In this paper, I provide the background historical and philosophical assumptions that inform my rather ‘heroic’ interpretation of the value of interdisciplinary inquiry. Unlike most contemporary defenses of interdisciplinary research, mine does not presuppose that interdisciplinarity supplements, complements, or replaces discipline-based research. Rather, I see the matter the other way round, namely, that disciplines are artificial ‘holding patterns’ of inquiry whose metaphysical significance should not be overestimated. A key feature of my perspective is that inquiry needs a social space where it can roam freely. That space, the natural home of interdisciplinarity, is the university. Unfortunately, that institution is often deconstructed, if not completely under erasure, in contemporary discussions of interdisciplinarity (e.g. Lyotard 1983).

In a book first published ten years and soon to come out in a second edition, I called myself an ‘ideologue of interdisciplinarity’ (Fuller & Collier 2003: chap. 2). In other words, I do not see interdisciplinarity as simply a call for open borders between disciplines, so that cross-disciplinary borrowings are tolerated and even appreciated for the value they add to solving problems in one’s home discipline. Rather, the persistent need for interdisciplinary solutions to disciplinary problems brings out the inherently conventional character of disciplines. Of course, these conventions can be socio-historically explained and epistemologically justified, but so could alternatives that perhaps already exist in neighbouring countries or had existed in earlier times. Could we dispense with disciplines entirely and simply follow the course of inquiry wherever it leads -- each of us, as it were, our own unique interdisciplinarian? That is not quite what I mean. Rather, disciplinarity should be treated as a necessary evil of knowledge production – the more necessary it is made to appear, the more evil it becomes. One important way in which disciplinarity can appear ‘necessary’ in this objectionable sense is by a historical perspective that cannot imagine alternatives to the current regime of disciplines.

Disciplinary success is largely a function of institutionalisation – matters relating to control over the flow of various kinds of resources. Basically any discipline can succeed if its members are provided with adequate resources to solve their own problems, which are in turn more generally recognized as problems worth solving. However, this commonplace continues to be shrouded in epistemological mystery because the ebb and flow of disciplines appears to happen without any central planning, let alone philosophical legislation. As a result, with a little help from secular theologies like ‘scientific realism’, a trivial sociological insight is transubstantiated into a version of the ‘invisible hand’ fashionable in the 18th century and vigorously pursued by the merchants of ‘self-organisation’ today – a very broad church that includes followers of Hayek, Luhmann, and Maturana, as well as a miscellany of postmodernists, evolutionary epistemologists and complexity theorists.

A very influential figure in this respect – though usually regarded as anti-realist – is Thomas Kuhn, whose account of paradigm formation in The Structure of Scientific Revolution leaves the impression that ‘scientists’ are the people who manage to wrest control of the means of knowledge production from the politicians, religious fanatics, and other folks who make it impossible to pursue The True without also pursuing The Good and The Just at the same time. This autonomization of inquiry – symbolized by the founding of the Royal Society and similar scientific societies in the 17th century – epitomizes all the perceived benefits of disciplinarity. Here are some of them: (1) secure borders for inquiry that keep larger societal demands at a distance; (2) common standards for incorporating new members and topics, as well as for evaluating their efforts; (3) discretion over the terms in which the concerns from the larger society are translated into ‘new’ problems.

A striking feature of this account of disciplinarity is that it presupposes that the prior probability that disciplines exist at all is low. Certainly in Kuhn’s case, but also in much of the ‘self-organisation’ literature, it is considered a minor miracle that institutions of inquiry have been maintained in the face of various internal and external conflicts over the course of history. Indicative of this perspective is the tendency to think that disciplined science had a rather specific origin – perhaps even traceable to a singular cultural moment like the founding of the Royal Society – and that its development cannot be, nor could have been, more perspicuous than it has been. Even contemporary philosophy of science, which has almost completely purged its old positivist fixation on the goal of unified science nevertheless refuses to consider that science (or a particular science), had it pursued a different course of inquiry earlier in its history, would have ended up in a better epistemic position than it is in today. It is simply taken for granted that it was better to dump Aristotle for Newton, Newton for Einstein, etc. – and at roughly the times and for the reasons they were dumped. The purgatorial status of the Popperian philosophers who last questioned these intuitions – Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend – testifies to deeply held assumptions about the metaphysically special character of the history of science as it has actually occurred. Insofar as contemporary philosophers of science engage in criticism at all, it is with other philosophers or scientists who retain vestiges of the positivist world-view (and hence ‘misunderstand’ the nature of science). Yet, across the passing fashions in philosophy of science, the one constant has been a providential view of the history of science. In short, science normally is as it ought to be.

Everything I just said about philosophers of science could have been said about sociologists of science, who have equally sanguine views about the history of science. However, I stress philosophers because a traditional source of inspiration – and irritation! – in the philosophical enterprise is the postulation of norms that are so at odds with ordinary practice that philosophers are forced to wonder how people manage to make do with their suboptimal standards and what might be done to improve their performance. I mean to recall here the ultra-competences required to defeat the sceptic in epistemology and to satisfy either Kant or Bentham in ethics. One source of this hyper-normativity is the assumption that human beings are rather unique creatures – rational, to be sure, but perhaps even touched with the divine – who should always try to make good on their capacity to imagine having done better. However, if, in contrast, you view human beings as mere homo sapiens, one clever species among many, then our capacities for change are inscribed in the variation that our history has tolerated. When humans are seen in this ontologically diminished (a.k.a. ‘naturalised’) light, induction acquires a luminous significance. Institutions become entrenched lucky accidents that we radically change at our peril.

The origins of this ‘naturalistic’ mentality in the 150 years prior to the American and French Revolutions make a superstitious attitude toward history understandable. Accompanying a gradual secularisation of humanity was a realization that governments of any longevity typically arose from the ashes of war and were maintained by hereditary succession. Succession by election was seen as an opportunity for renewed conflict -- witness the intrigues associated with eccelesiastical and academic appointments -- and constitutional conventions were little more than philosophical chimeras. That autonomous scientific societies managed to survive as well as they did in their self-selecting, self-organising fashion was thus a considerable political feat in its own right, not to be tampered with. The founders of the Royal Society and similar bodies must have therefore hit upon the via regia to reality! This, then, was the great miracle associated with the so-called Scientific Revolution. Interestingly, this miracle only gets canonized as such around the end of World War II, by Herbert Butterfield in Britain and Alexandre Koyre in France, each adding his own distinctive air of mystification to the episode.

It is interesting to look at the history of disciplinarity before the canonization of the Scientific Revolution. Of course, most of the same people, events, and institutions are discussed but their respective significance is ‘spun’ rather differently. In the first place, disciplines were portrayed as more loosely ‘bounded’ than they are today. From reading, say, Kuhn or Michael Polanyi, it is easy to get the impression that a discipline is akin to a monastic order in the stringency of its entry criteria, training procedures, evaluative standards, etc. However, until the late 19th century, with the introduction of nationwide textbooks for discipline-based instruction in universities, an academic discipline was really little more than a collection of certification boards announcing that a piece of research met the standards upheld by the boards. Here I mean to include what is common to doctoral examinations and peer review journals. The exact nature of the training, the source of funding, and the overarching programme of inquiry to which the research contributed were largely left open to discretion. Of course, some people aspired to stricter criteria – and the 20th century has been the story of their steady ascent – but these have been always difficult to enforce for any great length of time or expanse of space.

Despite the looseness of the concept of disciplinarity pre-1945, nevertheless a shape to its history can be discerned that is common to, say, the massive studies undertaken by the engineer-turned-historian John Merz and the Neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer. It does not resemble the post-Kuhnian commonplaces of today, according to which disciplines are the natural products of the ‘functional differentiation’ of the cognitive superorganism. Rather, the sorts of things we call disciplines (or even sub-disciplines) today were originally world-views designed to explain everything. They flourished as social movements in several countries, where they campaigned against each other to acquire professorships, funding, influence, etc. ‘Crucial experiments’ and Methodenstreiten functioned as symbolic events in the ongoing struggle. Over time, these clashes were institutionally resolved, especially through the creation of academic departments that were entitled to self-reproduction. (The ‘nebular hypothesis’ proposed by Kant and Laplace for the origins of the universe may be the appropriate scientific metaphor here.) In a sufficiently wealthy academic environment, even the losers could console themselves with a department they could call their own. (Social scientists are very familiar with this scenario!) Moreover, the resolutions were themselves subject to significant cross-national differences, such that the losers in one country may turn out victorious in another. As for the apparent ‘universalisation’ of particular disciplines – the fact that, say, physics or economics may be taught the same everywhere – that tendency simply tracked the geopolitical interests of the nations whose universities housed the discipline.

I believe that we should return to this older historical sensibility toward disciplinarity, one that diminishes the phenomenon’s significance in the ontology of knowledge production. Indeed, in the older story, ‘disciplines’ function as little more than the legitimating ideology of the makeshift solutions that define the department structure of particular universities. Taken together across institutions and across nations, the history of disciplinarity constitutes a set of test cases on how to resolve deep differences in cognitive horizons. As for interdisciplinarity itself, the main benefit of this general approach would be to highlight its centrality as an internal motivator of sustained epistemic change. In effect, today’s disciplines were born interdisciplinary, as social movements that aspired to address all manner of phenomena and registers of life, not simply the domain of reality over which they came to exercise custodianship (Fuller 2000: chap. 8). In this respect, positivism holds a special place as a metatheory of interdisciplinarity.

Common to the various projects that have travelled under the rubric of ‘positivism’ has been an interest in constructing a medium of epistemic exchange across disciplinary boundaries. Indeed, in the case of the logical positivists, it would not be far-fetched to regard their ill-fated attempts to ‘unify’ science as having taken seriously – much more so than Peter Galison’s bland notion of ‘trading zone’ – that pidgins and Creoles may evolve from their origins as trade languages to become the official language of the trading partners (Fuller 2002). In their original Viennese phase, the logical positivists were keen to invent an interdisciplinary lingua franca from scratch, partly inspired by ongoing efforts in the 1920s to make Esperanto the official language of the League of Nations. However, once in exile, at least one positivist, the Harvard-based Philipp Frank, considered in some detail the strengths and weaknesses of two living examples of interdisciplinary social movements that at the time showed no signs of retreating behind disciplinary boundaries and containing themselves to specialist puzzles: Thomism and Dialectical Materialism (Frank 1949). Both movements, despite their obvious cognitive deficiencies and proneness to dogmatism, earned Frank’s respect for keeping alive the ideal of inquiry that roams freely across domains of reality in the service of individual enlightenment and collective empowerment.

In recent years, Frank’s curiously ineffectual career in the United States has been subject to serious historical investigation. Based on unpublished sources, including the archives of the Philosophy of Science Association, the Chicago-based independent scholar George Reisch has discovered that the FBI found Frank’s interdisciplinary vision potentially dangerous in a political climate increasingly keen on ‘containing’ conflict. Even Frank’s philosophical colleagues detected a ‘totalitarian’ mindset lurking behind his critical appreciation of Thomism and Marxism (Reisch 2004). I raise this lurid bit of Cold War history because if one is to take seriously the heroic ideal of interdisciplinarity as free-ranging critical inquiry, then one must find a place hospitable to its conduct. For Frank, the natural place was the university, especially its mission of liberal education, which continually forced academics – no matter how specialized their research – to return to the question of what citizens need to know to exercise their liberties most effectively (cf. Fuller 2003a).

To be sure, in one sense, Frank was simply restating the classical ideal of the university found in, say, the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the famed first Rector of the University of Berlin. However, at age 25, long before he became the Prussian education minister and icon for its dedicated bureaucracy, Humboldt invested this ideal with radical political import, partly inspired by Kant. In the 1792 essay, The Limitations on State Action, Humboldt entrusted the university with making the state ‘wither away’ from a prescriptive agency to a service provider by enabling citizens to legislate for themselves. Humboldt’s youthful vision deeply influenced John Stuart Mill, who dedicated On Liberty to him. The Mill-Humboldt connection, in turn, inspired Karl Popper to think about epistemological matters in terms of liberal political theory (Fuller 2003b: chap. 12). Frank also clearly drew on this history, and not surprisingly he was one of the few logical positivists with whom Popper remained on good terms throughout his life.

This genealogical excursus yields some interesting practical insights about the promise and perils of interdisciplinarity. While interdisciplinarity may not respect disciplinary boundaries, it needs boundaries of its own to protect its free-ranging activities, especially so that inquirers are not cut short as they attempt to challenge or bridge differences in existing bodies of knowledge. Historically, the institution that has most adequately addressed this need is tenure. However, tenure has tended to attach to membership in a specific department rather than the university housing the department. Moreover, tenure is typically treated as akin to a guild privilege that defines corresponding obligations solely in terms of what one must not do, rather than in terms of what one must do: As it were, the tenured are not obliged to cure, but they are obliged not to harm. These quasi-legal arrangements are insular and even self-protective: Undermining the credibility of your colleagues is always a greater sin than simply doing nothing. In such an academic environment, interdisciplinarity is a highly risky venture for which there is little clear reward.

Yet interdisciplinarity flourishes today – but typically at the expense of the university as a tenure-granting institution. Briefly recall the relevant history from the Cold War onward. In the Cold War era, as universities expanded to meet national defense needs, a variety of ‘area studies’ and ‘systems theoretic’ approaches were proposed as interdisciplinary fields. The founders of these fields typically had a good enough grasp of the history of academic disciplines to realize their status as glorified reifications that strategically downplayed or omitted certain cognitively and socially important problems. Nevertheless, the intellectual power of the founders’ visions was no match for the existing department structure of universities, especially when it came to securing tenure for the would-be interdisciplinarians. Echoes of this old obstacle can still be heard in the final report of the recent Gulbenkian Commission on the future of the social sciences (Wallerstein et al. 1996). Although very much in favour of interdisciplinary research, the Commission could recommend nothing bolder than for academics to be granted tenure in two departments.

However, as universities restructure themselves to face an increasingly competitive market for both training and research services, tenure is seen as a luxury that few institutions can afford. Moreover, for the younger generation of researchers who have come of age in this new regime, the ideal represented by tenure is far from clear. In particular, the guarantee of permanent department employment seems to license – in many of the older generation – the mindless repetition of old lectures and the artificial extension of exhausted research programmes. In short, tenure and department affiliation are despised together as representing the most reactionary aspects of the university. Under the circumstances, the ability to undertake interdisciplinary research is seen as a mark of ‘flexibility’ and ‘adaptiveness’, highly valued qualities in today’s ‘knowledge economy’. However, arguably, these qualities are less profound than the ‘critical reflexivity’ promoted by interdisciplinarians of an earlier era. The goal of interdisciplinary collaboration today tends to be less the fundamental transformation of intellectual orientation – a realignment of disciplinary boundaries – than the fostering of good communication skills so that no vital information is lost in the pursuit of a common research project. Thus, obstacles to interdisciplinarity that in the past would have been interpreted as based in disciplinary considerations are now demoted to local problems of project management that need to be overcome as expediently as possible, for purposes of grant renewal and securing the employability of the project members – in whatever field their future ventures happens to take them (cf. Lazenby 2002).

References

Frank, P. (1949). Modern Science and Its Philosophy. New York: Collier Books.

Fuller, S. (2000). Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fuller, S. (2002). “The Changing Images of Unity and Disunity in the Philosophy of Science.” In I. Stamhuis, et al., eds. The Changing Image of the Sciences (pp. 173-196) Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Fuller, S. (2003a). “The University: A social technology for producing universal knowledge.” Technology in Society 25: 217-234.

Fuller, S. (2003b). Kuhn vs Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science. Cambridge UK: Icon Books.

Fuller, S. and Collier, J. (2003). Philosophy, Rhetoric and the End of Knowledge: A New Beginning for Science and Technology Studies. (Orig. 1993). Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Lazenby, J. (2002). Climates of Collaboration. Ph.D. thesis in History & Philosophy of Science. University of Toronto.

Lyotard, J.-F. (1983). The Postmodern Condition. (Orig. 1979). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Reisch, G. (2004). “From the Life of the Present to the Icy Slopes of Logic: Logical Empiricism, the Unity of Science Movement, and the Cold War,” A. Richardson and T. E. Uebel, eds. Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.

Wallerstein, I., et al. (1996). Open the Social Sciences. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.