Problems of Interdisciplinarity
The View from Oregon — 328: Friday 14 February 2025
In a PS to newsletter 324 I mentioned that I would be giving some guest lectures this term, building on what I talked about in a previous term. So far this month I’ve given two of three talks, with one more in the coming week scheduled. Most of what I’ve been talking about could be called philosophy of psychology, though I’m also giving some historical background of the ideas discussed. Preparing these talks, each of which is about an hour long, has taken a lot of my time, so I haven’t made the kind of progress I thought I would make on my Thought Experiments in Civilization series, though I’m still working on this and hope to produce another episode (with the title “In Search of Lost Civilizations”) in the coming week or two. However, what I have learned in preparing these talks will be relevant to my work on philosophy of history and civilization in at least two ways: 1) There is nothing in human experience that is irrelevant to civilization, since civilization comprehends everything that human beings do, and 2) thinking about psychology and related disciplines has given me yet another perspective on philosophy of science, and new perspectives on philosophy of science give me novel approaches to the problem of a science of civilization. Moreover, these two points are related in a way that I will try to explain.
When I look at psychology and related disciplines like psychiatry, neuroscience, and cognitive science I see the same problems I see in history and civilization, which is the failure to converge on a coherent scientific research program. However, this is a matter of degree rather than a rigid science vs. non-science dichotomy. I suspect a great many people believe that psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science are sciences in good standing, as well established (or almost as well established) as any of the traditional natural sciences, but the very fact that we come at the human mind from these radically different perspective shows us that the mind is insufficiently well defined to definitely exclude any given perspective we might take on it. But that doesn’t mean that all the contenders to being a science of the mind are equally valid or indeed equally failed sciences. A body of knowledge might be a mixed bag, based on scientific research program that is itself a mixed bag, with some tightly defined quantitative concepts (theoretical terms) and other loosely defined folk concepts. The resulting body of knowledge is partly predictive, partly misleading, so that the attempt can be seen as having promise, and some will be lured by that promise to sink their careers into it without seeing what the problem is. This is, I think, more or less the point that Wittgenstein was making in the passage at the end of his Philosophical Investigations where he discusses the confusions of psychology.
The traditional “hard” sciences are not without their problems, analogous to the problems of the “soft” sciences. There are many research programs in fundamental physics, and there are problems that divide the scientific community. The hard sciences, however, are more easily quantifiable, which is the same thing as saying that they are easier to reduce to a set of fruitful abstractions that allow us to construct a body of knowledge with the least amount of problems inherited from our qualitative experience of the world and the folk concepts that were introduced on the basis of qualitative experience. The “soft” sciences — the human sciences, the social sciences — still retain many if not most of the folk concepts that define their scope, and any attempt to replace folk concepts with quantitative concepts results in resorting to testimony — self-reported scores on a 1–10 scale, and things of that sort. But lacking any consensus on what the self or the mind is that makes these reports, we really have no control over these numbers, and by “no control” I mean a control in the experimental sense of a control group. We can’t take an isolated mind as a standard point of reference, measuring all other minds on the basis of that standard reference. Individuals may have quantitatively distinct pain thresholds, or even qualitatively distinct pain thresholds, and we have no way to establish a baseline.
Neuroscience may seem to be our best bet, as we now have a lot of quantitative data based on fMRI scans, but to establish some relationship between the observational terms of neuroscience and theoretical terms of neuroscience that are intended to express human cognition taking place in the brain requires bridging the gap between the inner and outer worlds. We can posit theoretical terms internal to neuroscience that would strictly account for observables without ever invoking subjective experience, but that’s not really the interest that drives neuroscience. Neuroscience is interesting to us because it is about the physical basis of cognition, but cognition stands on the other side of the scientific barrier, with our own cognition being that which is most intimately known to ourselves, while the cognition of others is known to us only by testimony and reports. I’m well aware that all these formulations are unsatisfactory. It would take a significant effort to tighten them up to the point that they could be regarded as definitive, but most reading this will easily enough see what I am trying to get at here.
There are a couple of hard truths that follow from the uneven development of science. One of these hard truths is that it is not the case that every nascent science can converge on a coherent scientific research program. Many promising efforts fail, and they fail for many different reasons — lack of conceptual clarity, failure of buy-in (by both individuals and institutions), lack of imagination in elaborating the nascent science, stagnation once initial results are obtained, and so on. Another hard truth is that some concepts are intrinsically more suited to scientific schematization than others, and this difference among candidate sciences is glossed over in most scientific thought. Both of these hard truths represent a failure of universality very different from failures of universality that follow from anthropocentrism, geocentrism, or specifically human or tribal cognitive biases. It has been a staple of critiques of science that scientific knowledge leaves out much of human experience, but instead of using this insight to better understand science, it is invoked as an excuse to tolerate non-scientific and unscientific modes of thought. This holds no interest for me personally, but since I’ve been giving talks on philosophy of psychology it naturally comes up in relation to Carl Jung, whose followers dichotomize into those who continue his work in the spirit of scientific naturalism, and those who employ Jung as a cudgel to beat back unwelcome naturalistic encroachments on their preferred illusions. This also describes a lot of the objections to evolutionary psychology.
One response to recalcitrant objects of knowledge that do not readily yield to conventional scientific methods is interdisciplinarity. I have mixed feelings about this. I said above that nothing is irrelevant to the study of civilization, and this implies that the study of civilization ought to be the ultimate interdisciplinary science, drawing in all the special sciences for their insights into matters that ultimately must touch on civilization. Also, I’m sympathetic to big history, which is very much an interdisciplinary undertaking. But I also have second thoughts about interdisciplinarity. I am beginning to see the purported interdisciplinary sciences are more like a scientific pastiche that take a bit from here and a bit from there and mix in a few folk concepts for good measure. Of course, it doesn’t have to be like this, and I have argued many times for the value of interdisciplinary scientific inquiry, but we also need to recognize when interdisciplinary science goes terribly wrong. I don’t have any of this adequately formulated, but I will work on it. Now that I’ve seen it (i.e., now that I believe myself to have grasped a hard truth about interdisciplinary sciences), I can start to sort through the arguments that have apparently come to me on a subconscious level. The making explicit of an elusive idea is always a great philosophical challenge.
I’ve written a number blog posts and newsletters in which I have suggested a picture of science in which disciplines grow, fragment into special sciences, and then these special sciences merge together again in different patterns, giving rise to new sciences, and I have argued that this process admits of no intrinsic limit and can therefore continue to account for indefinite growth in scientific knowledge. I still largely hold this view, but my second thoughts suggest that I need to qualify this view. It is not the case that every possible combination of special sciences can yield a coherent scientific research program and scientific knowledge derived from that research program. How strong is this constraint on the formation of new sciences? A sufficiently strong constraint on the formation of new sciences would mean that viable new sciences would be finite in number and exhaustible in principle. Science could come to an end, as Nicholas Rescher has argued.
At its most radical, this insight also suggests a hard limit to comprehensive and big picture sciences. Perhaps there is a threshold that, once crossed, rigorous science becomes impossible. That is to say, there may be a limit to the number of sciences that can come together in an interdisciplinary science, so that any putative object of knowledge that requires a number of sciences beyond the threshold of epistemic coherency can never be a viable science and the putative object of knowledge can never to be thematized by science. A big picture inquiry like a science of civilization would necessarily be given the lie by this, insofar as we conceive of it as the ultimate interdisciplinary enterprise for which no knowledge is relevant. However, we can re-conceive putative objects of knowledge not as the proper object of an interdisciplinary science, but as the proper object of a distinctive science the relevant concepts of which have not yet been formulated, so that object of knowledge might yet be thematized by a special science rather than an interdisciplinary science. This is where the two points mentioned in the first paragraph come together: considerations in the philosophy of science arising from the contrast of psychology and related sciences suggests limits to a coherent scientific research program, and the study of civilization treated as an interdisciplinary science would exceed these limits if anything would exceed these limits. Therefore, if the study of civilization is to become scientific (maybe, someday), either it must be re-conceived as a special science, or the scope of its interdisciplinarity must be constrained below a currently unknown threshold of coherence.
