Integration, Values, and Well-Ordered Interdisciplinary Science

I. Introduction

I want to begin by sharing an experience working alongside a team of scientists dedicated to studying coastal fog. Two years ago, experts in coastal ecology, meteorology, atmospheric chemistry, and geography recognized the need to initiate conversation between the diverse disciplines that investigate fog. Although fog had long received attention from myriad sciences, coastal fog was yet to receive the sustained investigation (and institutional support, such as from academic journals and professional conferences) that these scientists believed it warranted. Coastal fog is a strong candidate for such investigation; not only is fog implicated in a number of socially relevant processes, such as agriculture, transportation, and air pollution, but interdisciplinary conversation had spurred disciplinary breakthroughs in the past, famously in the marriage of oceanography and atmospheric chemistry. A steering committee brought together thirty researchers at a workshop with the explicit objective of catalyzing interdisciplinary research. My colleague and I were invited to provide philosophical insight into the challenges of interdisciplinary research and to work with the collaborators to overcome these challenges.

For philosophers of interdisciplinarity, a small but growing field that participates in the not-quite-as-small but growing fields of the science of team science and interdisciplinary studies, the fundamental goal of interdisciplinarity is integration (Repko). Integration is what characterizes interdisciplinarity as distinct from multidisciplinarity, integration is accomplished both socially and conceptually, and integration is marked by the construction of a common language that facilitates communication (Klein). Interdisciplinarians agree that integration is crucial but challenging, but they hardly agree about what integration is, beyond the wide deployment of an array of metaphors such as “trading zones,” “pidgin languages,” and “collective communication competence” (Boix Mansilla; Galison; Klein). There’s a tendency for philosophers and non-philosophers alike to think of integration much like middle-of-the-last-century theoreticians of science spoke of unification (Grantham). Of course, integration as unification poses something of a threat to pragmatists’ philosophy of inquiry and, hence, much of the constellation of pragmatist theories. Here, pragmatists encounter the paradigmatic conflict of interdisciplinary communication; they converse about the unification of democratic projects and scientific inquiries, while all along their interlocutors refer to a unified ontology where nature is carved at its joints.

Much of the mysticism surrounding integration could be clarified by re-describing interdisciplinary collaboration through the vocabulary of a pragmatist theory of inquiry. Generally, those who praise integration need a different way of talking about interdisciplinarity so that integration recommends itself as an ideal. Indeed, the more philosophically inclined of the thirty-some fog scientists posed the question eloquently—Why should we care at all about interdisciplinarity? Interdisciplinarians are on the right track when they talk about constructing shared meaning and forging a shared language; they are on the wrong track when they entangle these concerns with reference and reality. Pragmatism helps us pull these concerns apart. It helps us speak about speaking, about systems, and about integration—in ways that return us to the democratic contexts within which interdisciplinary inquiry is meaningful. After deflating and democratizing these matters, I forward Philip Kitcher’s recent articulation of well-ordered science as a useful heuristic for idealizing integration for interdisciplinary collaborators.

II. Discipline, Inquiry, and Value

The standard picture of interdisciplinary collaboration invests heavily in the subject matters about which different disciplines speak. A common parable is that of several blind men examining an elephant; it is only by investigating each part of the pachyderm that a complete account is composed (Baerwald; Nissani). Disciplinary scientists participate in interdisciplinary endeavors in like fashion; they each offer different parts of the whole, and once these parts are brought together, decision makers deploy their own values when choosing an action (Norton). As soon as the challenge of interdisciplinarity is put thusly, the solution to the challenge is naturally a matter of communicating more effectively. Because biologists speak about cells and sequencing and sociologists speak about power and participatory observation, communication between the different scientists is far from straightforward. When problems seem to involve both cells and power, however, the involvement of both disciplines seems required. Theorists of interdisciplinarity stress that these...