Patterns & Metaphors
Interdisciplinarity
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The need in meetings to interrelate the approaches of different disciplines, in order to understand a social problem situation and to be able to recommend appropriate remedial programmes, is now increasingly recognized. The "inter-disciplinary" approach in now in fashion and an essential element in many requests for programme funds. On closer examination, however it is possible to discover that this requirement, far from constituting any form of progress, is only the symptom of the pathological state of knowledge at this time. The specialization without limit of scientific disciplines has resulted in an increasing fragmentation of the epistemological horizon.
Specialists cannot be asked to testify in meetings with regard to the unification of the sciences, or an "integrated" action programme, insofar as these specialists by their vocation and training are ignorant of, or deny, this very unity. Even those who profess to stand for the unification of the sciences cannot always be trusted, for each one of them would be satisfied in defining his familiar point of view, and more or less justifying his own individual presuppositions.
Teaching and research institutions reinforce the above separation through administrative procedures which tend to eliminate communications with institutions associated with other disciplines. This is reflected in conference programme events sponsored in parallel by such bodies. The division of intellectual space into smaller and smaller compartments, and the multiplication of institutions which assume the management of each such territory, results in the formation of a feudal system which governs the majority of scientific teaching and research enterprises and is clearly reflected in the organization of meetings.
When an "interdisciplinary" approach is used in a meeting, it most often consists in bringing together specialists from different disciplines, in the simplistic belief that such an assembly would suffice to bring about a common ground and a common language between individuals who have nothing else in common. The reports or results of such meetings neither achieve, nor attempt to achieve, any synthesis - other than the purely spatial juxtaposition of viewpoints and constraints, and subsequently, a judiciously worded editorial overview for the published proceedings.
Few of the societal problems which give rise to large conferences at this time can adequately be handled within any one discipline. Such problems result from the interaction of social, economic, technological, political, religious, psychological, biological and other factors. Understanding requires an integration of the relevant disciplinary perspectives. Such integration however must be much more than the synthesis of results obtained by independent unidisciplinary studies conducted prior to the meeting. The synthesis, to be useful, must come before the unidisciplinary commitments have been made and the conclusions frozen, without having been tempered by exposure to other constraints. This should be the true function of an interdisciplinary "meeting" - to act as a "transformative crucible" from which a new perspective emerges and is tempered in a number of stages. If the result is merely an agglomeration, then no transformation has taken place and the process has failed.
Where such interdisciplinary synthesis does take place, however, it is most successful between two closely related disciplines. Such integration is decreasingly successful as the number of disciplines involved increases. This is matched by a rapid decrease in the sophistication of the synthesis and a reduction in expectation of its benefits by those involved. A "synthesis" of results in itself dangerous in a meeting if it is superficial, but nevertheless succeeds in removing the stimulus to greater collective effort. The difficulties are increased when the disciplines are of a different nature, have fundamentally different methodologies, or focus on very different subject matter. As the variety of disciplinary perspectives increases, so does the tendency of each subgroup to perceive the activity of others as being of marginal relevance or importance.
The challenge in meetings is to face up to the failures of the past (particularly those disguised as successes) and to find new ways of interrelating the intellectual resources available in order to guide significant change.
