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Week 8 Readings
Knowledge Synthesis for Professional and Personal Development (Liberty
University)
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Week 8 Reading Notes
Why some of us don’t have one true calling
Why some of us don't have one true calling | Emilie
Wapnick Source:
What do you want to be when you grow up? Well, if you're not sure you want to do just one
thing for the rest of your life, you're not alone. In this illuminating talk, writer and artist Emilie
Wapnick describes the kind of people she calls "multipotentialites" — who have a range of
interests and jobs over one lifetime. Are you one? TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best
talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers
give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment
and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more. Find closed captions
and translated subtitles in many languages at http://www.ted.com/translate Follow TED news
on...
Ten cheers for interdisciplinarity: The
case for interdisciplinary knowledge
and research.
AN 9706064520 to search on Liberty
Library website
Authors:
Nissani, Moti
Source:
Social Science Journal . 1997, Vol. 34 Issue 2, p201. 16p.
Document Type:
Article
Subject Terms:
Interdisciplinary research
Abstract:
Presents a comprehensive defense of interdisciplinary knowledge and research.
Definition of interdisciplinarity; Rewards of interdisciplinary knowledge and research;
Intellectual, social and personal price of compartmentalization; Barriers to
interdisciplinary knowledge and research.
Full Text Word Count:
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ISSN:
DOI:
7632
0362-3319
10.1016/S0362-3319(97)90051-3
Accession Number:
9706064520
Notes:
Liberty University subscribes to this resource in print. Check "Get it @ LU" if no full text
links appear in this record.
Translate Full Text:
TEN CHEERS FOR INTERDISCIPLINARITY: THE CASE
FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGE AND RESEARCH
Contents
1. INTRODUCTION
2. WHAT IS INTERDISCIPLINARITY?
3. REWARDS OF INTERDISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGE AND RESEARCH
4. A BRIEF CASE AGAINST INTERDISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGE AND RESEARCH
5. BARRIERS TO INTERDISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGE AND RESEARCH
6. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS
7. REFERENCES
Full Text
The frequently-encountered wholesale dismissal of either interdisciplinary knowledge or
research reflects a profound misunderstanding of their vital contributions to scholarship, society,
and individuals. This article presents the only self-contained, comprehensive defense of
interdisciplinary knowledge and research, arguing that they are important because: 1. Creativity
often requires interdisciplinary knowledge. 2. Immigrants often make important contributions to
their new field. 3. Disciplinarians often commit errors which can be best detected by people
familiar with two or more disciplines. 4. Some worthwhile topics of research fall in the
interstices among the traditional disciplines. 5. Many intellectual, social, and practical problems
require interdisciplinary approaches. 6. Interdisciplinary knowledge and research serve to remind
us of the unity-of-knowledge ideal. 7. Interdisciplinarians enjoy greater flexibility in their
research. 8. More so than narrow disciplinarians, interdisciplinarians often treat themselves to the
intellectual equivalent of traveling in new lands. 9. Interdisciplinarians may help breach
communication gaps in the modem academy, thereby helping to mobilize its enormous
intellectual resources in the cause of greater social rationality and justice. 10. By bridging
fragmented disciplines, interdisciplinarians might play a role in the defense of academic
freedom. The case against interdisciplinary knowledge and research is made up of many intrinsic
drawbacks and practical barriers. Taken together, these rewards, drawbacks, and barriers suggest
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a mild shift in the contemporary world of learning towards interdisciplinary knowledge and
research.
"Your planet is very beautiful," [said the little prince]. "Has it any oceans?"
"I couldn't tell you," said the geographer. ...
"But you are a geographer!"
"Exactly," the geographer said. "But I am not an explorer. I haven't a single explorer on my
planet. It is not the geographer who goes out to count the towns, the rivers, the mountains, the
seas, the oceans, and the deserts. The geographer is much too important to go loafing about. He
does not leave his desk." Antoine de Saint Exupery (The Little Prince, pp. 63-64)
INTRODUCTION
Long ago, C. P. Snow (1964a) observed that the intellectual life of the West was being
increasingly split, with literary intellectuals at one pole and physical scientists at another. As a
consequence, the West lost even a pretense of common culture. This cultural divide, in Snow's
view, entailed serious consequences for our creative, intellectual, and everyday life.
By now, most of us no longer think it possible to become a Renaissance Scholar a la Leonardo
da Vinci. Gradually during the nineteenth century, the ideal of the unity of knowledge--that a
genuine scholar ought to be familiar with the sum total of humanity's intellectual and artistic
output--gave way to specialization. Humanity's ever-growing store of knowledge, and the fact
that each person is bestowed with a unique set of aptitudes, left most scholars and artists
stranded in ever-shrinking islands of competence (Cummings, 1989):
No people in our own time could rationally proclaim that they knew everything about
everything, or even everything about their own fields.....Instead of being challenged by the
slowly emerging knowledge of the Renaissance, we are now being deluged by torrents of new
information almost daily. In self-defense, to avoid drowning and attain some kind of footing, we
seek to come ashore on ever-smaller islands of learning and inquiry. ... To look beyond....is to be
overwhelmed by the ocean's magnitude: better to remain ignorant of all but our own tiny
province.....The result in our own time is not just Snow's "two cultures" but in fact a multitude
of
cultures, each staking out a territory for itself, each refusing to talk to the other, and each
resisting all attempted incursions from surrounding "enemies" (Miles, 1989, pp. 15-16).
Others take a more sanguine view of the contemporary world of learning:
It has become too easy to criticize esoteric research as narrow, detached, and trivial. Such
criticism lacks an appreciation for the elegant way in which fields of study merge.....Some links
facilitate integration and thereby prevent specialization from becoming narrow-mindedness. ...
We need to reconceptualize our model of disciplinary growth and specialization, adopting a more
organic model that accounts for the intricate links among the many specializations. Our current
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mechanistic model divides disciplines into numerous blocks of specializations; it is inaccurate ...
and misleading (Ruscio, 1986, pp. 43-14).
Regardless of one's views about the extent of compartmentalization in the modern research and
creative enterprises, it is clear that specialization in one form or another is here to stay. The
question that keeps rearing its head concerns the future and legitimacy of interdisciplinarity.
Some people feel that any attempt at interdisciplinarity smacks of dilettantism, perhaps even
charlatanism. This article will show that this view entails a profound misunderstanding of the
intellectual, social, and personal rewards of interdisciplinary knowledge and research.
WHAT IS INTERDISCIPLINARITY?
Although many have tried to define interdisciplinarity (Berger, 1972; Kockelmans, 1979;
Mayville, 1978; Stember, 1991), it still seems "to defy definition" (Klein, 1990). The most
widely cited attempts break down interdisciplinarity into components such as multidisciplinarity,
pluridisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. Because these subdivisions throw
little light on the theory and practice of interdisciplinarity, elsewhere (Nissani, 1995a) I have
proposed their replacement with a more appropriate definition. To begin with, a discipline can
be conveniently defined as any comparatively self-contained and isolated domain of human
experience which possesses its own community of experts. Interdisciplinarity is best seen as
bringing together distinctive components of two or more disciplines. In academic discourse,
interdisciplinarity typically applies to four realms: knowledge, research, education, and theory.
Interdisciplinary knowledge involves familiarity with components of two or more disciplines.
Interdisciplinary research combines components of two or more disciplines in the search or
creation of new knowledge, operations, or artistic expressions. Interdisciplinary education
merges components of two or more disciplines in a single program of instruction.
Interdisciplinary theory takes interdisciplinary knowledge, research, or education as its main
objects of study.
This article is largely concerned with the defense of interdisciplinary knowledge and research in
typical academic settings. Although almost identical arguments could be used in defense of
interdisciplinary knowledge and creativity in the arts, such a defense will not be undertaken
here. Also, this essay is largely confined to the knowledge and research aspects of academic
interdisciplinarity, leaving for another occasion a discussion of the similar, but more complex
and ambivalent, case of education. Likewise, this essay only offers reflections in--but not about--
interdisciplinary theory.
REWARDS OF INTERDISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGE AND RESEARCH
When pressed to justify interdisciplinary knowledge and research, theorists typically come up
with two or three arguments. No single treatise known to me makes a comprehensive case for
interdisciplinarity. This section tries to fill that gap. In doing so, it relies on the reflections of
interdisciplinary theorists, on the reflections of others, and (especially in the choice of
illustrations) on my own experiences in a variety of fields.
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As will be seen, the specific rewards listed below fall within three overlapping categories: (1)
growth of knowledge, (2) other social benefits, and (3) personal rewards.
Creative Breakthroughs
The very act of creation often involves the bringing together of previously unrelated ideas
(Koestler, 1964). Highly creative artists and thinkers form unconventional but fruitful
permutations of disparate ideas (Simonton, 1988). The combined aspects may be drawn from a
single discipline, as in Torricelli's sea of air hypothesis, or from everyday experiences and a
single discipline, as in Archimedes' celebrated "eureka" case. The act of creation may also arise
from the permutation of ideas from two or more disciplines. Thomas Kuhn, for instance, noticed
the striking similarity between a gestalt switch (psychology) and a paradigmatic shift (history of
science).
Most observers of the creative moment concur: "The clashing point of two subjects, two
disciplines, two cultures--of two galaxies, so far as that goes--ought to produce creative chances.
In the history of mental activity that has been where some of the break-throughs came" (Snow,
1964a, p. 16). "Intellectual cross-pressures generated by an interdisciplinary outlook liberate a
person's thinking from the limiting assumptions of his own professional group, and stimulate
fresh vision" (Milgram, 1969, p. 103). "The periods of greatest excitement and of expanded
vision in our joint work as social psychologists have been during interdisciplinary efforts"
(Sherir, 1979; see also Becher, 1989; Bechtel, 1986; Florman, 1989; Gaff, 1989; Miles, 1989;
Moffat, 1993; Ruscio, 1986). C. Wright Mills (1959, pp. 211-212) puts it well:
The sociological imagination ... in considerable part consists of the capacity to shift from one
perspective to another, and in the process to build up an adequate view of a total society and of
its components. It is this imagination, of course, that sets off the social scientist from the mere
technician. Adequate technicians can be trained in a few years. The sociological imagination can
also be cultivated; certainly it seldom occurs without a great deal of routine work. Yet there is an
unexpected quality about it, perhaps because its essence is the combination of ideas that no one
expected were combinable--say, a mess of ideas from German philosophy and British
economics. There is a playfulness of mind back of such combining as well as a truly fierce drive
to make sense of the world, which the technician as such usually lacks. Perhaps he is too well
trained, too precisely trained. Since one can be trained only in what is already known, training
sometimes incapacitates one from learning new ways; it makes one rebel against what is bound
to be at first loose and even sloppy.
Thus, if chance favors the prepared mind, and if preparation often involves grounding in two
or more disciplines, then those who wish to speed up the growth of knowledge should promote,
or at least tolerate, interdisciplinary knowledge and research.
Outsider's Perspective
According to some observers (Becher, 1989, p. 118), "career mobility ... is among the most
potent sources of innovation and development within a discipline." For instance, seventeen out
of forty-one scientists in the phage group (which played a decisive role in mid-century biology)
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were physicists or chemists by training. Heinrich Schwabe was a pharmacist, James Joule a
brewer, Paul Gauguin a stockbroker. Thomas Hunt Morgan was trained as an embryologist, A.
E. Housman as a classicist, Somerset Maugham as a physician. There is a pattern here, which
demands an explanation.
The first cause is obvious: immigrants bring fresh insights and methodologies from their old
disciplines. This may include, in particular, a more fruitful way of telling apart wheat from chaff.
The second cause can be best approached by noting the resemblance between immigrants to a
new discipline and to a new land. Foreign observers like Herodotus, de Tocqueville, or
Margaret Mead sometimes see cultural aspects which are invisible to the natives. The natives
live and breathe their customs; the perceptive foreigner doesn't. The same goes for the history of
ideas: outsiders are less prone to ignore anomalies and to resist new conceptual frameworks.
An outsider's perspective, then, is particularly valuable at times of crisis. Such times are
common. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that no discipline is exempt from cycles of
normalcy and revolution (Kuhn, 1970). Sometimes, an entire discipline is in intellectual
disarray, e.g., pre-Copernican astronomy with its multitude of epicycles.
One could cite many historical periods of disciplinary crisis, but here I shall focus on the
contemporary scene. According to some observers (Koestler, 1959; Schwartz, 1992),
contemporary particle physics is in an unsettled state. The social sciences may also be in such a
state. "The most prominent indicator of the crisis ... is the low wheat-to-chaff ratio in the
glittering piles of research publications." Other indicators of crisis, according to this view, are
controversies about everything and preoccupation with methodologies (Sherif, 1979, pp. 201-
203). Another alleged candidate is education (Swoboda, 1979, p. 81; Whitlock, 1986, pp. 24-
27).
Although these bleak assessments of contemporary particle physics, social science, and
education could be mistaken, the history of ideas leaves little doubt that some fields are, or will
be, in an unsettled state. The disarray may be more keenly felt and acted upon by newcomers
who have not yet grown habituated to it--fresh recruits on the one hand, immigrants from other
fields on the other.
Crossdisciplinary Oversights
The gaps among [the social science] disciplines are much too large.....As a result, many
sociologists.....[long continued] to draw their imagery of the Protestant Reformation from Max
Weber, although professional historians have long since relegated his theories to the dustbin. In
the same way, sociologists long continued to draw their imagery of primitive societies from
Patterns of Culture far after the time when anthropologists had dismissed Benedict's
ethnographic depictions as quite misleading. In neither case does the rejection of the work deny
the intriguing quality of the conceptual scheme, but it does brand the specific historical or
ethnographic accounts as so fallacious empirically that the concepts would not be utilized
without the most careful reconsideration. And, both cases serve to illustrate how the gap
between disciplines has led to one of them relying on theories and data which are quite
invalidated among the originating discipline (Wax, 1969, pp. 81-82).
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Insulated from related disciplines and lacking a clear notion of its bearings relative to what
others have done, intensive study within a single [social science] discipline sooner or later leads
to floundering into territories already explored by others. The result is confusion and displays of
needless ignorance, of the kind typified in the past by psychologists who improvised their own
sociology of the family or of culture, or who declared social institutions to be fictions (Sherif,
1979, p. 217).
The problem is by no means confined to the social sciences. At the turn of the century
some biologists believed that dominant genes would increase in frequency in relation to
recessive genes. In this case, the interdisciplinary corrective was put into effect by the
mathematician Hardy.
Nor is this predicament confined to the past. The writings of some contemporary
economists often fly in the face of basic ecological concepts. Most books, one noted
economist says,
discussing environmental and resource problems begin with the proposition that there is an
environmental and resource crisis. If this means that the situation of humanity is worse now than
in the past, then the idea of a crisis--and all that follows from it--is dead wrong. In almost every
respect important to humanity, the trends have been improving, not deteriorating. [Therefore,
global and U.S. trends will go on] improving instead of deteriorating.
Had our economist consulted an introductory logic text, he might have perceived that this
passage employs a persuasive definition of "crisis" (humanity's situation is worse now than in
the past), instead of the more appropriate lexical definition ("an unstable state of affairs in which
a decisive change is impending"--Webster International). Had he consulted a middle-of-the road
ecology text, he might have realized that this passage ignores the widely accepted theoretical
definition of "crisis."
Or take the following lines, quoted approvingly in an eighth edition of a logic text. "The school-
book pictures of primitive man sometimes omit some of the detractions of his primitive life--the
pain, the disease, famine, the hard labor needed just to stay alive." Now, the assertion about
hard labor ignores anthropological findings that some "primitive" tribes enjoyed much leisure.
Or take, finally, the key assertion in an influential, and otherwise excellent, education treatise,
that, of all the animals, "man is the only one to treat not only his actions but his very self as the
object of his reflection." A passing acquaintance with ape behavior and, especially, with Gordon
Gallup's work on self-awareness in chimpanzees and orangutans (Gallup, 1979), would have
surely led this author to qualify both this statement and its implications.
This comedy of errors could be expanded to fill volumes. Such oversights can be found in works
of the highest quality: they are part and parcel of the scholarly condition. In the non-existent
world of pure disciplinarity, the people who commit such errors and their colleagues, being strict
disciplinarians, would have not been in a position to catch them. And all those fancied strict
disciplinarians who could spot such errors would have never learned of their existence. Zealous
divisions of this type are of course fictional (Ruscio, 1986). The routine detection of
crossdisciplinary oversights shows that we do not yet live in a pure disciplinary world.
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Nonetheless, the oversights that do escape notice for years suggest that the world in which we do
live is not as interdisciplinary as it ought to be. Indeed, with more thinkers straddling more
disciplines, and with greater tolerance for interdisciplinary conceptualizations and vocabularies,
such embarrassing episodes would be less common than they are now (cf. Whitman, 1953).
Disciplinary Cracks
According to most interdisciplinary theorists, some problems of knowledge are neglected
because they "fail to fit in with disciplinary boundaries thus falling in the interstices between
them" (Huber, 1992, p. 285; see also Campbell, 1969; Kavaloski, 1979; Kockelmans, 1979). For
instance, it seems reasonable to suppose that psychology has something to do with price raising,
but, in 1977, this problem fell outside the domain of both psychology and economics; it
therefore received insufficient attention (Boulding, 1977).
Before this sensible claim can be accepted, it must be borne out by the historical record. So far,
this record is open to an opposite interpretation: potentially productive questions in No Man's
Lands do eventually get attention. Witness, for example, the ongoing search for extraterrestrial
life, which shifts along between astronomy and biology. Or witness explorations in scientific
parapsychology, which fall between psychology and mysticism. Perhaps, as Ruscio (1986)
argues, the disciplines are not in practice as sharply demarcated as most theorists suppose.
Disciplinary researchers seem capable of filling productive, yet unoccupied, niches, so that the
opportunities for fruitful research in the gray areas among the disciplines are perhaps not missed
for long.
Regardless of the historical reality of unexplored gray areas, one point is perfectly clear: such
areas include important topics which often require interdisciplinary research.
Complex or Practical Problems
Suppose that you wished to understand the Soviet-American Cold War. Suppose further that you
were interested in fathoming this entire conflict, not merely one or another of its aspects. A few
years and a few bookshelves later, you might realize that most experts have failed to arrive at a
self-contained portrait because they examined this subject from a single disciplinary perspective.
An integrated approach, you might conclude, holds a greater promise of bringing you closer to a
firm grasp of this complex subject than any important but one-sided study. Thus, in this
particular instance, you may begin with history. At some point of your ambitious undertaking,
you would realize that history falls short, and that the Third World policies of both America and
Russia are important to your subject. At another point you might conclude that the theories and
practices of totalitarianism and democracy must be understood as well. You may prolong this
branching out process for a while, until a reasonably coherent picture emerges. If you
persevered, your broad synthesis may well embody a deeper understanding than any
unidisciplinary approach could possibly muster.
Or suppose you wanted to understand the nature of political liberties. You might examine the
subject from a philosophical perspective, and, if you are an original thinker, come up with some
interesting observations. Or you might examine it from a historical standpoint, focusing perhaps
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on the conflict between Athens and Sparta, or between the Third Reich and France. Or, if you
happened to be a science historian, you might focus on the similarities between scientific and
democratic decision-making. All these disciplinary contributions may be valuable. But some
hunters for truth go beyond this point: when their quarry ignores human-made "no trespassing"
signs, they continue the chase. If, besides this interdisciplinary resolve, they also have an original
mind, they may end up writing an epoch-making book on the Open Society and its Enemies.
In such cases, those who stop at the disciplinary edge run the risk of tunnel vision. Besides these
obvious intellectual costs (cf. Saxe, 1945), narrow disciplinarity is frequently accompanied by a
social cost. It is possible, for instance, that the high costs and risks humanity endured throughout
the Cold War period are traceable in part to the tunnel vision of decision-makers and their
academic advisors (Nissani, 1992). Humanity's use of new reproductive technologies is open to a
similar interpretation:
The failure to engage wisdom of an adequate breadth for addressing the subject at hand, along
with the disciplinary norms that encourage such failure, are painfully evident even in the best of
the recent books on the impact of the new reproductive technologies ... [books which] fail to
transcend the narrow boundaries of their own argumentative fields to offer broad-based and
widely comprehensible options for our collective future (Condit, 1993, p. 234).
Bertrand Russell's (1960, p. xv) characterization of politics may still merit our attention: "It is the
custom among those who are called 'practical' men," he says, "to condemn any man capable of a
wide survey as a visionary: no man is thought worthy of a voice in politics unless he ignores or
does not know nine tenths of the most important relevant facts."
Even well-meaning statesmen may err because they do not understand the technical, social, or
scientific aspects of a policy:
It is dangerous to have two cultures which can't or don't communicate.....Scientists can give bad
advice and decision-makers can't know whether it is good or bad. On the other hand, scientists in
a divided culture provide a knowledge of some potentialities which is theirs alone. All this
makes the political process more complex, and in some ways more dangerous, than we should be
prepared to tolerate for long, either for the purposes of avoiding disasters, or for fulfilling....a
definable social hope (Snow, 1964b, p. 98).
The intellectual, social, and personal price of narrow compartmentalization has been often
remarked upon (Boulding, 1977; Easton, 1991; Eliade, 1977; Gaff, 1989; Gass, 1972; Mayville,
1978; Petrie, 1986). Indeed, history might have been different if the experts who developed fire
retardants in children's nightwear examined their mutagenic potential (Swoboda, 1979), if the
people who put together the Aswan Dam had been trained to remember the large picture, if the
people who marketed thalidomide looked beyond its tranquilizing and economic potential. An
interdisciplinary background may have not caused industry experts to adopt a more balanced
view of the tobacco/cancer link, but it might have tempered their outright advocacy of smoking.
In more general terms, "recent history is filled with cautionary tales [all showing] the dangerous,
sometimes fatal, narrowness of policies recommended by those who possess expert knowledge."
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Experts prefer quantifiable variables, they tend to ignore contextual complexity, and their scope
is often limited (Marx, 1989). All too often, experts forget that "problems of society do not
come in discipline-shaped blocks" (Roy, 1979, p. 165).
Of the many episodes which capture our society's disciplinary dilemma in more personal terms,
I should like to relate one. It involves a nuclear weapons scientist who gradually became
alienated from his work. His epiphany came in
the experience he had in the mid-1980s when visiting the Soviet Union for the first time:
Walking in Red Square ... [seeing] so many young people ... he began to weep uncontrollably ....
Before that, Moscow had been no more than a set of lines at various levels of tads and pressures
and calories per square centimeter that one had to match with the bombs. (Lifton & Markusen,
1990, pp. 273-274)
Again, for all I know, the production of nuclear weapons could be justified on moral grounds,
but this is not the point here. To democrats and humanitarians, the frightening point is this: in
this world of specialists, a highly educated person can be unaware of the social and moral
dimensions of her actions. H. G. Wells said someplace that history is a race between education
and catastrophe, but this captures only part of our plight. Ironically, in this age, one may know
much about a subject and yet know little about its ramifications. I for one know decent people
who know everything about the chemistry of CFCs and nothing about the ozone layer (Nissani,
1996); everything about internal combustion engines and nothing about global warming;
everything about minimum wage legislation and nothing about poverty. Compartmentalization,
besides lack of education, is the enemy; an enemy that can only be conquered through holistic
scholarship and education:
Previously, men could be divided simply into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the
one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of
these two categories. He is not learned, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into
his specialty; but neither is he ignorant, because he is "a scientist," and "knows" very well his
own tiny portion of the universe. We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a
very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the
ignorant man, but with all the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line (Ortega y
Gassett, 1932).
To sum up. Many complex or practical problems can only be understood by pulling together
insights and methodologies from a variety of disciplines. Those who forget this simple truth run
the intellectual risk of tunnel vision and the social risk of irresponsible action. In some areas,
interdisciplinary research has long been practiced, e.g., materials research or American studies.
Such areas, and the habit of holistic vision they foster, should become more numerous. Future
specialists will perhaps be able to see their field "as part of a wider context, to reflect on the
impact of their discipline' s activities on society, and to enhance their ability to contribute to
social developments" (Huber, 1992, p. 290).
Unity of Knowledge
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It is of course impossible, in our age, to become an expert in everything. But if we mistake
disciplinary knowledge for wisdom; if we forget how much we don't know; if we forget how
much we cannot know; if we don't set for ourselves, in principle at least, the ideal of the unity of
knowledge; we lose something of great importance. By persistently aiming at the hazy target of
omniscience, interdisciplinarians help us remember these things. They thus spur us to see the
various components of human knowledge for what they are: pieces in a panoramic jigsaw puzzle.
And they inspire us to recall that "the power and majesty of nature in all its aspects is lost on him
who contemplates it merely in the detail of its parts, and not as a whole" (Pliny, 1977, p. 581).
Familiarity with other cultures enables us to see deficiencies in our own:
The modern mind divides, specializes, thinks in categories: the Greek instinct was the
opposite, to take the widest view, to see things as an organic whole It was arete that the
[Olympic]
games were designed to test the arete of the whole man, not a merely specialized skill.....The
great event was the pentathalon, if you won this, you were a man. Needless to say, the Marathon
race was never heard of until modem times: the Greeks would have regarded it as a monstrosity.
As for the skill shown by modem champions in games like golf or billiard, the Greeks would
certainly have admired it intensely, and thought it an admirable thing--in a slave, supposing that
one had no better use for a slave than to train him in this way. Impossible, he would say, to
acquire skill like this and at the same time to live the proper life of a man and a citizen. It is this
feeling that underlies Aristotle's claim that a gentleman should be able to play the flute but not
too well (Kitto, 1957, pp. 173-174).
Flexibility of Research
Most fields experience exciting periods of rapid, sometimes revolutionary, advances, followed by
periods of comparative stagnation. Most people stick it out through thick and thin; without their
dedication, the world of culture would have been in a sorry shape. (Although sometimes, as we
have seen, immigrants bring fresh perspectives and thereby contribute to their new subspecialties
or disciplines.) Be that as it may, in personal terms, individual scholars eager to migrate to a new
discipline enjoy greater flexibility and freedom in their career, an obvious personal reward of the
willingness to cross disciplinary boundaries.
Law of Diminishing Returns
The law of diminishing returns states that, beyond a certain point, the yield on fixed
increments of input gets progressively smaller. It takes hours to learn chess, months to get to
be reasonably good, and years to become an expert.
A similar situation seems to prevail in the world of learning. An insect anatomist, for instance,
must keep abreast of his field. He might have never read Tolstoy or Plato; never heard Bach or
Vivaldi. As a human being, he could undoubtedly gain more from getting acquainted with these
authors and composers than from spending the same amount of time on insect anatomy. But life
is short. In a better world, we would all have "world enough, and time." In this world, a
champion marathoner, a concert master in a major orchestra, a Stakhanov, or a liver
toxicologist, are the victims of the law of diminishing returns. To reach the pinnacle of their
profession, they
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often end up exploring one interesting feature of a single atoll. Interdisciplinarians, by contrast,
are forever treating themselves to the intellectual equivalent of exploring exotic lands.
Social Change
Although the modern university is rich in intellectual resources, it is only mildly effective as an
agent of social change. One would expect a stronghold of professional thinkers to have a
fundamental impact on politics, but it doesn't: the academy enjoys little success in mobilizing its
vast intellectual resources to improve society.
The reasons for this are no doubt complex, but one among them is clear: "the fragmentation of
the disciplines renders all of us passive before a world become increasingly obscure and
arbitrary" (Birnbaum, 1986, pp. 65-66).
A community whose members speak a multitude of mutually unintelligible languages cannot
build high towers; functionality requires effective communication (Hirsch, 1987). To transform
theory into praxis, to tap the tremendous potential for progress and justice in the intellectual and
artistic communities, channels of communication, and a common language, must be reinforced.
Interdisciplinarians, by reminding us of the unity-of-knowledge ideal, by their mastery of two or
more lingua academicas, may be able to contribute to a greater integration of the world of
culture.
Academic Freedom
Cultural systems--like ecosystems---can be disrupted or destroyed by external interventions.
"Too forceful a superimposition of the extrinsic values of accountability and relevance on the
intrinsic values of reputation-seeking and quality control by peer group judgment can only lead
to intellectual subservience, and thence to academic sterility. On the cognitive side of the
equation, knowledge itself, viewed as a cultural resource, demands good husbandry and steady
replenishment" (Becher, 1989, p. 169). Owing to the disciplinary fragmentation of the world of
learning, academics fail to notice those larger threats to academic freedom which affect the
academic community as a whole.
To preserve even a modest degree of intellectual integrity, the enemy within should not
remain unnoticed. The problem remains of how to bridge the evident divisions and thus to
promote
that recognition of commonality which seems essential to the maintenance of some measure of
collective independence.....An enhanced recognition of mutuality could serve as better defense
against the intrusive managerialism which seeks to impose a crude form of accountability, based
on false assumptions about the nature of intellectual endeavor, and bolstered by insensitive and
often spurious "indicators of performance." It might even help to persuade the wider society, on
whose patronage the pursuit of knowledge ultimately depends, to maintain for academics a
reasonable liberty--if one which remains well short of license--in their choice of what to study
and how to study it (Becher, 1989, pp. 169-171)
If we accept Becher's analysis and share his concern for academic freedom, an additional
advantage of interdisciplinary knowledge, research, and education, emerges: perhaps more than
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any other group within the academy, interdisciplinarians are posed to build bridges among the
disciplines.
A BRIEF CASE AGAINST INTERDISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGE AND
RESEARCH
At times, interdisciplinary perspectives may prove a handicap. Indiscriminate attempts to apply
one discipline to others have often had unsavory consequences. Both Archimedes' physics and
Spinoza's philosophy suffered for being clad in an ill-fitting mathematical dress. Evolutionary
theory suffers because it contradicts religious beliefs. Some people believe that the social
sciences could advance faster by blazing trails with their own axes, not with fancy imports from
the natural sciences.
More often than not, amateurs and outsiders will miss an essential facet. They often blunder, as
did the many "inventors" of perpetual-motion machines, the religious fundamentalists who
dismissed Galileo's telescope on spurious grounds, alleged observers of UFOs, or the music
lovers who rioted during early performances of Stravinsky's works.
Even under the best circumstances, an interdisciplinarian is unlikely to gain as complete a
mastery of her broad area as the specialists upon whose work her own endeavor is based. She
must risk dilettantism to gain her bird's eye view. She may become jack of all trades, master of
none. Literary critics, for example, often borrow a theory from another discipline, even though
they fail to "first understand what it means in that discipline and how it is judged there" (Levin,
1993, p. 33).
The impossible ideal of the unity of knowledge may lead some people to scorn the never-ending
search for knowledge: since humanity's stock of knowledge cannot be mastered, and since reality
itself must forever elude us, the quest for truth might be given up as misguided in principle.
Also, ignorance in some cases is bliss. Knowing the negative consequences of their actions,
interdisciplinarians may wrestle with dilemmas which are dimly perceived by their straight-and-
narrow brethren. Fragmentation, on the other hand, renders mastery of a subject manageable, it
helps us forget how much we cannot know, and it keeps us blissfully unaware of untoward
repercussions.
An interdisciplinary dialogue runs the risk of going stale. The interdisciplinary community can
become "cut off from fresh infusions of disciplinary knowledge." It can slide into naive
generalism with little disciplinary training (Grant and Riesman, 1978, p. 35).
In some cases, interdisciplinary research requires cooperation of experts with different
disciplinary backgrounds and different ways of thinking--a notoriously difficult
undertaking.
Interdisciplinary knowledge and research are demanding. To keep reasonably abreast of just two
fields, for instance, requires tremendous investment of time and intellectual energy.
BARRIERS TO INTERDISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGE AND RESEARCH
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In the world of learning as it is presently constituted, committed interdisciplinarians typically
find themselves in a disciplinary environment. "Disciplines serve not only as a convenient ...
way of dividing knowledge into its components, but ... they also serve as a basis for organizing
the institution--and hence the professionals engaged in teaching and research---into autonomous
fiefs" (Gass, 1979, p. 119). The consequences are predictable. In a recent case, the promoters of
an interdisciplinary program were called upon to formally explain how their program would
achieve disciplinary depth. Experts tend to view with suspicion people lacking a firm anchor in
any discipline. Regardless of the quality of their work, interdisciplinarians often experience
difficulties securing research grants, going on exchange programs, publishing, gaining
recognition, securing a job, or being promoted: "Researchers who identify themselves
professionally with cross-disciplinary categories face the entire panoply of gatekeeping
mechanisms, which by and large favor existing disciplinary categories" (Klein, 1993, p. 193).
A few examples: The Fulbright Scholar Program has no interdisciplinary category--no
interdisciplinarians need apply. "To be accepted, Piaget's seminal work had to be replicated in
conformity to the American model" (Bechtel, 1986, pp. 2223). It took 35 years for Mendel's
work to be noticed (Nissani, 1994a). William James felt that "it seems a great pity that as
original a man as [Charles Peirce] ... should be starved out of a career" (1952, p. 279). Isaac
Asimov came close to being fired from an academic post for being a generalist. Asimov's case,
however, is not nearly as tragic as Peirce's: Asimov not only kept his job, but, twenty-four years
later, made the grade for full professor (Asimov, 1980, pp. 111, 798; see also Nissani, 1994b;
Nissani, 1995b).
Unlike interdisciplinarity, specialization may be in harmony with Western tendencies "to
compete, excel, dominate, and control" (Gusdorf, 1979, p. 147). People educated in our
universities find it difficult to conceive of anything other than the current departmental structure.
Promoters of interdisciplinary research and education must overcome their colleagues' resistance
to change (Nissani, 1994b; Nissani and Hoefler-Nissani, 1992). In a world of limited resources,
interdisciplinarians may be perceived as competitors. Disciplinarians may be perfectly content
doing things their way and reluctant to labor for a devil they don't know. Inside and outside
academia, the interdisciplinarians' concern with interconnections and the larger picture may be
viewed as potentially subversive.
All these drawbacks and barriers explain the hostile reception of interdisciplinary initiatives
(Roy, 1979, p. 167):
Given the intractability of the departmental structure, the change resistance of faculty ... it is
unlikely that modem universities can produce many graduates who will reflect the now elusive
Renaissance ideal. There will of course continue to be those rare human instances of
extraordinary and comprehensive knowledge; but such people will emerge as much in spite of as
because of universities (Miles, 1989, p. 17).
PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS
Despite the barriers and drawbacks, the foregoing discussion forcefully calls for a mild shift (in
both attitudes and institutional arrangements) towards interdisciplinary knowledge and research.
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To overcome the negative sides of specialization, to retain its vitality, the academy must
cultivate interdisciplinary knowledge and research. It must never forget that a vibrant
community of scholars--just like a thriving ecosystem--nurtures specialists and generalists,
diversity and interconnections.
No doubt, most academics "will go on tending their own garden" (Sherif, 1979, p. 218). This is
all as it should be, provided these specialists "force themselves to define all of the available
research on that problem as of possible relevance, and to see themselves as contributing to the
resolution of a problem rather than as adding information to an isolated discipline" (Condit,
1993, pp. 245-246). No doubt too, and despite the hardships, a few creative individuals will
continue to tread from one garden to another. We should see to it that their less-traveled paths
are not overrun with thistles.
The case for interdisciplinary education, it seems to me, is not as straightforward as its
knowledge and research counterparts. Because educational philosophies are shaped in part by
ideology, intuition, and aesthetics, the controversy about the extent, timing, and need for holistic
education may well be irresolvable. Here I can do no more than offer a personal view. The
soundest course of action may again involve enriching the vast disciplinary archipelago with
idiosyncrasies and bridges. At the global level, this implies a wide range of disciplinary and
interdisciplinary educational programs. At the institutional level, this implies encouraging
students to take at least one consciously integrative course.
Acknowledgments: The author wishes to thank Donna Nissani, Shreedhar Lohani, Norma
Shifrin, Bob Carter, David A. Freeman, and students--each in her/his special way made the
writing and publication of this article possible.
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~~~~~~~~
By MOTI NISSANI, Wayne State University
Direct all correspondence to: Moti Nissani, Interdisciplinary Studies Program, Wayne State
University, 5700 Cass Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48202.
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