Text discussed in the virtual seminar
"Rethinking interdisciplinarity" on www.interdisciplines.org
(where the whole discussion is available) Dan
Sperber WHY
RETHINK INTERDISCIPLINARITY? This
virtual seminar on “Rethinking Interdisciplinarity” is organised by members
and associates of the Institut Jean Nicod (which describes itself as “an
interdisciplinary lab at the interface between the humanities, the social
sciences and the cognitive sciences”). We do not, normally, discuss among
ourselves interdisciplinarity per se. What we do is work on issues that happen
to fall across several disciplines, and, for this, we establish collaboration
among philosophers, psychologists, neuropsychologists, linguists,
anthropologists, and others. Still, we—and so many other scholars, students,
and managers of scientific institutions—have good reasons to pause and reflect
on interdisciplinarity itself. Research that falls across disciplines meets
specific obstacles. It is easily construed as challenging the dominant
disciplinary organisation of the sciences. This challenge is seen as positive by
some, a distraction by others. Scholar involved in interdisciplinary research
end up having to either articulate the challenge or downplay it. So it goes in
the micro-politics of science. But surely, talk of interdisciplinarity should
not just be opportunistic. It is, or should be, relevant to our understanding of
the character and becoming of science. Hence the idea of this seminar. I had
initially intended, in this opening presentation, to outline a few ideas on the
pros, the cons, and the future of interdisciplinarity, but in working on it, I
felt more and more inclined to share reflections, concerns, and indeed emotions
inspired by my experience, that of a social and cognitive scientist deeply
involved in interdisciplinary research. I will do so by presenting a few
vignettes and commenting them. Cosmetic
interdisciplinarity:
I sit, once again, on a committee evaluating grant proposals that have to meet
explicit criteria of interdisciplinarity. As usual, the committee is
interdisciplinary in the sense that it is mostly made up of scholars from
several disciplines, each recognised and powerful within his or her one
discipline. Very few of us have been involved in intensive interdisciplinary
work. Most of the grant proposals we have to evaluate have built in
interdisciplinary rhetoric and describe future collaboration among people from
different disciplines, but this is mostly done in order to meet the criteria of
for the grant. The actual scientific content generally consists in the
juxtaposition of monodisciplinary projects with some effort to articulate their
presentation. A few proposals are genuinely interdisciplinary, but often they
are the less well thought through, the least likely to yield clear results. And
now we have to rank two proposals: a really good proposal the interdisciplinary
character of which is superficial and ad hoc, and a merely decent, but genuinely
interdisciplinary and innovative proposal. Should we prefer the first one hoping
that, just as faith is said to come while praying, some true interdisciplinary
interaction and thinking will occur in what was initially an opportunistic
half-hearted effort, or should we favour the second proposal and see its more
tentative and fuzzy character as the price paid for leaving the well-trodden
paths? I have known similar dilemma before. This time, I vote for the better
not-so-interdisciplinary proposal, which I see as more clearly deserving to be
funded. At the same time, I wonder: What kind of a comedy is this, where we are
pretending to fund novel, interdisciplinary research, when, in fact, there is
very little funding for interdisciplinary teaching and training in the first
place? How likely is it that outstanding interdisciplinary proposals emerge in
such conditions? And aren’t most
of my colleagues on the committee quite content with this state of affairs,
which allows disciplinary business to go on as usual at the cheap price of some
interdisciplinary rhetoric? Interdisciplinary
disappointments. A
team of eminent psychologists spends years providing experimental evidence in
favour of the view that there are fundamental differences in the modes of
thought of members of different cultures. While this view goes against the
biases of most psychologists, it has long been defended by anthropologists,
without however the benefit of experimental evidence. Our psychologists are
invited to present their work at an anthropology conference. The disappointment
is strong on both sides. The anthropologists fail to see the relevance of
experimental evidence in favour of a thesis they feel confident has already been
amply demonstrated with ethnographic data. They object to what they see as the
artificiality of experiments collected outside of an ethnographic context.
Moreover, they find the psychologists’ view of culture, exemplified by the
fact that they are talking about Western and Asian cultures in general, far too
crude. The psychologists feel that the anthropologists are just blind to the
importance of experimental evidence, that they criticise experimental
methodology without understanding it, and that they fail to appreciate how much
their work might contribute to a fruitful exchange between psychologists and
anthropologists. In the end, the thesis itself is not given any discussion. What is going wrong? The two communities, psychologists and
anthropologists, have, different vocabularies, presuppositions, priorities,
criteria, references. In general different disciplines have different
sub-cultures, and the difference is made worse, not attenuated, by the existence
of superficial similarities, for
instance identical words used with quite different meanings (“culture” and
“mode of though” in the present example). Because issues seem to be shared
by two disciplines, scholars from each may seek, or at least welcome,
interdisciplinary exchanges. More often than not, their expectation is not so
much that they will learn much from the other discipline; it is that people in
the other discipline can and should learn from them. It is much less challenging
to think that one’s message has relevance beyond its usual audience than to
think that one has been missing a message of great relevance to oneself. In
fact, in the story I just told, clearly, the psychologists made the greatest
effort to go out of their way and produce novel work, but more with the
expectation that they would have a message to share than one to accept. The
anthropologists, on their part, were willing to welcome psychologists whom they
expected to bow to the obvious superiority of anthropology over psychology in
matter of cultural modes of thought. They were not at all ready to try and
understand things from the point of view of psychologists (in spite of the fact
that understanding other people’s point of view is what anthropologists do,
but then the people in question are far away and are not competing for academic
recognition and resources). More
generally, many researchers in many disciplines have participated in
interdisciplinary encounters; public discourse on these occasions always
underscores their positive side, but, in private, misgivings and frustrations
are commonly expressed. Most participants return mildly intrigued but otherwise
unmoved, the way business managers return to their routines after a
self-awareness week-end retreat. A
slow learning curve:
Some of the members of the psychological team I have just mentioned are involved
in a graduate “Culture and Cognition” program at the More generally, it turns out that the only way to have interdisciplinary
work paid attention to, and, even if often misunderstood, at least not right
away dismissed is to produce different versions of it for each of the
disciplines concerned. You submit, say, one article to a psychology journal,
with streamlined introduction and general discussion, a standard detailed
experimental section, thorough references to the psychological literature, and
using all the disciplinary buzz words in the right way. You develop basically
the same argument for an anthropology journal with, mutatis mutandis, the same
strategy, which this time involves providing a mere summary of the experiments,
what psychologists would call anecdotal evidence, and much longer theoretical
sections anticipating the objections most anthropologists tend to have to any
naturalistic approach. Same concerns when you give talk to disciplinary
audiences. Being an anthropologist, I have enjoyed going native in several
disciplinary sub-cultures, and yes, there is much to learn from the experience.
However, this makes serious involvement in interdisciplinary research a high
investment endeavour. An easier way is to have enduring interdisciplinary
collaborations among specialists of different disciplines. To be able to
understand each other and conceive of common goals, they still need not just
good will, but something like the kind of training provided by the “Culture
and Cognition” program at A
student’s dilemma:
D., a psychologist, and I are co-tutors of a particularly promising graduate
student with degrees in philosophy, sociology, and biology, who is now at the
end of his first year in a cognitive sciences doctoral program. He is
participating in experiments in D.’s lab as part of his training. The student
wants to choose, for his dissertation, an interdisciplinary research topic
having to do with the cognitive basis and the cultural forms of morality. D.,
although he is currently involved in another interdisciplinary project on a
related topic, tries energetically to convince the student to give up his idea
and to choose—or accept—a strictly psychological research project closely
related to work currently pursued in D.’s lab, and the results of which can be
partly anticipated. Only if the student makes such a choice, does D. feel
confident that he will be able to help him with his career. Interdisciplinary
work is for when you already have a job! The student has been motivated
throughout his studies by interdisciplinary goals and is very reluctant to
accept. At the same time, he will need a grant, and later a job, and I cannot
but confirm that, from this important practical point of view, D. is essentially
right. As I have told quite a few students who wanted to work within the kind of
interdisciplinary approach I have been defending, choosing an interdisciplinary
research topic at the doctoral stage involves serious career risks. Also, it is
much harder to get a proper training without investing all of one’s energy
into one discipline, or rather sub-sub-discipline. Happily, in this particular
case, after several exchanges between all the people involved, and helped by the
manifest excellence of the student, we find what looks like a realistic
compromise, which will involve downplaying the interdisciplinary character of
the research the student will in fact pursue (just the opposite rhetoric of that
of the typical interdisciplinary grant proposal!).
I see here a vicious circle: postponing interdisciplinary work to the
time a researcher is well established means that such research is generally
pursued as a side activity, with more goodwill than thorough competence, and
that therefore, indeed, it will be much harder for a student to find proper
supervision in an interdisciplinary than in a disciplinary area. Even more
generally, this means that the inventiveness and creativity of younger scholars
is discouraged from going into interdisciplinary work, slowing down this work,
making it intellectually and practically less attractive, and so on. The
emergence of an interdisciplinary network:
In the late 80s we were a few anthropologists trying to develop a different kind
of cognitive anthropology, drawing on the work of Noam Chomsky and of some
outstanding developmental psychologists, arguing that the mind involves a
variety of domain specific mechanisms and that these mechanisms played an
important role in permitting cultural transmission and in shaping cultural
contents. In 1990, a conference on domain specificity in cognition and culture
was organised at the More
generally, in a number of fields, major advances have involved interdisciplinary
interactions. The example I just gave is not untypical of what has been
happening in the cognitive sciences. Howard Gardner, an early historian of what
he dubbed the “Cognitive Revolution” wrote in 1985: “At present most
cognitive scientists are drawn from the rank of specific disciplines—in
particular, philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics,
anthropology, and neuroscience. … The hope is that some day the boundaries
between these disciplines may become attenuated or perhaps disappear altogether,
yielding a single unified cognitive science.” (Gardner 1985: 7). Almost twenty
years later, what do we observe? The disciplines have not merged (and, in cases
such as that of philosophy or anthropology, only sub-disciplines were involved
in the cognitive science enterprise anyhow), but each discipline has borrowed
concepts, issues, tools, and criteria from others. To give just a couple of
illustrations, modelling, inspired by artificial intelligence, is more and more
used as a tool in psychology and neuroscience, and, more generally, the
existence of a clear possibility of modelling a given hypothesis is recognised
as a criterion for judging the acceptability of an hypothesis anywhere in the
cognitive sciences. Issues about the character and role of representations,
first raised in philosophy of mind, have become topics of controversy within and
across all the cognitive sciences. It still is the case that most cognitive
scientists squarely belong to a specific discipline, but it has become quite
common for many of them to be routinely involved in intensive research
programmes involving researchers from several disciplines. Some of
us have gone one step beyond: we don’t belong anymore to a given discipline,
or we belong to several. I, for instance, have done research and published in
anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and experimental psychology: I am at ease
in each of these fields but not exactly at home in any. There is however—or so
I believe—as much unity to my work as there would have been had I followed a
more traditional course: my goal has been from the start to explore and develop
some of the common foundations of the social and cognitive sciences, and no
single discipline offered an appropriate vantage point to do so. For some of us,
interdisciplinarity (or transdisciplinarity, or call it the way you want) is a
way of life. It is at least an ordinary aspect of their work for most
researchers in the cognitive sciences (and also in other domains, for instance
environmental studies). The cognitive sciences have become a new kind of
(inter)disciplinary configuration, with less institutional unity than most
established disciplines, but more dynamic interactions than recognised groups of
disciplines such as the social sciences. An
interdisciplinary Web conference:
Between October 2001 and March 2002, an interdisciplinary conference on the
future of the text in the electronic age took place, appropriately, on the Web.
(It was organised by the Library of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Institut
Jean Nicod, the Association Euro-Edu, and the GiantShare Company, and led by
Gloria Origgi and Noga Arikha). Every fortnight, a lecture was put on line for
discussion. The lecturers were historians, cognitive scientists, philosophers,
librarians, and a publisher and a journalist. The N
people who participated in the discussions had even more diverse background. We
often heard the following objection to the Web conference format: you loose the
voices, the bodily communication, the conversations in the lobby or at lunch.
True, but these do not have only beneficial effects. They quickly stabilise a
pecking order among the participants based on age, sex, fluency, aggressiveness,
and academic status. Some intervene with ease in all the discussions and others
feel inhibited by their real or perceived position in the pecking order. In the
case of an interdisciplinary conference, the disciplinary divisions tend to be
maintained by all these forms of direct interaction: lobby and lunch
conversations tend to be among disciplinary colleagues, public interventions are
in good part aimed, directly or indirectly, at members of the same discipline,
and so forth. We found that a web seminar gives participants greater opportunity
to contribute to a discussion across disciplines and languages, without worrying
about their status, affiliation, or fluency. Thus, unlike what happens at an
ordinary interdisciplinary conference, nobody felt compelled to hail the
interdisciplinarity of the occasion: it was there as a matter of course. Only
when it was directly relevant, did participants mention their own disciplinary
affiliation. The whole debates had the character of a thoughtful conversation,
with a common goal of enhanced understanding, rather than that of a series of
short intervention aimed as much at asserting or reasserting the speaker’s
authority or the precedence of his or her discipline. More
generally, much of the difficulty of interdisciplinarity has to do with the fact
that attention, recognition, and authority are channelled by disciplinary
institutions. In fact, this can be viewed as one of their primary functions.
Even in ordinary interdisciplinary events, disciplinary networking is still
quite potent. Before the advent of the Internet and the Web, most scientific
communication was channelled by disciplinary institutions, labs, conferences,
specialised libraries, journals, and so on. With the advent of the internet it
has become much easier for individual researchers to establish and maintain
communication based on common intellectual interest rather than on institutional
alliance. The ever growing free availability of scientific papers on line
renders researchers less dependent on the library of their home institution
(including paid online subscriptions). Discussion lists (and now web
conferences) recruit over time their own rapidly evolving communities. Thus
interdisciplinary interaction becomes easier, and so does the recognition of
interdisciplinary findings. The next step will come with the generalisation of
teaching on the web: then, acquiring a scientific education à la carte may
become a real possibility, boosting the development of interdisciplinary
research in areas where it is genuinely fruitful, or so one may hope. Concluding
remarks As Peter
Weingart observed, talk of interdisciplinarity is fraught with paradoxes—of a
superficial kind, I would add. On the one hand interdisciplinarity is touted as
a “good thing,” contrasted with excessive specialisation, a “bad thing.”
Yet, rather than the one displacing the other, both have greatly developed in
the past decades—and specialisation more than interdisciplinarity.
“Interdisciplinary” is used to describe—and praise—courses, research
projects, or grant proposals, as routinely as “full-bodied” is used to
describe red wines. This month (March 2003), “interdisciplinary” has 1 700 000
entries in Google, as compared, for instance, to 255 000 for
“experimental.” Notwithstanding all this song and dance, the vast majority
of scientific publications belongs squarely to an established discipline, as
does the quasi-totality of academic and research jobs. Interdisciplinarity has
not become a hot topic in philosophy of science. “Philosophy of science”
combined with “interdisciplinarity” returns only 915 Google entries, as
compared to, say, 4690 entries when combined with “reductionism.” With a few
notable exceptions (which will be well-represented in this seminar), most people
who have written on interdisciplinarity have done so from the point of view of
science policy rather than from the point of view of philosophy, history or
sociology of science. It might look as if, somehow, interdisciplinarity is one
of these grand notions handy in political discourse, but not to be taken too
seriously. As I hope to have illustrated, this is not always the case.
Interdisciplinarity is not in itself a good thing, nor specialisation a bad
thing, for the advancement of science. In some areas, disciplines and
specialised subdisciplines are producing optimal results. In others areas, on
the contrary, disciplinary boundaries are obstacle to desirable developments and
interdisciplinarity helps optimise research. Should
we conclude then that interdisciplinarity emerges unproblematically in those
areas where it is scientifically productive? This would ignore the force of
inertia of established disciplines. The development of valuable
interdisciplinary work in cognitive science, for instance, is slowed down and
made harder in a variety of ways by the standard disciplinary organisation of
research and teaching. This relative difficulty of doing effective
interdisciplinary work might be viewed as a mild negative side-effect of the
otherwise highly positive disciplinary organisation of the sciences, a
side-effect appropriately compensated for by institutional policies of
encouraging interdisciplinary work. However—and I have left this for other,
more competent contributors to this seminar to develop—disciplinarity itself
deserves some serious rethinking. After
all, the disciplinary organisation of the sciences as we know it is not a mere
reflection in scholarship of everlasting natural divisions among levels of
reality. It is a historical product which, in its present form, goes back to the
nineteenth century and to the development of modern universities and research
institutions. This organisation of the sciences may rapidly evolve with new
social and economic demands on science, with the Internet and its growing impact
on scientific communication (both in teaching and in research), and with the
advancement of science itself. The current disciplinary system may be becoming
brittle, and the growth of interdisciplinary research may be a symptom of this
brittleness. More positively, new forms of scientific networking may be
emerging, helped by the growing role of the Internet in scholarly communication.
Describing these forms in terms of disciplines and interdisciplinarity may fail
to capture their novelty. All this deserves some serious rethinking. References Arikha, N. and Origgi, G. (eds.) (2003) Text-e: Le texte à l’heure de l’Internet. Paris :
Bibliothèque Publique d’Information du Centre Pompidou Gardner, H. (1985) The Mind’s New Science: A History of the
cognitive Revolution. Hirschfeld, L., and Gelman, S. (eds.) (1994) Mapping the Mind: domain
Specificity in Cognition and Culture. Weingart, P. (2000) “Interdisciplinarity: The Paradoxical Discourse.”
In P. Weingart and
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