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.