The Complacent Disciplinarian
Ian Hacking
I am not a good person to discuss interdisciplinary studies because they have never been a problem for me. My undergraduate education in philosophy was more narrow than anyone today can imagine, and I loved it. Ever since then, I have dabbled in, and sometimes contributed to, more fields of thought than most people can shake a stick at. Analytic philosophers are not expected to write a book about experimental physics and another about multiple personality (etc.) but for me it has been the most natural, if not the easiest thing in the world, partly because I do not think of myself as ‘interdisciplinary’ but as applying my discipline in different directions.
Even my doctoral dissertation had two unconnected ‘parts’ that the examiners graciously accepted. One proved some new results in modal logic, while the other was infatuated with Wittgenstein’s reflections on mathematics.
My role model has tended to be a predisciplinary man, namely Leibniz. I once had the project to write a paper every year, about a topic that exercised him when he was x years old, when I myself was that age. I kept it up for a while, but flagged, which he would not have done. He is usually catalogued as a philosopher, but what is the field of knowledge, wisdom or practice in which he did not engage his energies? Peace studies. Mining engineering. Comparative linguistics. He spent more of his days on those fields (which had not yet been invented) than on developing the calculus or the nascent physics. Above all, he was curious about everything. That is surely one way to be interdisciplinary. By the way, the late Pierre Bourdieu, quite an interdisciplinary figure, also cut his teeth on Leibniz.
Curiosity: that is my role model, with the Leibnizian imperative, namely discipline. Work hard and get it as right as you can. Maybe a newish sub-discipline will emerge. But do not try to create disciples. Just respect your juniors, and tell them when you see that they, too, are trying to get it as right as they can. And say when by your lights they are not trying hard enough. Yes, that is discipline for sure. Not comfortable, either to administer or to receive.
How strange that word is, ‘discipline’. An old word, or words, as old as European vernaculars, and traipsing behind them not so much Roman Latin as the learning of Mediaeval times. In both French and English, there is both verb and noun. The noun that makes for interdisciplinarity implies fields of study defined by content and institution. But the verb implies chastising and punishment.
The root idea is that of a disciple. You can see how the idea forks. On the one hand, religious teachers, and modern scholars, engineers or artists who have disciples, create fields of knowledge, understanding and activity. Thus the noun. But then there is the verb, to discipline: the master chastises to ensure that the disciples toe the line. I say ‘chastise’, for I find that word in old French and English, and flogging is mentioned as a mode of chastising, of disciplining. How strange it is that ancient meanings are continued below the level of conscious awareness. Many who object to disciplines do so because they sense that they have been flogged by the institutional structures that determine the disciplines. There is no freedom to live other lives, or to create other kinds of knowledge.
I know many people who have been disciplined by disciplines. I mean, bullied by bosses who sternly strive to maintain pre-established institutional structures of inquiry. One need go no further afield than what I think of as my own discipline, analytic philosophy. Many students have felt oppressed by it. This is especially so because some of its practitioners have a remarkably narrow conception of what philosophy is. The student cannot get a qualification without fitting into the norms, and cannot get a job without continuing to do so. I respect these victims of the system, regret their plight, and hope that sometimes I have been able to help them.
Nevertheless, I would like to tell another story, of collaborations between disciplines, of the openness that has long existed between fields of expertise. Not a tale of breaking down of disciplinary boundaries, but of mutual respect, which, as a new group of issues arises, may create a new discipline. In my opinion what matters is that honest and diligent thinkers and activists respect each other’s learned skills and innate talents. Who else to go to but someone who knows more than you do, or can do something better than you can? Not because you are inexpert in your domain, but because you need help from another one. I never seek help from an ‘interdisciplinary’ person, but only from a ‘disciplined’ one. Never? Well, hardly ever.
Why am I so complacent? Because I lucked out. In 1965 I published a book about the logic of statistical inference. It had a good publisher, in those days (Cambridge). That surely helped. But the book said on the front page that I worked at a nothing university, in those days (British Columbia). This book had been written entirely in isolation. I had not talked to a single statistician. It was my own introverted thing. Within weeks of publication I got long, critical and helpful letters from the leading statisticians who were preoccupied by the foundations of their subject. People whom I had only imagined, since I was an introverted nerd. They wanted to talk, and I wanted to talk, and it took a few letters, in the old days, to talk. So I learned, if you spend your energies thinking about what they are doing, within the domain of what you know how to do, then concerned others will want to learn about what you are doing, within the domain of what they know how to do.
I have always lucked out. Of course, as I have carried more cultural and academic capital with me, it has been easier and easier to consult people from different disciplines. Yet I have regularly found that people who have skills want to tell you what they do and how to do it. Are you scared of someone because they know more than you? Forget it. They will love to tell you. My only ‘interdisciplinary’ experience, so designated, was at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (the ZiF: Zentrum für interdisciplinäre Forschung) in Bielefeld. In 1982 the late Lorenz Krüger organized – and found the funding for – a year-long research group dedicated primarily to questions in the history of probability. It included many young scholars, plus a few established ones, from a great many countries in Europe, plus people from the USA and Canada. There were historians of science, philosophers, statisticians with an historical bent, economists, mathematicians, experimental psychologists. Yes, a lot of disciplines were represented.
The year was an amazing success, largely owing to the gentle and sensitive leadership of Lorenz himself who encouraged us to do what we were good at, and to listen to others doing what they were good at. I often come across references, in the general literature, to ‘the Bielefeld group’. The productivity was amazing. In the first instance, two volumes of collected papers, and a volume, a sort of overview, written by a collective that was a subset of the group. In the following few years a number of truly excellent books were published by individual members of the group. Some of these are absolutely permanent contributions to the field – they have become ‘classics’. Plus many more specialist papers.
One might say, twenty years later, that the Bielefeld group created a sub-discipline in the history of science, for there continue to be published important new papers and books. I suppose that the history of probability and statistics should not count as a fully fledged sub-discipline. Nowadays a good sociological criterion for the existence of a sub-discipline is the existence of at least one journal explicitly dedicated to the topic. There is no such journal for the history of probability! Nevertheless, a great deal of first-rate research continues. I suppose that would have happened anyway, but Bielefeld provided a benchmark in the development of the field.
Is the Bielefeld group a model for ‘interdisciplinarity’? Yes and no. Yes, of course, the participants were drawn from a number of disciplines, and worked in an institution dedicated by name and practice to interdisciplinary research. But in a sense, the answer is ‘no’. Here I have to speak for myself. I never thought in those terms, and never once heard one of my colleagues use the word ‘interdisciplinary’. Of course it was there, in the name of our host institution, but since we always called it simply the ZiF, we never heard the word. We thought of ourselves as individuals from different disciplines with some overlapping interests.
Allow me another example. A couple of years ago I was privileged to attend the eightieth birthday celebration of Mary Douglas, the anthropologist. It was quite rightly held in the rather grand premises of the British Academy. Seven people spoke about aspects of her work. (I did Risk and Culture.) Aside from her biographer, exactly one speaker was an anthropologist, who discussed Mary’s early research in the Congo. And then: A famous urban sociologist-cum-politician. A biblical scholar - Douglas became fascinated by the pollution rules of the Pentateuch, and something of a Biblical scholar herself. An art historian. An expert on Hindu mythology. And no one spoke about her books on food and its meanings, or on styles of thought ... She is one interdisciplinarian! Except that is not how I think of her. Rather she applies her keen and totally unconventional mind and skills where she is interested. I shall have to ask her next time I see her, does she think of herself as anything other than a (non-conformist) anthropologist of a particular kind, education and tradition? I doubt it.
I conclude with a current hobby of mine. There is today an increasing awareness that diagrams can play a fundamental role in the communication of ideas. In modern physics, the Feynman diagram is ubiquitous, and an indispensable tool of thought. I have become interested in tree-diagrams. There are cognitive scientists who argue strongly that arranging hierarchies, taxonomies, temporal processes and the like, in the form of tree-diagrams, may be in effect innate, perhaps there is even a tree-diagramming module in the brain.
Certainly tree imagery is very deep in human culture: the Tree of Life goes back to Babylon and Assyria, long before the Hebrew Bible, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is ancient too. The candelabra in the Temple, the Menorah, are branching trees. The Cross is a tree, so shaped, and made of wood indeed. Tree images are present in most civilizations, even if they are most prominent in regions where trees are not so easy to come by. Yet the use of tree-diagrams seems very recent. How recent? I had carelessly said in seminars that the Linnaean hierarchy in which classes are defined by division (species, genus, order, class) obviously produced a tree-structure. A student kept on protesting that before evolutionary theory, systematic taxonomists did not think in terms of trees or draw trees. Well, she was right. I have adopted what I call ‘Scharf’s maxim’: it is not a tree unless it is drawn as a tree and called a tree.
I became curious about tree-diagrams in general. For example in traditional logic there is what is called the ‘Tree of Porphyry’, but which is not found in or mentioned in Porphyry’s Isagoge (his introduction to the Categories of Aristotle) written about the year 300. Also genealogical trees, the tree of Jesse, trees of consanguinity, which determine the impediments to marriage (viz. incest). Tables of kinship relationships, which have played such a role in twentieth century ethnography. Trees are important in logic and essential in many aspects of computer science, though the first theorem about trees appears to have been published only in 1857. I have, over the past two or three months, consulted, usually by e-mail, a vast range of experts, most of whom have been extraordinarily generous. I do not read Latin properly, let alone Greek, but now I think the first logic trees were drawn and described in Syriac, perhaps about 500. The very symbols of that alphabet are unintelligible to me. So I have been consulting masters of this or that language – and biologists, anthropologists, Byzantine scholars, Renaissance scholars, computer scientists. I am still trying to find historians of Islamic logic who can help me. All this in order to understand what we might call the cultures and uses of tree-diagrams.
If anyone should be curious: At present I believe that in the East, better named West Asia, tree diagrams start early, say 500. In Western Europe, and in particular Spain, there are trees of consanguinity from 600, but these are generalized to genealogical trees, the Tree of Porphyry, the Tree of Jesse only around 1100, always in Spain, so focal for joining Western Christian, Jewish (especially Cabala) and Islamic civilizations. The greatest tree-diagram fetishist of all time was a Catalan, Raymond Lull, who was at the focal point, around 1300. And who happens to have been one of Leibniz’s heroes. Paolo Rossi wrote a great book about the history of combinatorial logic and the universal language – ‘from Lull to Leibniz’.
Of course the fact that tree-diagrams are so recent in human history does not imply that they are not grounded in a universal mental module. It would imply that human beings learned to use and represent this faculty only in historical time. There is a further question for an evolving discipline, namely cognitive science. We have not yet sorted out how to run together questions of culture and cognition.
Is this an interdisciplinary quest? In one sense, ‘yes’: I am consulting experts from disciplines that are mutually unintelligible to each other. I have yet to meet a person truly knowledgeable about Byzantine civilization who understands evolutionary theory – or vice versa. Neither is likely to comprehend the present ambitions of the cognitive sciences. But in a more important sense the answer is ‘no’: highly disciplined scholars help out in a project that is quite easy to explain and to become captivated by.
I apologize for an all too complacent contribution to this ongoing series of discussions. I respect the questions raised by colleagues, but thought it worth while to put in a word for collaborating disciplines that do not need to be, in any important sense of the word ‘interdisciplinary’.
http://www.interdisciplines.org/interdisciplinarity/papers/7
No comments:
Post a Comment