Interdisciplinarity

Date: 2009.11.27 | Category: General | Tags:

This was a somewhat odd article contra “interdisciplinarity” by a sociologist at Penn, and this was a more interesting takedown of the original piece. I, particularly from my status as a professor at one of the places cited as drinking deeply from the interdisciplinary Kool-aid, fall somewhere in between.

Before commenting on the article, let me say that one thing I’ve learned about doing interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary work at Michigan is how important it is that faculty members are the ones making the connections, rather than graduate students. For pretty serendipitous reasons, many faculty at Michigan have split appointments, which require them to trek across campus and teach courses in different departments. This pays many dividends, and stands in marked contrast to other places I’ve been, where students are the ones to make these connections. It takes grad students some time to figure out what connections are to be made, and then they graduate and leave (damn them!), and connections tend to wither away. In some cases traditions can pass down from one grad student to another (example, my former student Gary Feng got a master’s degree in statistics at UIUC, which became a tradition for his successors), but these are weak links. Having faculty have to live in multiple departments, or in some interdisciplinary unit, seems to be really key to sustainable multidisciplinary programs.

Having said something about the how, what about the why and the whether (and how’s the weather where you are?) ?

I think this quote captures the tone and tenor of the Jacobs article:

Another serious concern about interdisciplinarity is that any promise it holds depends on the presence of strong disciplines. Going too far down the interdisciplinary path by ending academic departments, as some have suggested, would be a disaster. Departments teach techniques needed to conduct high-quality research. Disciplines establish a hierarchy of problems. Interdisciplinarity cannot exist without disciplines and departments. What happens when that structure is broken? Will all problems be equally important? How will quality be judged, and how will the most important advances be communicated?

These are, indeed, all important concerns, although the “some have suggested” move should always signal the flashing “strawman ahead” klaxxons.

But these are problems that any field worth its salt faces more or less constantly. Are they better/worse/different in an “interdisciplinary” context? I would argue that they are actually better, because you can’t use the heavy hand of past traditional judgements to avoid to defining what high quality work is.

As in the natural world, the most promising and interesting intellectual opportunities lie at the intersections of traditional intellectual ecosystems.

Furthermore, there’s some pretty intriguing evidence that scientific groups that reflect different academic backgrounds are more productive than those that are more homogeneous, as well as why that might be the case. Kevin Dunbar at the University of Toronto has done fascinating studies of scientific workgroups in action. In Dunbar (1995) he describes why some groups are less effective at dealing with unexpected results than others:

Why were the members of the laboratory not making use of analogy? One aspect of the laboratory appears critical to whether analogies will be used. It is the social structure of the laboratory. All the members of this laboratory had come from highly similar backgrounds, and consequently drew from a similar knowledge base. In the other laboratories, the scientists came from widely differing backgrounds, and these different sources of knowledge were important components in the construction of analogical mappings. When all the members of the laboratory have the same knowledge at their disposal, then when a problem arises, a group of similar minded individuals will not provide more information to make analogies than a single individual.
The finding that the social structure of the laboratory has an effect on types of reasoning and conceptual change may explain why many experimental studies of reasoning by groups produce no better performance than individuals alone. In these studies, the groups of subjects are generally homogeneous with respect to background, and according to the mechanisms of conceptual change that I am invoking, should not produce conceptual change. We are currently conducting a number of experiments to test this hypothesis. These results go beyond merely stating that social structure is important. These findings indicate the groups of individuals must have different pools of knowledge to draw from to make fruitful analogies.Merely having a group of scientists working on a particular problem (i.e., social structure) will not result in the use of analogies.

Overall, I agree with Professor Potter’s argument that Jacobs’ piece is well characterized as “we’re here because we’re here.”

Still, one small caveat. I do worry about grad students who are brought up without a grounding in some recognized discipline. In part because I think it’s important to have a home discipline in the same way that it’s important to have a native country (I’m not sure how defensible this is, but it’s how I feel). More pragmatically, it’s important for students to get jobs in a world of departments. Also, I’ve seen how people whose work spans departments can have problems when it comes to being evaluated. It’s easy for people whose interests just span part of the scope of the person’s work and judge it against others who only work in that area. The sum of a series of such judgments can be problematic (the person is a mediocre chemist, mediocre biologist, etc., ignoring the promise of the sum of the of those parts). And it’s certainly possible to be a dilettante in many fields. Working across disciplinary boundaries is a high risk occupation, but one with pretty high intellectual rewards as well.