from learning about Anderson's Model. Philip W.

Anderson, Nobel Prize winner for Physics challenged the reductionist paradigm in "Each physical level has its own 'fundamental' laws and its own ontology. This view is consistent with everything I have experienced to date in any field I studied. There are NO absolutes, no final law, the closest we can get to Truth is by creating theories consistent within themselves and attempting to relate them.

But what interdisciplinarity can do is to provide fora like this one, where people can share opinions and evidence. Out of such discussions, research advances. Individual disciplines are just as necessary, however. That is where the actual research is done. Nobody can reliably follow two methodologies at the exact same time.

But exposure to the pros and cons of different methodologies can give raise to new ones, better suited to the study of specific phenomena. Simple or over-simplified? Radu Luchian Apr 7, UT I did not say the cognitive factors involved in socio-cultural phenomena such as the ones we discuss in this seminar are simple. I said that among other phenomena , we observe a continuous interplay between the innovating spirit and the conservative one.

And that both are equally useful and different people choose different points of balance between them. Fear of the unknown is always a brake for unchecked curiosity.

Depending on the goal one has in mind, the brake is useful- or it isn't. When the body of knowledge was smaller, it was easier to be 'interdisciplinary' Physicians were physicists and chemists and biologists.

Architects were sculptors and painters and mathematicians. And so on. There's nothing to rethink. The term may be new, but the concept behind it is old and as necessary for the advance of the models we build, as specialization is for the consistency of those models. Steve Fuller introduced this idea by emphasizing differences in methodologies, but objects or problems can constitute specialties, too Whitley Moreover, the difference between research domain and teaching domain makes it possible to understand some of the problems of scientific careers mentioned by Dan Sperber.

Yes, there are problems of language, conceptual differences, etc. It is primarily at higher levels of aggregation where things get messy. Indeed, the studies on the emergence of scientific specialties have demonstrated that combining heterogeneous knowledge is one of the main ways in which new specialties emerge.

Empirical studies have shown that funding of interdisciplinary collaboration can trigger sustainable interdisciplinary research programs, i. However, most collaborations are more short-lived. We can observe a typical process here: Institutionalization of funding criteria is also an over-generalization of these criteria, and science responds partly with window-dressing.

Please understand this as a plea for a more concrete debate. Chubin, Daryl E. The Conceptualization of Scientific Specialties. Sociological Quarterly Laudel, Grit, Collaboration, creativity and rewards: why and how scientists collaborate. International Journal of Technology Management Whitley, Richard D. Cognitive and social institutionalization of scientific specialties and research areas.

Richard Whitley ed. I hope the seminar, in the coming months, keeps going back and forth between these two perspectives. So, the discussion turns to the theme Rainer Kamber introduced. Where do the problems originate?

We must talk about problem choice. We need a dialogue of both the general and the concrete. With 'top down interdisciplinarity' I refer to anything where the demand for interdisciplinarity is stated prior to any assessment of the need for interdisciplinarity for solving research problems see Grit's comments. This is due to the fact that in Germany the institutionalisation of research outside universities has to be justified, and for at least one type of institute the justification is that the institutes can conduct interdisciplinary research easier than universities.

However, the fields combined in the institute originally didn't come up with problems suitable for interdisciplinary research except for one which was very applied in nature and therefore confronted with problems that demanded interdisciplinarity. Two developments could be distinguished: With weak organisational leaders, fields simply did not become integrated and proceeded without much interdisciplinary research i.

In both cases, the departments which could not integrate themselves in the interdisciplinary work suffered: In the first institute they got shut down, in the second institute they had to change their research programs until they could be integrated. In Germany, this seems to work well as long as collaborative projects are submitted to a very specific and extended interdisciplinary peer review Grit knows more about this than I do.

However, there are counterexamples where interdisciplinary research is promised because of the funding but doesn't happen. As far as I remember, some environmental research programs had this problem: Natural and social scientists could not collaborate successfully. They rather dealt with their own problems by applying their own methods.

The results could still be combined, but this was a multidisciplinary rather than an interdisciplinary approach at least in my understanding of the terminology. With these examples, I would like to reinforce the point that interdisciplinary research is possible only if certain cognitive preconditions are met. Unfortunately, generalizing from empirical studies of interdisciplinary research plays only a minor role in this dialogue. I think that this is to a great extent due to a weakness of science studies which currently appear to lack a common frame of reference for empirical descriptions of research processes.

Idiosyncrasies abound. This is not surprising because it seemed to lack the basic pre-requisites of any kind of collaboration. Why should the anthropologists be interested in the research results provided by the psychologists? They have a shared object "culture" but it is not clear if they have a shared subject matter "culture" and "mode of thought" have different meanings. Have the psychologists formulated a research question that is interesting for the anthropologists?

Have they formulated this research question in the language of the anthropologists? Obviously not, if the anthropologists think that the thesis "has already been amply demonstrated with ethnographic data". This is different to the many successful interdisciplinary collaborations I have observed in the natural sciences Laudel The usual situation was that a scientist had a problem that he or she could only solve by borrowing methods from other specialties.

To give one example: a group of cell biologists was interested in studying the movement of cells. They couldn't solve the problem with their own conventional methods light microscopy. The cell biologists interested a group of biophysicists in the problem. With their help the biologists adapted another microscopical method and hence solved their problem.

The main difference seems to be that there is a general interest in the other specialty's methods and not the attempt in the first line to reproduce the methodical and methodological differences between the disciplines, as Steve Fuller described it. The interest of many natural scientists is produced by a cognitive need to combine knowledge from different specialties, a need that is much weaker in the social sciences and humanities.

Indeed, the institutions that influence a scientists' career path do not keep step with the development of new research areas. A PhD degree is usually awarded in the older disciplinary structures.

In my empirical studies I had several examples of PhD students successfully working in interdisciplinary projects. In these cases, the supervisors of the PhD student stemming from two different specialties, agreed about a research question that should be answered by the PhD student. The PhD student collected methods from both specialties and solved the problem. There were no cases where there was a problem of getting the degree from the faculty because the research problem to be solved was recognised as important for the degree rewarding discipline.

Borrowing methods from other specialties is unproblematic because it is part of the scientific culture in many natural science specialties. When it is needed, or when the need is perceived?

Among cognitive and social scientists, as I tried to describe, things are not so smooth. Is it because interdisciplinarity is not actually needed, or is it because the need is not well-understood?

Often the latter, I would argue. It is true that needs are not as easily perceived in these fuzzier disciplines, which lack generally shared goals and criteria. In a good part of my work, I have been arguing that anthropological theory is at a dead end because of its inability to interact seriously with the cognitive and biological sciences.

Some agree, some disagree. The right policy would be then, it seems to me, a pluralistic one: Let any given avenue be explored once there are enough serious scientists who have argued the case and want to go ahead. In the social sciences it often appears to be not clear what the research problem is and hence when it is actually solved.

Consequently, there is also a much weaker pressure to get adequate methods for solving the problem. You can sort it by conference so as to see directly which entries deal with interdisciplinarity. So you are encouraged to cite the relevant literature during discussions. ALSO, the bibliography can somewhat play the role of an online archive library insofar as the entries have the corresponding text online. When it is the case, please mention it or write directly to us and we will enrich the entry with the hyperlink to the online text.

The vast majority of interdisciplinary collaborations I observed in the natural sciences had been driven by the use of methods from other specialties.

The growing complexity of objects, also led to a growing need for methods from other fields. Scientists I observed were eager to use as many methods as possible in order to produce substances or to get complementary data; these methods often came from different fields. If the complexity of the research object is a driving force of interdisciplinary collaboration, then the weakness of the latter in the social sciences is surprising: The social sciences have to deal with the most complex object of all: human beings.

Consequently, the kind and number of methods applicable for observing this object is very limited. With this kind of freedom, we could produce hard data. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar, [] Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Thus, linguistics, for example, is practiced by several schools, of which the Chomsky school in its varieties is only the most prominent, at least from the outside. There is no approach to syntactic analysis which all linguists share even to the troubled extent that biologists, for example, share a commitment of Darwinian evolution.

Linguistics is in what Thomas Kuhn called a pre-paradigmatic state. Thus, a psychologist, anthropologist, or literary critic seeking an interdisciplinary alliance with linguistics cannot expect to make cause with a consensus linguistics representing the views of more or less all linguists. Rather, she must seek an alliance with a partisan on one school or another and so must undertake to discover just which school is most compatible with her aims.

The same, of course, holds for a linguist looking for a literary critic — which brand of critic do I choose? Taking the long view, one might wonder whether or not linguistics will always be thus fractured. I see no change in the foreseeable future, but I would hope that, in the long run, linguists would arrive at some substantial consensus.

But how would that come about? In particular, I think that neural evidence will play a critical role. That is to say, matters internal to linguistics are going to be partially adjudicated through relations with other disciplines. But I think that is true of the neurosciences as well, not to mention, anthropology, rhetoric, musicology, and so forth. It seems to me that we are seeing a whole-scale revision of the human sciences and that interstitial and bridging work between and among disciplines is part of this process.

But how do you make the distinction? We may all agree that some such distinction is useful, but, when it comes to actual cases, we might have very different judgments. Can this distinction be articulated in a way that provides some useful constraint on picking longshots? Sheer anathema to most social scientists.

The second activity plunges me into the heart of institutional politics. Bureaucracies are inherently conserving organizations. I start the process of encouraging people to take more risks by throwing out their usual means of answering the question of what people in their institution are doing.

The typical first place to look is the organizational chart. It is, because it reminds us of the role of innovation and risk in the growth of knowledge.

Vers un savoir postdisciplinaire? What counts as good interdisciplinary work? An empirical view Veronica Boix Mansilla Apr 18, UT Dan Sperber's committee experience resonates clearly with that of many: Journal peer reviewers, funding committees, and interdisciplinary researchers alike puzzle over what counts as high quality interdisciplinary work.

Over the last two years, my colleague Howard Gardner and I, together with a team of researchers, have been studying the criteria by which experienced interdisciplinarians assess their work. Our interviewees were researchers in centers like the Santa Fe Institute, the MIT Media Lab, and the Bioethics Center at U Penn-- What we have discovered resonates with several of the claims made in the discussion so far and adds a few new criteria: 1.

Proposed interdisciplinary research approaches or the results obtained are assessed against the background of what is known and "trusted" in the disciplines involved. Many would agree, this is in part a necessary yet a rather conservative "default" approach employed by multidisciplinary review committees.

Interdisciplinary work is also assessed vis a vis its "leverage" to provide insights that would have been unattainable through canonical disciplinary means. This echoes Rainer Kamber's and Julie Klein's targeted reference to the "problem solving capacity" of a piece of work. In our analysis this criterion applies to "Lebenswelt" problems How can we create a just society in a globalized world? The most experienced subjects in our study also value work that stands in what we are coming to call "reflective equilibrium".

In it, the relative presence of specific disciplinary views is weighted in light of the aims of the work; the methods proposed are selected against the background of a variety or fit contenders, and a fruitful level of tension among disciplinary views is delicately maintained.

Our interviewees seemed to value healthy skepticism-an awareness of the specific imitations of even their best integrative efforts. Finally, because interdisciplinary work is communicated in the form of specific "genres of performances"-a research paper, a computer enhanced musical instrument, a new media art exhibit-- each genre imposes particular standards to the work. Our subjects referred to this criterion with ease.

Interestingly, like Dan and many others in the discussion, most of our subjects highlighted the absence of clear criteria to assess interdisciplinary work as problematic and no individual subject provided us with a full picture of the criteria described above. It is my hope that, as we gain more clarity about how to carry out quality interdisciplinary work, we will find fewer reasons to be disappointed with the research and the educational practice that we see taking place in the name of "interdiscplinarity.

Good news! In the meantime, I still wonder to what extent their findings reflect the experience of particularly successful interdisciplinary endeavours such as the Santa Fe Institute or the MIT Media Lab -- as opposed to the general situation which of course would not make these findings any less interesting, but would affect their interpretation. This project has brought together physical oceanographers, ichthyologists, meteorologists, archivists, librarians, programmers, educators, and managers from several institutions to create a unique combination of content to serve researchers and the general public.

It combined data sets on fish catch statistics and marine conditions that had been unavailable in digital form with mission logs of research vessels, oral histories of research scientists and archival photographs to provide an inclusive, multifaceted view of oceanography.

This project is an example of a multidisciplinary environment, where researchers and professionals from different fields have been brought together to work on a common problem. Sometimes the presence of differently- degreed folk on the grant proposal is evidence enough.

Since bibliometric data is readily available and comfortingly quantitative, publications co-authored by members of different departments seem to satisfy some funding agencies. Interestingly, in this project a heuristic albeit not a strong one was embedded in the formal usability analysis of the system: if a non- scientist considered scientific data useful, or if a scientist found the less technical aspects of the site useful, that was considered evidence enough of the desired cross-fertilization of ideas.

Surely we can articulate more clearly what we want out of interdisciplinarity. Jochen Glaser Apr 28, UT Rich Gazan's contribution "Interdisciplinarity in practice" illustrates nicely why I am always uncomfortable with the word "interdisciplinarity".

Creating this information system is obviously interdisciplinary work that is important for the progress of science. It is also an interdisciplinary collaboration. It may even produce new knowledge though I am not sure about this.

But I don't think it is interdisciplinary research. In my opinion, the distinction between research and other types of activities is an important one, which is unfortunately too often obscured by the "ity" word.

In the case of a project described by Rich one would expect the relations of the project to each of the collaborators prior and ongoing lines of research collaborators to be different from what usually occurs in collaborative research projects.

Comparing research with other types of interdisciplinary work could lead to a better understanding of all these activities. It would also show that a general "interdisciplinarity discourse" is of limited value because it tends to hide important differences.

The Geography of Thought Bill Benzon Apr 22, UT The New York Times Book Review has recently reviewed a book reporting the kind of cross-cultural psychological results that Dan Sperber mentioned in his initial article -- I'd even hazard the guess that the book reports those same results. Nisbett and the review is written by Sherry Ortner, who identifies herself as an anthropologist.

Here are some critical passages from the review: On the methodology: for an anthropologist like me, what counts as meaningful research is what is called "participant observation," joining as deeply as possible in local social and cultural worlds to try to figure out what is going on for those who live within those worlds. The idea that by taking individuals and putting them in rooms to do strange tasks one will learn something significant about their cultures seems to me quite dubious.

But there is more here than methodological difference between an experimental social psychologist and an ethnographic anthropologist. Even within Nisbett's "scientific" framework, his arguments are not convincing. It is common knowledge, for example, that the vast majority of subjects in psychology experiments are college students; in fact, they are the subjects of most of the studies discussed in this book.

Yet college students are a very specific subset of any population, and one cannot help wondering about the generalizability of findings derived from testing such not-very-typical individuals. There was also the question of interpreting the numbers. Return to Book Page.

Des Fitzgerald. This book offers a provocative account of interdisciplinary research across the neurosciences, social sciences and humanities. Setting itself against standard accounts of interdisciplinary 'integration, ' and rooting itself in the authors' own experiences, the book establishes a radical agenda for collaboration across these disciplines.

Rethinking Interdisciplinarity does This book offers a provocative account of interdisciplinary research across the neurosciences, social sciences and humanities.

Rethinking Interdisciplinarity does not merely advocate interdisciplinary research, but attends to the hitherto tacit pragmatics, affects, power dynamics, and spatial logics in which that research is enfolded. Understanding the complex relationships between brains, minds, and environments requires a delicate, playful and genuinely experimental interdisciplinarity, and this book shows us how it can be done.

This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors. Get A Copy. Hardcover , pages.

More Details Post your question. Safe and Secure Payments. Easy returns. You might be interested in. Document type : Preprints, Working Papers, Complete list of metadata Display. Files index. Citation Dan Sperber. Why rethink interdisciplinarity?.