A start

"If Darwin were alive today, he clearly would have been an obsessive blogger." Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford 2009): 76.

Background

Although I have been corresponding online from before the time when NetNorth (Canada), Bitnet (US) and Janet (UK) became the Internet and before the Web became a household word, this is my first blog. Colleagues have said that I have been proto-blogging on the electronic seminar Humanist from its beginnings in 1987, but I don’t think they are paying close enough attention to the relationship of form to formed. A blog (fr. “weblog”, which suggests to me a blend of diary and ship’s log) is a different creature from the dominant mechanism of those days, a multiple-recipient e-mailer. A blog, I’d guess, has a more meditative, interior trajectory, an e-mailer a more conversational tendency. Even a tabula rasa remains a tabula.

So, what is this blog? My guess is: an experiment to discover what the Editor of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews thinks about the journal as it is happening (thoughts mostly unknown, perhaps even to himself), and then whether these thoughts are of interest to readers.

Why might they be? I think they might because ISR is at the forefront of attempts to realize, reflect on and give meaning to the qualities of genuinely interdisciplinary research across all the disciplines, especially between the sciences and the humanities. It is true that interdisciplinary research is as old as disciplines and that it has been promoted since the early 20th Century. But knowledge practices are slow to change and even slower to become objects of enquiry. When Anthony Michaelis founded ISR in 1976, he felt the need to enclose “interdisciplinary” in quotation marks, denoting almost a neologism. Now, more than 40 years later, claims of “interdisciplinarity” are rife, seemingly a condition of grant-getting and academic respectability. But I confess unease with the abstract noun and the pointless ontological argument it seems endlessly to generate. I think we need to know how interdisciplinary research is done, and done well, rather than what interdisciplinarity is. The Oxford English Dictionary helps in its discussion of the root-term by showing that discipline is fundamentally concerned “with practice or exercise” rather than with theory. So also its extension to interchange among disciplines.

Slowly ISR has expanded its scope from interchange among the natural sciences (Michaelis’ focus) to the humanities, arts and social sciences, where the refiguration of disciplinary thought that Clifford Geertz noticed in the early 1980s continues apace. But work beyond areas of narrow specialization is still largely unrewarded as well as poorly understood. For that reason ISR receives a lamentably meagre trickle of unsolicited submissions, enough to populate one issue every other year at best. Its function has rather proven to be best served through commissioned and mostly guest-edited issues, which are nevertheless rigorously peer-reviewed.

ISR 35.3-4: “History and human nature”

The forthcoming issue of ISR, “History and human nature”, splendidly illustrates the journal’s intentions and potential. As the brief introductory editorial explains, the issue grew out of Editorial Board member Brad Inwood’s suggestion to approach G. E. R. Lloyd for an essay along the lines of his recent book, Cognitive Variations (Oxford 2007), which we both admired, and to ask him to name co-contributors whose commentary he would most like to have. He eagerly agreed, naming a dozen and a half scholars from around the world. Almost all of them agreed. In turn we asked each contributor to name readers, thus greatly widening the circle of collaborators and disciplines. The width of that circle gives some indication of how magnanimous Lloyd’s treatment of his subject is.

My reaction? As a scholar I live for opportunities to work with such colleagues and to see such a result.

“History and human nature” is important to ISR’s long-term project in a number of respects. The distinction and attention it brings to the journal is of course most welcome. But far more important is advancing Lloyd’s argument on cognitive variation in humankind, with its implications for our understanding of what it might mean to be interdisciplinary – i.e., able to see what others see as they see it, to operate on it as they would and discuss it in terms they would recognize. In his opening contribution Lloyd refers to the effort as building “bridgeheads of intelligibility” – notably an ongoing process that does not presume a neutral standing point but works toward better (and badly needed) communication among disciplines. Some, most notably Stanley Fish, have argued that since perfect neutrality is impossible, the attempt is illegitimate. His would be the last word on the subject if the point were to be, rather than try to become, interdisciplinary. The authors of “History and human nature” show how exciting, even thrilling, and profoundly informative the striving is when done with such intelligence and care.

This issue is also important to ISR because it exemplifies scholarly collaboration and so gives genuine meaning to a “transcendental virtue” (Peter Galison’s term) against which the work of the caricatured “lone scholar” is nowadays unfavourably compared. The particular rhythm of conversation among scholars set by the medium of a printed journal and the reader’s imaginative participation at the pace it determines are, I think, exactly right for the interchange among disciplines that the journal exists to foster.