Conceptual Foundations for Multidisciplinary Thinking

Stephen Jay Kline

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 1995
• ISBN:
  9780804763936
• Edition: 1

Our current intellectual system provides us with a far more complete and accurate understanding of nature and ourselves than was available in any previous society. This gain in understanding has arisen from two sources: the use of the 'scientific method', and the breaking up of our intellectual enterprise into increasingly narrower disciplines and research programs. However, we have failed to keep these narrow specialities connected to the intellectual enterprise as a whole. The author demonstrates that this causes a number of difficulties. We have no viewpoint from which we can understand the relationships between the disciplines and lack a forum for adjudicating situations where different disciplines give conflicting answers to the same problem. We seriously underestimate the differences in methodology and in the nature of principles in the various branches of science. This provocative and wide-ranging book provides a detailed analysis and possible solutions for dealing with this problem.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The intellectual system erected largely in the Western world since the Reformation is enormously powerful and productive. Although we have much yet to learn, the scientific approach to knowledge since the time of Galileo has provided the human race with a far better understanding of our world and of ourselves than was available to any previous society. This gain in understanding has arisen primarily from two sources. We have adopted what we loosely call “scientific methods,” and we have broken the intellectual enterprise into a larger and larger number of parts (disciplines and research programs). We have created working groups of scholars who study each of the parts in as “scientific” a method as they can bring to bear. However, there is a near total absence of overviews of the intellectual terrain.

The lack of overviews of the intellectual terrain causes several difficulties. We have no means for understanding the relationship of our individual area of expertise to the larger intellectual enterprise. We have no viewpoint from which we can look objectively at the relations among the various disciplines. We tend to see science as a single method (usually based on physics), and thereby underestimate the differences in the methods and natures of various fields dealing with truth assertions. It seems past due that we begin to see if we can rectify these difficulties. That is the primary purpose of this book.

This book deals with questions such as the following:

• Can we erect overviews of the intellectual domain dealing with truth assertions about physical, biological, and social nature?
• Are such overviews important?
• What is the appropriate nature of the “principles” for various disciplines? Are these the same for all fields, or are they necessarily in part different for different “domains of knowledge” ?
• Is the dominant (reductionist) view of science sufficient? Or do we need other views to augment it?

In this book we will call the discussion of these and other related questions “multidisciplinary discourse.” More specifically, multidisciplinary discourse will denote the study of two topics: (1) the relationships of the disciplines of knowledge to each other; and (2) the relationships of a given discipline to human knowledge about the world and ourselves as a whole.

Multidisciplinary discourse is not the same as what we usually call interdisciplinary study. Interdisciplinary study generally denotes the combining of knowledge from two (or sometimes more) disciplines to create syntheses that are more appropriate for certain problem areas. Multidisciplinary study examines the appropriate relationships of the disciplines to each other and to the larger intellectual terrain. There is some overlap between interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary study, but for the most part they are different areas.

The remainder of this chapter sets out the preliminary groundwork. It lists the topics that multidisciplinary discourse needs to cover, defines the terrain we will examine, and sets out some hypotheses we need to begin the discussion. Chapter 2 begins the discussion of the first overview of the terrain.

Multidisciplinary discourse needs to cover at least the following four topics:

1. The description of several overall frameworks that exhibit the place of the disciplines of knowledge with respect to each other.
2. The delineation of what a given discipline can (and cannot) represent in the world. The word “represent” here includes such things as descriptions, taxonomies, understanding, and possibly predictions.
3. The development of insight into the similarities and differences of the disciplines in matters such as the complexity of paradigmatic systems, the invariance of (or variation in) behaviors and principles over time, and the typical variables used in analyses.
4. The study of the following:
   1. How the disciplines ought to constrain each other when applied to problems that inherently require knowledge from many disciplines, including examples or specific difficulties that have arisen from lack of this kind of discussion.
   2. Some ways in which scholars can judge when subfields, or research programs, have drifted into error, nonproductive triviality, or approaches that inherently cannot produce the results sought.
   3. Application of (a) and (b) to at least a few important historical and current examples.
   4. Implications of (a) and (b) for methodology in various disciplines, and in our total intellectual system.

This book examines elements of all four items above and other related topics.

Our discussion will focus on those disciplines of knowledge that deal with truth assertions about our world. The word “discipline” is not given a tight definition. Since we will want to examine carefully the differences between disciplines, a tight a priori definition might overconstrain our study. It is enough at this point to say, “a discipline” can be understood as the subject of study of a university department (or major sector of a department) in a late-twentieth-century university. This implies that a discipline possesses a specific area of study, a literature, and a working community of paid scholars and/or practitioners.

The operative verb about this discussion of multidisciplinarity is “to begin,” for several reasons. For at least a century, there has been no community of scholars concerned with multidisciplinarity, and therefore no continuing discourse. As a result, there has been relatively little opportunity for the sort of ongoing discussions with colleagues that so often provide aid in testing and improving conceptual work. Many valuable and insightful suggestions for improvements have been made by reviewers, as the Acknowledgments note, but these do not entirely replace discussion within an ongoing, mature body of scholars.

Moreover, no work known to the writer covers all of the four topics listed above, or any part of item 4. These gaps further reinforce the idea that we have neglected the area of multidisciplinary study.

We will make no initial assumption concerning the question of the importance of multidisciplinary discourse. However, beginning at this point, I will start to build a case for its importance. This will allow us to draw conclusions concerning its importance in later chapters.

Several reasons why a discourse on multidisciplinarity is potentially important can be seen even at this starting point. First, the inability to perceive human knowledge as a whole, as a complete pattern, is one of the sources of pervasive anxiety in our times. In the face of a plethora of experts, whose specialized languages form a tower of Babel, we tend to feel uninformed, helpless, and lacking in control over our own lives. Even a modest amelioration of these feelings of anxiety would in itself justify the discourse. This is not to suggest that multidisciplinary activity is a way to solve all problems. On the contrary, I will argue that multidisciplinary discourse needs to be an additive to, not a replacement for, disciplinary work. To put this in different words, I will construct reasons why multidisciplinary discourse is needed not only to solve some problems but also to help disciplinary experts better understand the connection of their own field to the whole of human knowledge.

Another reason we need multidisciplinary discourse is the existence of “emergent properties.” Systems constructed from qualitatively disparate parts often exhibit emergent properties (also called “holism”). To put this differently, systems made of qualitatively different kinds of parts, when hooked together and wired up, often can do things which precisely the same parts cannot do when they are unconnected. Even systems with homogeneous composition sometimes exhibit emergent properties, although far less commonly. These new properties of the whole system “emerge” from the interactions of the parts within the specific structure. Therefore the emergent properties exist only when the system structure is complete in an appropriate sense. For example, if you lay out all the bits and pieces of your car in your driveway, the bits and pieces will no longer carry out the main function of a car — to move and thereby “transport” passengers and their belongings. The “transport” function of a car is a characteristic of the structure of the systemic nature of the whole system; the transport function is not possessed by the unconnected individual pans of an automobile. A second example is a manufacturing corporation, let’s say General Electric. The corporation is made up of people, plants, offices, and various forms of machinery. But no one person or machine can, by itself, do all the things General Electric does. It is only when the appropriate pieces are connected that refrigerators or jet engines or other devices can be manufactured and sold.

The concept of emergent properties is far from new, and emergent properties are common in systems of many kinds we see every day. We have acted, nevertheless, as if the concept of emergent properties did not apply to the realm of ideas. We have done so even though we often have experiences in which new and improved ideas emerge from the discussion of a problem or analysis in more than one conceptual framework. The process of arguing out the U.S. Constitution plus the Bill of Rights is a notable historical example.

There is also a pragmatic reason why multidisciplinary concepts are potentially useful for business, government bodies, and other enterprises that routinely deal with inherently multidisciplinary problems. We have usually treated such problems by assembling working groups containing all the relevant kinds of experts. But these experts often have trouble understanding each other; as a result only a small amount of information can then be fused into an improved or reframed solution to the problem at hand. There is a good likelihood that if all experts understood the relationship of their particular disciplines to other disciplines and to the totality of human knowledge more clearly, the problems of mutual communication and understanding would be ameliorated. As Gene Bouchard, a member of the group called the “skunk works” at Lockheed Aircraft, said to me recently, “It is not enough to assemble a multidisciplinary group; the individual people must themselves be multidisciplinary or willing to become so.” Since the Lockheed skunk works is both multidisciplinary and noted for repeatedly producing successful and unusual advanced aircraft designs, Bouchard’s remark brings relevant experience to the point under discussion.

For at least a century, we have acted as if the uncollected major fragments of our knowledge, which we call disciplines, could by themselves give understanding of the emergent ideas that come from putting the concepts and results together. It is much as if we tried to understand and teach the geography of the 48 contiguous states of the United States by handing out maps of the 48 states, but never took the trouble to assemble a map of the country. No one questions the importance of the map of the country even when state maps exist. Nor do people question our ability to assemble a map of the country as a whole. We do not question our ability to form the map of the whole because we know a map of the country fulfills two conditions: first, it does not contain all the details that 48 maps of the 48 states provide; and second, we make sure that the overall map does not do violence to the symbols, boundaries, or details of the 48 state maps. Does this metaphor of the map provide a useful way of thinking about the relation between disciplines and also between each of the disciplines and overviews of our total knowledge about truth assertions? Used with caution it seems to. Overviews, whether in the form of maps or in some other forms, necessarily suppress some detail if they are to be understandable. Despite this necessary loss of detail, we know that overviews are important. In the metaphor of the U.S. map, the overall map allows us to deal with the relation of the states to each other, which the individual maps do not. The view of the country as a whole, in one piece, also has value for a variety of other purposes.

Also in the metaphor of the map, we insist that the state maps be consistent not only with each other but also with the map of the whole. But in recent decades we have not insisted that the results from various disciplines be consistent when they are applied to a single problem; there has been no common discourse that could insist upon and strive toward such consistency. We will see some important difficulties that have arisen in our intellectual system as a result of the failure to seek consistent results when more than one discipline is applied to the same problem. In one illustration, we will see an important problem where six disciplines each created a model of the same system; all six models were discipline-bound and therefore oversimple, and there was little if any awareness within each of the six fields that the other five models existed.

Moreover, if we extend the map metaphor a little further, we might say, “In the scholarly world we have not authorized or paid anyone to try to assemble a map of the country of ideas and knowledge. We have instead usually discouraged volunteers, not only because we have seen the task as impossible or ‘fuzzy,’ but also because we have envisaged the disciplines as the only route to sure knowledge.”

It is not much of an exaggeration to say that in our late-twentieth-century universities we have acted as if there were a “First Commandment of Academe” which reads, “Thou shalt not transgress thy disciplinary boundary.” A caution is needed here: the discussion here and above, and throughout the rest of this book, is not an argument against disciplinary knowledge. As already stated, the division of intellectual labor into various disciplines has been a major factor in the accelerating accumulation of relatively well-grounded human knowledge. The argument in this discussion is for disciplinary knowledge and, in addition, for a discourse on multidisciplinarity so that both specialists and students can better understand the connections of the fragments to each other and to the whole.

The map metaphor also helps clarify what a multidisciplinary discourse should not be. The discourse should not deal with all the content of various disciplines; that vast amount of knowledge does seem impossible to contain in a single book or a single mind (see particularly Chapter 3). In the map metaphor we need to deal with how the state maps go together and their relation to the whole, not with all the details contained within the finer-scale maps except as they affect relationships to the whole. This is why multidisciplinary discourse is, for the most part, a different topic than the knowledge content within disciplines.

Potentially, it seems that a discourse on multidisciplinarity can help us overcome several kinds of difficulties that have arisen from viewing the world of knowledge as an assortment of fragments without “maps” of the whole.

Let’s begin the task of creating multidisciplinary discourse by stating three hypotheses. A number of other hypotheses and guidelines will emerge later in the discussion. All of the hypotheses and guidelines are restated at the end of the book for ready reference.

Three Starting Hypotheses

Hypothesis I: The Possibility of Multidisciplinary Discourse. Meaningful multidisciplinary discourse is possible.

Hypothesis II: Honor All Credible Data. In multidisciplinary work, we need to honor all credible data from wherever they arise. (This includes not only data from various disciplines and from our laboratories, but also from the world itself, since we have no labs from which we can obtain data for many important purposes.)

Hypothesis III: The Absence of Universal Approaches. There is no one view, no one methodology, no one discipline, no one set of principles, no one set of equations that provides understanding of all matters vital to human concerns.

If we are to go to the trouble of creating a multidisciplinary discourse, Hypothesis I is a necessary initial belief. The results we find will in themselves confirm or disconfirm Hypothesis I.

Hypothesis II is also a necessary starting point since, by construction, a multidisciplinary discourse must draw on data from many fields and from the world itself. It must not restrict itself to the data or the contexts (and assumptions) of any one discipline, or only to data that emerge from laboratories. Are there credible data outside of carefully erected disciplinary knowledge? Yes! As an example, we can establish the existence of objects, processes, and organisms merely by pointing at them and saying “There they are!” even when we cannot provide double-blind data or do not understand why the objects or species exist. If we want to establish the existence of that odd-looking animal the giraffe, all we need do is locate some and say, “There is one, and over there is a whole herd of them, the animals we call giraffes.” We need not be skilled zoologists to do this. To establish the existence of automobiles we need only point at a few types and look at what they do. We need not be skilled automotive engineers to do this. So long as we believe that the world is real, these observations are sufficient. We will call such directly verifiable facts that can be observed by lay people, and that do not need laboratory research or elaborate protocols in order to be credible, “barefoot data” in order to have a name for them.

In thinking about the credibility of data and processes it is useful to hold in mind what I will call Heaviside’s Query. When mathematicians complained of some of his methods, Oliver Heaviside asked, “Shall I refuse to eat my breakfast because I do not understand the process of digestion?” As Heaviside reminds us, digestion exists, even though we may or may not understand the details of how the process works. The mathematicians were right about some of the details of his methods, and Heaviside was wrong. Nevertheless, by moving ahead to solve problems, Heaviside forged a set of methods that later were adopted by mathematicians and are still widely used.

The key word in Hypothesis III is “one.” Over and over, we will see that the distinction between “one” or “some” on the one hand, and “all” on the other, is critical in multidisciplinary discourse. Moreover, we will see this obvious point of logic has been ignored in many different guises and locations within the intellectual world as it stands in the...