Disciplinary boundaries

Eszter’s “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/19/isolated-social-networkers/ on physicists, sociologists and network theory has given rise to some interesting responses, and the beginnings of a broader distributed discussion on what disciplinary boundaries mean. Maybe it’s time to tie these threads back into a knot, entangle them further with some arguments from Susanne Lohmann on the functions and problems of academic disciplines, and see how people choose to unravel it all. (warning – lengthy extracts below fold).

“Cosma Shalizi I”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/%7Ecrshalizi/weblog/347.html

So where does all this leave us? Obviously, I wish physicists would bother to master the existing literature in new areas, before we start building models there. It’s highly unlikely that all of the previous scholars who worked on the subject were idiotic or totally misguided — and even if they were, it’s important to be able to say so with a clean conscience. As a physicist working in non-traditional areas myself, I find it both acutely embarrassing and professionally harmful when others of my tribe make dreadful howlers, or re-enact elementary discoveries. (There is a reputational externality here.) At the same time, I think it would be a shame if the offenses many physicists commit against properly scholarly procedure and etiquette lead others — in this case, sociologists — to dismiss our efforts completely, partly because that would be unfair to individuals, and partly because very interesting results, which seem to me to be relevant to sociology, have come from individuals who I’ve heard express the most withering (and completely unjustified) contempt for that field and its practitioners. (I can’t, obviously, name names.)

After some thought, I am unable to come up with a flaw in the following simple plan (which means there are probably many): if you are a physicist and found you have written a paper on topic X, send it to a journal of X-ology. If X is, by tradition, a part of physics, by all means send it to Physical Review E. If, on the other hand, X is a topic in social science, then send it to a social science journal. Only if X isn’t physics, but also isn’t really, or isn’t just (say) an analysis of social structure, because it’s also an analysis of metabolic pathways, and says something new about nonequilibrium phase transitions, and says how to get a free pony, only then does it make sense again to send it to PRE — or Nature, especially if you have a good picture of the pony. (Even then, if we had successful complex systems journals, I’d say send it there.) As precedent, I would point to the way we helped invent molecular biology, publishing not in our own journals but in things like the Journal of Biological Chemistry. If you are worried about finding a social science journal which will not reject your contributions just because of your background and approach, let me take this opportunity to plug the new Structure and Dynamics: e-Journal of Anthropological and Related Sciences. As a recently co-opted member of the editorial board, I can promise that your manuscript will receive extensive criticism from referees from both mathematical-physical and social-scientific backgrounds — though whether the net effect is to make the review process unusually well-informed or completely blockheaded is obviously not for me to say.

“Cosma Shalizi II”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/%7Ecrshalizi/weblog/349.html

Aaron’s post, especially towards the end, touches on the question of why we have disciplines in the first place. Various deflating answers are possible — for instance, some combination of medieval university tradition and primate territoriality. But I think they do, in fact, have a useful function in the advancement of knowledge. Researchers face what are, in principle, insanely difficult decision-problems: what topics do I investigate? what methods do I use? what background knowledge do I need to have? to whom do I communicate my results, and how? which other investigations are most relevant to my work? The existence of a discipline — in the sense of both a body of knowledge and a community of inquirers — reduces the scope of these problems; so does that of more specialized sub-disciplinary fields, and so on all the way down to research communities of, perhaps, a few hundred people world-wide. It is at this point that things are sufficiently manageable that ordinary mortals can hope to make some progress, together, on learning about the world. Disciplines and smaller fields are never completely isolated from one another, but the interfaces are restricted — anything else would be self-defeating. As science expands, both intellectually and socially, the decision problems get harder, and so the pressure to specialize rises.

“Timothy Burke”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=26

bq. It seems to me that we learn best about fields which are new to us by trying to practice them, not by going into monkish seculsion and acquiring a comprehensive command of a full canon before we even dip our toes into a new hot tub. Complexity and emergence is old hat to some people, but it’s new to me, and judging from the reaction when I talk about it to colleagues in my own discipline, new to most historians. It’s best when we first try to practice in a new area that we acknowledge our limitations, I agree. It does annoy when someone tackles a topic that is deeply explored by a generation of scholars as if those scholars never existed. Stephen Wolfram got smacked for just such a sin, and appropriately so, whatever the virtues of his work in other respects might be. That humility isn’t just a performance: it’s a recognition of the collective, cumulative nature of scholarship. It needs to be met by a generosity on the other side of things, however. Part of how we learn by doing is the gentle amendations of others inside and outside our own disciplines once our work circulates or is published. Guiding people to well-formed bodies of knowledge is one thing; punishing them for having failed to find those bodies of knowledge, for failing to be us is another. The one seems to me the best possibility of a scholarly community; the other the worst realization of it.

“Susanne Lohmann”:http://fac.cgu.edu/~zakp/conferences/AC/papers/Lohmann.pdf

bq. the function of the university is to enable deep specialization. The structures of the university emerged to solve several problems: how to nurse deeply specialized scholars, how to protect them from each other and the outside world, and how to pool the results of their distributed inquiries. The problems to which the university is a response are hard problems, and there is no free lunch. Institutional solutions are generally second-best in the sense that they constitute the best solution that is feasible in the light of environmental constraints (in which case they are a defense), or they are less than second-best (in which case they are defective). …

bq. Deep specialization and the disciplines emerged in tandem, and for a reason. Because the world is complex and the individual brain is limited in its cognitive grasp, the task of figuring out how the world works needs to be split up into manageable pieces, but then the results of all the distributed inquiries need to be pulled together to form a synoptic picture—the ultimate goal, after all, is to help the human race gain control over harsh and capricious Nature (including human nature). To this end, the university slices the world into a hierarchically ordered set of disciplines and fields-within-disciplines and subfields-within-fields. A deeply specialized scholar will spend his life tending to some obscure question which, taken in isolation, is completely pointless. His research gains meaning and impact only by being pooled with research of other scholars who are working on the same, or closely related, questions, and the research of a group of scholars gains meaning and impact only if it connects and cumulates within the larger discipline.

bq. … the history of the university … is largely a history of ossification punctuated by bursts of intellectual vibrancy and structural innovation. … When institutional change occurs, it is typically in response to the political or economic threat posed by entrants. … The multi-year process of enculteration by which a student becomes a scholar generates an emotional and cognitive lock-in. … The Fachidiot is nothing by himself—he is necessarily part of a group consisting of like-minded individuals competing with other groups. … The clusters that form the backbone of scientific networks typically count about 150 members … Scholars are energized not only by within-group approval but also by the between-group competition. … The university is a cruel institution. It takes the best and the brightest, promises them the world, and then it throws most of them to the dogs. … And if the department hires one of Them by accident, the outsider will do less well come promotion time because departmental resources are allocated by subfield and the political support structures are tied to the subfields. Thus, there is a seminar series in labor economics and in macroeconomics, and not in political economy or experimental economics, and so the scholarly misfit will have relatively less opportunity to connect with his peer group. External labor economists and macroeconomists are asked to write tenure letters, and not political economists or experimental economists, and so the scholar who is neither fish nor flesh will end up looking weaker than he really is—on paper, which is what matters in a bureaucratic promotion system.

bq. …But let us not kill the departments and disciplines all too quickly. They have evolved to protect scholars from each other and from the outside world, and their protection function is all too easily overlooked. Structures that mute conflict tend to be underappreciated when they do an excellent job because little if any conflict is observed in equilibrium— and so people forget about the problem that is being solved by the structures and “see” only the patholological implications of the structures. …Consider, for a moment, an economist and a historian who are coming up for tenure. They have very different takes on the issue of globalization. The economist thinks “more is better,” and he has money and material goods in mind. … In comparison, the historian looks through the glass, darkly, and sees globalization as the direct descendant of colonialism and imperialism. …Now imagine the two (or their friends in their respective departments) could vote on each others’ tenure cases. It would be a disaster. Neither of them would survive. And yet it is arguably useful for the university to have both (or even more than two) sides of the globalization debate represented in its walls. And it does—because the tenure process neatly separates faculty who can’t possibly get along: economists vote on economists, and historians vote on historians. … Deeply specialized scholars and discipline-based departments are the way they are for good reason. …

bq. So what’s a reform-minded university leader supposed to do? … What the president can do is put into place structures that promote internal competition and thereby exert pressure on the departments to become more flexible and nimble-minded. Internal competition can be achieved by piling cross-cutting structures on top of the departmental structures. For example, an interdisciplinary program might draw on the discipline-based departments to staff its courses. Internal competition can also be put into place by linking units of the university that naturally have something in common even while they pander to different constituencies. For example, there is an overlap in the research and teaching of the economics department and the business school.