The Limits of Interdisciplinarity
Scientific Abstraction Differentiates the Special Sciences
Why do we have many sciences instead of one science? Why is not science more robustly interdisciplinary? These are a deceptively simple questions that are difficult to answer, as the answer takes us into regions of thought that rarely receive explicit exposition. I am going to approach these questions by way of a circuitous detour through the popularization of specialized knowledge.
Will Durant, who made himself independently wealthy from the success of his book The Story of Philosophy (which good fortune he paid forward by subsequently writing The Story of Civilization), wrote of his experience as a popularizer of philosophy in the Preface to the second edition of The Story of Philosophy:
“The appetite of the layman grew by what it fed on. There were in America millions of men and women who had been unable to go to college, and who thirsted for the findings of history and science; even those who had gone through college showed a moderate hunger for knowledge… Then came the flood. Outline followed outline, ‘story’ followed ‘story’; science and art, religion and law, had their stenographers…”
Durant concluded, however:
“The public appetite was quickly satiated; critics and professors complained of superficiality and haste, and an undertow of resentment set in, which reached every outline from the last to the first. As quickly as it had come, the fashion changed; no one dared any longer say a word for the humanization of knowledge; the denunciation of outlines was now the easy road to critical repute; it became the style to speak with a delicate superiority of any non-fiction book that could be understood. The snob movement in literature began.”
While it is no longer the interpretation of philosophy for the general public that produces literary sensations, the task of interpreting increasingly subtle and complex scientific theories to the public now occasionally produces best sellers, such as Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. While I do not myself consider A Brief History of Time to be a successful interpretation of science to the general public — Hawking made a lot of assertions without making much of an attempt to explain or clarify the ideas he asserted (and, yes, I read the book) — no one can dispute its literary success.
Science communications (which was once known as popularization, but I can understand why “communications” is preferred before “popularization”), when successful, plays an underappreciated role in providing an exposition of the underlying intuitions that form the background of a scientific discipline. Thus while popularizers are sometimes looked down upon, as Durant noted, they are doing something that many who make use of these underlying intuitions in advanced theoretical work cannot do themselves.
For example, Brian Greene in his The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (pp. 291–292), has done a remarkable job of elucidating the different intuitive motivations that underlie physics and cosmology in his exposition of the flatness problem in cosmology:
“By no means does the flatness problem show that the standard big bang model is wrong. A staunch believer reacts to the flatness problem with a shrug of the shoulders and the curt reply ‘That’s just how it was back then,’ taking the finely tuned matter/energy density of the early universe — which the standard big bang requires to yield predictions that are in the same ballpark as observations — as an unexplained given. But this answer makes most physicists recoil. Physicists feel that a theory is grossly unnatural if its success hinges on extremely precise tunings of features for which we lack a fundamental explanation. Without supplying a reason for why the matter/energy density of the early universe would have been so finely tuned to an acceptable value, many physicists have found the standard big bang model highly contrived. Thus, the flatness problem highlights the extreme sensitivity of the standard big bang model to conditions in the remote past of which we know very little; it shows how the theory must assume the universe was just so, in order to work.”
“By contrast, physicists long for theories whose predictions are insensitive to unknown quantities such as how things were a long time ago. Such theories feel robust and natural because their predictions don’t depend delicately on details that are hard, or perhaps even impossible, to determine directly. This is the kind of theory provided by inflationary cosmology, and its solution to the flatness problem illustrates why.”
Physics and cosmology, while both obviously natural sciences, are distinct natural sciences, and one of the things that distinguishes different disciplines of the natural sciences is the underlying intuitions that each makes use of, one part of the underlying intuition is the nature and degree of scientific abstraction that enters into the thought of each discipline. It is because of these distinct intuitions and forms of scientific abstraction that the cosmologist can shrug his shoulders at an observation that makes physicists recoil.
The particular kind of scientific abstraction of which physicists make use looks for isolatable systems that can be reduced to a mechanism. Physicists can be perfectly happy with laws of nature that work as well with time going backward as with time going forward, and think nothing is amiss in this, because these laws of nature are robustly testable (at least, testable in time as we know it, exclusively flowing forward) and can be isolated from the flow of history and elaborated in this idealized way. Physics is about finding mechanisms that work regardless of context.
Cosmology, like biology and geology, is essentially an historical science, and, as an historical science it is not so much looking for the kind of laws of nature that physics likes to find as it is looking for the exact sequence of development that brought us to where we are today. Historical sciences give meaning to their domain of knowledge by contextualizing that knowledge in larger structures, and so isolated, idealized mechanisms play a much smaller role in cosmology than they do in physics (though they are certainly not absent in physics).
Cosmologists, of course, have their own forms of abstraction. They may not think to tell you that, for a cosmologist, the basic building blocks of the universe are galaxies, so when a cosmologists tells you that the universe is expanding in all directions, they sometimes have to answer questions like, “If the universe is expanding, does that mean we are getting bigger?” or, “If the universe is expanding, are the stars in the Milky Way moving farther apart?” These are perfectly legitimate questions for a common sense view of the universe when told that the universe is expanding in all directions. We want to know exactly what is expanding and how it is expanding. But since the cosmologist is accustomed to his particular level of scientific abstraction at which entities less than galaxies don’t play much of a part, addressing these qualifications will be an afterthought.
There is a contemporary discipline known as astrophysics that synthesizes some of the intuitions and methods of physics and cosmology, as well as touching on concerns of astronomy, but it is significant that a new specialization of astrophysics appeared to address the need that was felt, because this is how the western sciences have approached the elaboration of knowledge. Each particular domain of knowledge has its own specialization, and the expansion of knowledge that makes us aware of previously unsuspected problems produces new domains of knowledge in the attempt to address these problems.
Astrophysics cultivates its own intuitions and its own forms of scientific abstraction that make the discipline function in its distinctive way. Indeed, these intuitions and forms of scientific abstraction more-or-less define the discipline, even if those who are working in the discipline cannot explain exactly what it is that they are doing, and must wait for a science communications specialist to come along and explain in ordinary language what the astrophysicists are doing. For science communications itself has its own intuitions and forms of scientific abstraction of which the other science specializations are innocent.
Brian Greene, obviously, is a physicist with a talent for science communications, and is capable of holding both physics and science communications in his mind at the same time, as in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous remark, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
Despite the imperative of epistemic wholeness that we all feel (totality of knowledge achieved by a single method), and which is at the root of calls for interdisciplinary research, most interdisciplinary research ends up producing a new specialization, because we make progress in scientific knowledge by focusing on a particular area of knowledge, and this means masking the rest of the world from view in an act of scientific abstraction, so that the specialist’s view of the objects of his inquiry is uncompromised by irrelevant and distracting detail.
This irrelevant and distracting detail — what William James called, “one great blooming, buzzing confusion” — is what characterizes lived experience, and it is at this point that we can understand the point at which lived experience diverges from scientific knowledge. Lived experience is a blooming, buzzing confusion, and while we filter this confusion in order to make sense of it, and focus on things that interest us, the blooming, buzzing confusion is never far. In science and the production of scientific knowledge, the blooming, buzzing confusion is rigorously excluded by protocols of experimentation and scientific method that narrow the scope of experience to the value of an observed dependent variable.
The literary genre we know as the novel is an evocation of lived experience, and we have much to learn from novels, but a novel is not an exposition of scientific knowledge. Literature is not going to give us the proper value for the Hubble constant; only science can focus on that question in a way that will produce an answer. A novel that described the drama of scientific discovery in the work of scientists converging on the Hubble constant would present a picture of the human side of doing science, and would help us to better understand the social context in which science is done — the lived experience of scientific researchers, at it were — and it might even illuminate the conclusions of researchers, but it would not arrogate to itself the role of arriving at the answers to the problems that science studies.
Science, on the other hand, is not going to give us the lived experience of researchers, but only scientific knowledge and a description of the meticulous process of arriving at this knowledge. This exclusion of lived experience can go so far as to obscure or even conceal the intuitions that underlie scientific research and discovery, and this is related to the problem that there is no science of science (on which cf. Theory Development in Science is Unscientific). That is to say, there is no systematic and methodical way to teach the intuitions and forms of scientific abstractions employed in science. The most one can do is to be a Socratic midwife to science, exposing someone to the procedures of scientific method in the hopes that they “get” it and are able to continue on their own.
It is often difficult, in reading scientific papers, to try to extract the plain, intuitive meaning behind the many circuitous and apparently oblique assertions contained therein. Scientists deeply invested in the forms of intuition and scientific abstraction that characterize their particular discipline cannot easily step back and view these intuitions with the same objectivity with which they view their data. With these barriers to understanding the intuitions that underlie science, it is no surprise that we do not possess a fine-grained account of the various kinds of intuition and scientific abstraction employed by the special sciences. But this is what we need in order to make sense of what we are doing in the growing enterprise of scientific knowledge, which is the engine that drives technological civilization forward.
The very least we can say in the light of the above considerations is that the problem of disciplinary silos is misconceived; researchers do not isolate themselves within disciplinary silos out of any sense of protecting their turf, or as part of a battle to attain status within a restricted domain, or to deny knowledge of the uninitiated and the Great Unwashed. Scientists are isolated within disciplinary silos because they have trained themselves into seeing the world through the filter of particular forms of intuition and particular kinds of scientific abstraction that are not employed, do not obtain, or are not relevant in the same way within other disciplines. One can blunder around other disciplines without a grasp of the relevant intuitions and forms of scientific abstraction, and everyone once in a while one will make an important connection that the specialists miss, but one will almost certainly never make a contribution to the advancement of the discipline itself. In all likelihood, if one does make an advantageous connection, this insight will then become the basis of a new specialization that will make progress to the extent that individuals converge upon novel forms of intuition and scientific abstraction that best serve this new discipline.
The specificity of disciplinary intuitions and distinctive forms of scientific abstraction define the limits of interdisciplinarity and the attempt to get the sciences to work together to the one, single end of expanding scientific knowledge, and thus this also explains why there are many sciences instead of one, single science. However, these many sciences accomplish the work of expanding scientific knowledge, though that knowledge is often highly specialized and must be interpreted in order to find its place within human life as knowledge that makes a difference in navigating the obstacles of an indifferent world.
Some time ago in a post I asked — Is it possible to specialize in the big picture? — and I think the above demonstrates how this question is more relevant than ever. We require stand-alone “big picture” disciplines with their own special kinds of intuition and their distinctive forms of scientific abstraction that can bring together the synthesis of scientific knowledge that is missing from the specialized disciplines. We should not expect that big picture disciplines — and there may eventually come to be many of them, as should be expected in light of the above reflections — will simply be an eclectic gathering of specialized scientific knowledge, but each will be a discipline in its own right, that makes use of the knowledge of the specialized sciences in its own distinctive way. We shouldn’t resist this movement of thought, but rather we should let a hundred flowers bloom.
