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Aristotle launched us on the trajectory ending in disciplinarity. Plato divided his investigations by personal names (Euthyphro, Phaedrus, Theatetus), occasionally by social roles (Statesman, Sophist) or political phenomena (Republic, Laws). In contrast, Aristotle introduced a taxonomy that foreshadows those presently used to manage knowledge: logic (Categories, Prior and Posterior Analytics), physics (including not just the Physics but also On the Heavens, Meteorology, On the Soul, On the Parts of Animals and more), and ethics (including the 'icomachean Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, and even to some extent the Metaphysics). The question is whether the modern knowledge management scheme that began with Aristotle is adequate for the age of Google. (We think not.) If not, perhaps an undisciplined discourse more evocative of Plato can help us constitute new, more relevant, inter- and trans-disciplinary forms of knowledge — using “interdisciplinarity” in a generic sense to cover inter-, multi-, cross-, trans-, and other extra-disciplinary formations.

The Complementarity Thesis

Both science and society now recognize that disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are not mutually exclusive but complementary. Hence the widespread appeal even within disciplinary formations for interdisciplinary efforts. The two are nevertheless also strongly opposed, since otherwise these efforts would be unnecessary.

The complementarity of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity was adumbrated by Martin Heidegger in a mid-1950s essay, where he noted the mysterious way that science depends on both disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. “Specialization is … a necessary consequence … of the coming to be of modern science.” Nevertheless, disciplinary compartmentalization does not just “split the science off from one another”; it also “yields a border traffic between them” (Heidegger 1977, pp. 170-171). Disciplinarity is the basis of the divide and conquer strategy of modern natural science. Identify a particular phenomenon (such as the mechanical interactions of inelastic bodies), develop a specialized method for analyzing that phenomenon (the mathematical representation of force and mass found in classical mechanics), and then extend this method across the object-area until it is exhausted or reveals the need for a new object-area definition and associated method (as with chemical bonds and interactions).

This analytical, disciplinary approach has advanced our understanding of nature and contributed to the development of technological power. Disciplinary knowledge has improved human welfare, increased human abilities both to produce and consume, vastly lengthened our life spans, and created opportunities for exploring outer and inner space. At the same time, according to Heidegger, the disciplinary formations of modern science set the stage for further interdisciplinary interactions — and thereby new disciplinary formations. Physics and geology made possible geophysics; chemistry and biology made possible biochemistry and molecular biology. Indeed, in the way that interdisciplinarity usually functions, it does not so much counter disciplinarity as advance it. But note that this form of interdisciplinarity, rather than promoting global views, creates additional and ever more regional ontologies. It has become apparent, however, that the complexity of many problems — from social anomie to climate change — calls for global views, even at the cost of more nuanced epistemological analysis.

It is not necessary to accept Heidegger’s argument concerning the ontological foundations of the disciplines in order to admit the empirical fact that their interactions tend to generate more disciplines, and that in consequence there exists a need for some kind of discipline-transcending reflection — a reflection that nevertheless struggles for realization. Steve Fuller, who styles himself an “ideologue of interdisciplinarity,” rejects any and all ontological justifications. According to Fuller, the disciplines are no more than socially rigidified forms of what were once interdisciplines or worldviews — worldviews that characteristically included a strong social movement component (Fuller and Collier 2003). For instance, classical modern physics, which has become a narrow, self-interested, knowledge-producing social institution subdivided many times over into mechanics, nuclear physics, quantum physics, astrophysics, high energy physics, and more, in its original 17th century form as “mechanical philosophy” claimed to offer a comprehensive understanding of the world, not simply a regionalized ontology. For Fuller, interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity thus remain complementary, with interdisciplinarity in desperate need of recovery as a free ranging, heroic ideal that might bring scientific knowledge to bear in human affairs.

Another way to characterize such a heroic ideal would be as interdisciplinarity that is both broad and deep.

In the 20th century, however, cognitive productivity in both disciplinary and interdisciplinary forms is becoming problematic, if not counterproductive. Knowledge production today has a tendency to swamp knowledge use systems at both individual and institutional levels. Overwhelmed by knowledge, we find it increasingly difficult to make good decisions — or, Hamlet-like, any decision at all. Psychological studies have well established that choice behavior is complicated by the expansion of choice options, and the same seems likely with regard to cognitive inputs. Nor is this a problem for ivory tower intellectuals alone. Try buying a television: one now has the option of buying SD, ED, HD-Ready, or HDTVs in one of five main varieties (CRT, LCD, Plasma, Front Projection, or Rear Projection) – this in addition to considerations of size and brand, over-the-air, cable, or satellite, etc. And as the science writer Malcolm Gladwell (2005) has reported in one example of the oversupply of information: for physicians, increases in knowledge about patients can actually lead to more rather than fewer errors in diagnosis. Additionally, while politicians, when faced with difficult problems, often call for more research as a way to stall for time, society is increasingly unable to fully fund all the knowledge producers it has trained. PhDs become cab drivers, arguably a poor allocation of intellectual resources. Institutions such as the U.S. National Science Foundation now reject higher and higher numbers of grant applications and support those they do fund at progressively diminished percentages of their original requests. Overproduction has bred absurdities such as astronomers who each night download gigabytes of data, only to store them in data bases that no one has the time to analyze.

Moreover, the knowledge society is increasingly characterized by a disconnect between knowledge production and knowledge utilization. This disconnect is in part the result of the sheer volume of information being produced. Disciplines pursue more and more specialization and detail, crowding out awareness of ends or purposes. Interdisciplinary efforts are often characterized as shallow, but this is true only in comparison with the “stove-pipe” narrowness of depth in disciplinary detail and specialization. It is equally the case that the disciplines are unable to offer any width and breadth of contextualization. Moreover, no epistemological justification is offered for why we should prioritize the vertical as compared to the horizontal dimensions of knowledge. In what sense does a PhD know something more or more valuable than a person with three masters? As important as disciplinary depth is knowledge of the overall topographic landscape of human affairs.

But how is this topography to be mapped? This is a question that requires a reconfigured version of the humanities to explore. Granted, the dream of a grand unification of (scientific) knowledge has properly been abandoned. In its stead, a crowded, fast-paced, high-tech world sponsors simultaneous interactions across an indefinite and shifting ranger of perspectives in search of nuggets of cognitive utility.

The epistemological existentialism of the Internet provides one salient example. Hotlinks embedded within texts radiate in all directions, exchanging disciplinary boundaries for a hyper-multidisciplinarity. Instant access to infinite amounts of information, combined with the lack of a vetting system for identifying authoritative knowledge, has promoted a new type of knowledge gathering and analysis: surfing. Surfing has been dismissed as a distracted, superficial, and indolent activity in contrast with the serious, sustained focus of traditional learning. But in an age of chronic overinformation, knowledge consumers must learn how to perform information triage. While not yet part of either undergraduate curriculum or graduate training, in a world where no one has time to read a book cover to cover, surfing is a skill that even specialists must master.

Might there not be a form of interdisciplinarity that complements the advancement of disciplinarity by circumscribing disciplinarity, assisting both producers and users of knowledge to draw insights from constrained disciplinary formations? Might there not be a type of interdisciplinarity that trains us to take quick dips into bodies of knowledge, extracting the knowledge necessary for particular circumstances, without becoming hostage to the incitements of surfing — disciplining our desires as well as our epistemological methods? As the pursuit of infinite knowledge begins to lose its raison d’etre, should there not be a form of interdisciplinarity — call it “critical interdisciplinarity” — that focuses on the recognition of limits, defining how much or how little information is needed to address a challenge at hand?

Predisciplinarity and the Rise of the University

Before interdisciplinarity in either the disciplinary-producing or disciplinarycircumscribing senses could manifest itself, disciplinarity itself had to take on its peculiarly modern form. Any assessment of interdisciplinarity — multi- and trans-, noncritical and critical — will benefit from an appreciation of this background. Prior to the modern period, learning exhibited a kind of unity that might be called predisciplinary. Aristotle, it is true, introduced distinctions between logic, physics, and ethics; but these were never of a kind to raise the possibility of cross-disciplinary formations such as “physical ethics.” During the Middle Ages the division of the artes liberales into grammar, rhetoric, dialectic (the trivium), arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (the quadrivium) ensured that the education of “free men” included all the knowledge and skills needed to exercise their social roles. Insofar as it existed, disciplinary specialization was present more in the “servile arts” of artisans and tradesmen. Not even teachers of the liberal arts became specialists in their different branches, since the idea of, for example, possessing arithmetic without grammar would have been considered a deformation of the mind. In the monastery schools the unfettered pursuit of knowledge was viewed skeptically, criticized as curiositas, and therefore subject to disciplinization in a premodern behavioral sense. Only at the end of the Middle Ages, as the infinite pursuit of disciplinary knowledge took on the character of a spiritual activity, would Renaissance men become necessary to cross boundaries and synthesize diverse areas of learning.

The rise of the universities — Bologna in 1088, Salamanca in 1218 — did not initially alter premodern predisciplinarity. Modern disciplinization really began outside the universities in such institutions as the Royal Society and other “invisible colleges.” For example, in the United States before the mid-19th century all college degrees were what would now be called general studies degrees. The modern research university was a phenomenon of the post-Civil War period, developing in response to the varied challenges facing a dynamic American society.

Spurred by industrialization, urbanization, and expansion along the western frontier, traditional predisciplinary structures of higher education broke down. Collegiate study (previously limited to the East Coast) had been dominated by recitations of Greek and Latin texts and lectures in natural philosophy and political economy — with no electives or laboratory courses. The overwhelming emphasis was on the preservation and transmission of established traditions and insights rather than on the creation of new knowledge. College education prepared gentlemen for politics, law, and theology.

Such an education was rendered obsolete by the forces of urbanization and industrialization. To a remarkable degree it was an academic revolution from above, led by a small number of visionaries. In 1869 Harvard President Charles William Eliot introduced the concept of the major and the elective system for undergraduates, creating an internal educational market where students could vote with their feet for the most useful classes. This in turn encouraged further curricular innovation and academic specialization, expressed by the progressive differentiation of undergraduate majors. In 1876 Johns Hopkins University adopted and adapted Germanic notions of advanced specialization and research in the form of the PhD degree. At the same time, the development of industrial chemistry — first in Germany, soon throughout Europe and the United States — marked the transition to an economy dependent on scientific research. The highest development of the tinkerer tradition in the person of Thomas Edison (1847-1931) also marked its eclipse as industry, invention, and science lurched toward integration.

New categories of knowledge were created. Natural philosophy divided into physics, chemistry, and mathematics, while natural history became biology and developed an experimental component that challenged the traditional emphasis on description and taxonomy. The social sciences of sociology, psychology, economics, and political science arose to address the new social conditions, applying a scientific and distinctively empirical approach to the problems of industrialized society. Professional associations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (founded in 1849, in imitation of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which had been founded the decade before) quickly emerged across the disciplines, establishing standards for accreditation and scholarship.

The disciplines that became known as the humanities — philosophy, classical and modern languages, history, art history, religion studies — formed a rump of knowledge, left over after the extraction of the other new specialties. The term itself was an adaptation from the Renaissance studia humanitatus, when humanist scholars looked to ancient thinkers such as Plato and Cicero for inspiration and guidance. A few of the latter day epigone protested the rise of specialization and disciplinarity and the new emphasis on research, but in general the humanities accommodated themselves to the novel paradigms of knowledge. Abandoning traditional ideas of expounding a perennial philosophy, fields such as literature and philosophy now trained their own specialists to develop new insights. Having given over the study of nature to the physical sciences, and the empirical aspects of the study of culture to the social sciences, the humanities were left with conducting meta-analyses or promoting a general approach of l’art pour l’art.

20th Century Interdisciplinary Education and Research

The closest the humanities could come to defending the traditional nature of the humanities was to defend interdisciplinarity. In her classic study Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (1990), Julie Thompson Klein distinguished a number of types of border traffic between the disciplines that emerged from the early middle 20th century: multidisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity. She further identified two distinct roots of 20th century interdisciplinarity: educational reform (a more humanities oriented version) and scientific advancement.

Beginning in the 1920s, U.S. institutions of higher education sought, by the development of general studies curricula, to counter the specialization they had created in the form of the major. The election of a major — within which courses were largely predetermined — was to be complemented by a set of core courses providing liberal education in a post-medieval sense. Under the influence of the Enlightenment, the conception of liberal arts had been transformed from passing on traditions to an upcoming elite who were already liberated from servile labor to liberating all minds from the superstitions and prejudices of tradition itself. Thus it turned out that the sciences, as those disciplines that commonly challenge received religious and political beliefs, came to have a central place in the new multi- disciplinary educational core, along with those parts of the social sciences and the humanities that could be interpreted as part of such a progressive program. In any case, this core of ostensibly predisciplinary courses themselves became steadily more disciplinary, and were increasingly viewed as something to be “gotten out of the way” before turning to the proper task of specialization.

Beginning in the 1930s, initially as a feature of the unity of science movement, scientific researchers proposed to interweave and hybridize the scientific disciplines into multi- and cross-disciplinary formations in order to extend their ability to pursue more complex research programs. Interdisciplinary efforts within the sciences were further intensified by the rise of mission-oriented “big science” (Price 1963) associated with the explosion of science funding during and after World War II. The research and development of radar, the atomic bomb, and other military projects could not be undertaken by any one scientific discipline, but required the coordinated interaction of such diverse disciplines as electrical and mechanical engineering, physics, and chemistry.

During the latter half of the 20th century scientific interdisciplinarity was further intensified by efforts to address social problems such as poverty, war, hunger, overpopulation, and environmental degradation. Recognition that none of these human problems are amenable to strict disciplinary approaches also led the physical sciences to cross borders with the social sciences — and vice versa. Social systems thinking emerged from systems science and systems engineering as one proposal for a grand interdisciplinary synthesis to replace older ideological syntheses such as those of Marxism or Thomism. Other factors promoting scientific interdisciplinarity included the rise of the computer as the subject of a specialized interdisciplinary science of electronic logic machines and as a tool for all the sciences, the emergence of relational sciences such as ecology, and the thematizing of chaos and complexity as distinct interdisciplinary research programs.

Following the physical sciences and engineering, the social sciences and the humanities soon pursued their own distinctive forms of interdisciplinarity. Area studies (American Studies, Latin American Studies, Asian Studies) prospered, and were soon complemented by Black Studies, Womens Studies, Popular Culture Studies, and more. The humanities saw the wholesale borrowing of methodologies as hermeneutics, phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction flowed across the liberal arts and to a lesser degree into the social sciences. But by and large, just as in the physical sciences, the result was more new disciplinary formations from what began as interdisciplinary exchanges. The various area studies programs became institutionalized in departments and degrees, which were complemented by their professional associations and scholarly journals.

Whether as educational curricula or research programs, all efforts at interdisciplinarity have tended to evolve into narrow disciplines. Moreover, they have tended to originate from rather restricted border crossings. Despite a plethora of interdisciplinary work, for instance, there have been remarkably few efforts to bring the sciences and the humanities together in a sustained manner. Instead, it has been much more common for one science to be crossed with another, or for one compartment of the humanities to open a window into another humanities compartment. On the research side, biophysics has not really united biology and physics but created another and even more narrow discipline; the same goes for fields like biochemistry and paleoclimatology.

Interdisciplinary teams of scientists and engineers formed to create nuclear weapons or land humans on the moon have been spectacularly successful in meeting very specific mission-goals, but with little or no attention to the broader questions these successes raise. On the side of the humanities, the traditional belief in a perennial philosophy was abandoned; philosophers, historians, and literary critics became specialists who developed new knowledge. Non-perennial and reputedly non-ideological syntheses such as poststructuralism or postmodernism were the most that seemed possible.

On the educational side the achievements were less dramatic, but the failures were just as glaring. The merger of periodical and broadcast journalism (with some advertising) into communications studies advanced technical competence at the same time that it marginalized the political and philosophic roots of these fields. And the general education movement remained the abused stepchild of higher education, consisting of spot check requirements often resented by students.

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