Introduction

The intellectual system erected largely in the Western world since the Reformation is enormously powerful and productive. Although we have much yet to learn, the scientific approach to knowledge since the time of Galileo has provided the human race with a far better understanding of our world and of ourselves than was available to any previous society. This gain in understanding has arisen primarily from two sources. We have adopted what we loosely call "scientific methods," and we have broken the intellectual enterprise into a larger and larger number of parts (disciplines and research programs). We have created working groups of scholars who study each of the parts in as "scientific" a method as they can bring to bear. However, there is a near total absence of overviews of the intellectual terrain.

The lack of overviews of the intellectual terrain causes several difficulties. We have no means for understanding the relationship of our individual area of expertise to the larger intellectual enterprise. We have no viewpoint from which we can look objectively at the relations among the various disciplines. We tend to see science as a single method (usually based on physics), and thereby underestimate the differences in the methods and natures of various fields dealing with truth assertions. It seems past due that we begin to see if we can rectify these difficulties. That is the primary purpose of this book.

This book deals with questions such as the following:

• Can we erect overviews of the intellectual domain dealing with truth assertions about physical, biological, and social nature?

• Are such overviews important?

• What is the appropriate nature of the "principles" for various disciplines? Are these the same for all fields, or are they necessarily in part different for different "domains of knowledge" ?

• Is the dominant (reductionist) view of science sufficient? Or do we need other views to augment it?

In this book we will call the discussion of these and other related questions "multidisciplinary discourse." More specifically, multidisciplinary discourse will denote the study of two topics: (1) the relationships of the disciplines of knowledge to each other; and (2) the relationships of a given discipline to human knowledge about the world and ourselves as a whole.

Multidisciplinary discourse is not the same as what we usually call interdisciplinary study. Interdisciplinary study generally denotes the combining of knowledge from two (or sometimes more) disciplines to create syntheses that are more appropriate for certain problem areas. Multidisciplinary study examines the appropriate relationships of the disciplines to each other and to the larger intellectual terrain. There is some overlap between interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary study, but for the most part they are different areas.

The remainder of this chapter sets out the preliminary groundwork. It lists the topics that multidisciplinary discourse needs to cover, defines the terrain we will examine, and sets out some hypotheses we need to begin the discussion. Chapter 2 begins the discussion of the first overview of the terrain.

Multidisciplinary discourse needs to cover at least the following four topics:

1. The description of several overall frameworks that exhibit the place of the disciplines of knowledge with respect to each other.

2. The delineation of what a given discipline can (and cannot) represent in the world. The word "represent" here includes such things as descriptions, taxonomies, understanding, and possibly predictions.

3. The development of insight into the similarities and differences of the disciplines in matters such as the complexity of paradigmatic systems, the invariance of (or variation in) behaviors and principles over time, and the typical variables used in analyses.

4. The study of the following:

a. How the disciplines ought to constrain each other when applied to problems that inherently require knowledge from many disciplines, including examples or specific difficulties that have arisen from lack of this kind of discussion.

b. Some ways in which scholars can judge when subfields, or research programs, have drifted into error, nonproductive triviality, or approaches that inherently cannot produce the results sought.

c. Application of (a) and (b) to at least a few important historical and current examples.

d. Implications of (a) and (b) for methodology in various disciplines, and in our total intellectual system.

This book examines elements of all four items above and other related topics.

Our discussion will focus on those disciplines of knowledge that deal with truth assertions about our world. The word "discipline" is not given a tight definition. Since we will want to examine carefully the differences between disciplines, a tight a priori definition might overconstrain our study. It is enough at this point to say, "a discipline" can be understood as the subject of study of a university department (or major sector of a department) in a late-twentieth-century university. This implies that a discipline possesses a specific area of study, a literature, and a working community of paid scholars and/or practitioners.

The operative verb about this discussion of multidisciplinarity is "to begin," for several reasons. For at least a century, there has been no community of scholars concerned with multidisciplinarity, and therefore no...