more on interdisciplinarity

It made sense to me to follow Julie Thompson Klein’s Notes Toward a Social Epistemology of Transdisciplinarity with Moti Nissani’s Ten Cheers for Interdisciplinarity: The Case for Interdisciplinary Knowledge and Research.

It’s a neat piece, making many familiar claims from the postmodern camp. The general thrust of the article is that it is no longer possible to have systemic view of knowledge, but that working across disciplines has many benefits.

The following top-10 list is from the abstract:

1. Creativity often requires interdisciplinary knowledge
2. Immigrants often make important contributions to their new field
3. Disciplinarians often commit errors which can be best detected by people familiar with two or more disciplines
5. Many intellectual, social, and practical problems require interdisicplinary approaches
6. Interdisciplinary knowledge and research serve to remind us of the unity-of-knowledge ideal.
7. Interdisciplinarians enjoy a greater flexibility in their research.
8. More so than narrow disciplinarians, interdisciplinarians often treat themselves to the intellectual equivalent of traveling in new lands.
9. Interdisciplinarians may help breach communication gaps in the modern academy, thereby helping to mobilize its enormous intellectual resources in the cause of greater social rationality and justice.
10. By bridging fragmented disciplines, interdisciplinarians s might play a role in the defense of academic freedom.

article: social epistemology of transdisciplinarity

Julie Thompson Klein’s Notes Toward a Social Epistemology of Transdisciplinarity has the potential to be really useful in a LIS context.  One of the knowledge/library issues I’ve been particularly interested in, is how the linear arrangement of information in a physical library can help or hinder a research question depending on the disciplinary context the researcher is coming from.

I really experienced this when working on my annotated bibliography for reference class.  Studying the feminist critique of science lead to a lot of resources in the social sciences.  Those, nearly, uniformly presented a similar accepted knowledge base.  There were a few texts in the sciences section, too, but those came at the subject from an entirely different perspective.  A feminist researcher approaching the questions would get a very different perspective on the issue depending on their academic area of interest.

Thompson Klein discusses how the world, in general, is more complex and interconnected than it once was, and we’re seeing that in academic subjects as well.  She cited women’s studies, systems thinking, peace studies, cognitive science, etc, as examples of new disciplines that are interdisciplinary.  Thompson Klein also pointed out that traditional areas of study sometimes borrow from other fields.  For example, an organisim can be considered in terms of culture, biology, and chemistry.  A political system can be considered in terms of political science, economics, or sociology.  In a sense, this project is borrowing from other disciplines to consider the more traditional aspects of LIS.

Also, Thompson Klein discusses “social epistemology of knowledge practices.”  This phrase might actually be a good phrase for what I’m investigating.  This could encompass the online social technologies that are interesting to me as well.  The blogging chapter hasn’t been published yet, by the way.  I’m looking into it.

article: individual knowers & community

Capurro, Rafael. “Hermeneutics and the Phenomenon of Information.” Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Technology. Ed. Carl Mitcham. Vol. 19. Research in Philosophy and Technology: JAI/Elsevier Inc., 2000.

The paper starts with a basic question: “What is information?”

It follows with an answer: “Some characteristics of the end of modernity are:
(a) abandonment of the primacy of rational or scientific thought as qualitatively superior to all other types of discourse
(b) abandonment of the idea of human subjectivity as opposed to objectivity, in which intersubjectivity and contextuality play only minor roles
(c) abandonment of the (Platonic) idea of human knowledge as something separate from the knower.”

This discussion pretty much fits with my understanding of the state of postmodern epistemology.

The author discusses “fragmented knowledge,” which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately… particularly in terms of search. It’s possible to use Google to find spellings, addresses, definitions, and other quick information without ever leaving the google page to see the site where the information resides. What does this decontextualization mean for the information seeker? Does one implicitly trust all websites because Google just finds them? How does fragmented knowledge impact people’s ability to have complex thoughts?

Another area I found particularly interesting was the discussion of knowers within the context of their individual communities. This individual community member interacts with the bibliographic database creator or web designer, even though the creator or designer may belong to an entirely different community. Does this even matter in an era when culture is becoming more homogonous?

Anyway, it was an interesting and short article!