Michael Livermore 0:11
Welcome to the free range podcast. I’m your host, Mike Livermore. This episode is sponsored by the program on law communities in the environment at the University of Virginia School of Law. For today’s episode, we’re trying something different. This is the last recording of the first season of free range. And it’s also the end of 2022. So I thought I’d try an experiment with a solo podcast. So no guests, just me talking for an hour or so. I’m not sure how much of an audience there’s going to be for this, but I thought I would give it a go. So the theory of the podcast is really just to provide me in some sense, with an opportunity to speak with guests with lots of different backgrounds and perspectives, about issues related to the environment and sustainability. It’s, it’s fun for me, I hope that there’s others in the world who enjoy it as well. But it is interesting to consider why this is valuable, you know, why this is a valuable thing to do, if it is a valuable thing to do, you know, this, this idea of kind of engaging across disciplinary boundaries, you know, I could have a different podcast that in which I talked to other legal scholars, or, you know, kind of, or even more specifically, just to other environmental law scholars, there’s plenty of environmental law scholars out there, we have plenty to talk about, you know, kind of stick within that disciplinary you know, that those disciplinary boundaries and, and have certainly many productive conversations. So my why this, why this alternative approach of, you know, talking with economists and philosophers and Religious Studies professors, and natural scientists, and folks from all these different fields. Now, it’s common to bemoan the intellectual silos that we, that we find ourselves with in the, in the academy in the university, right, the, you know, we do have disciplines, and we have departments. And, you know, folks will say, Well, you know, because it’s bad to be siloed into these departments, it’s bad to be cut off to have disciplinary boundaries. You know, that sounds like a bad thing, it sounds like you don’t be cut off from any angle and being in a silo doesn’t sound particularly beneficial or a, you know, a great way of opening your mind, it’s broadening your horizons. So, you know, there’s that kind of intuitive way of thinking about the interdisciplinary thing, and why you might want to engage. But we also need to kind of recognize that there are trade offs involved. You know, when you engage with folks across disciplinary boundaries, across disciplines, there’s the potential for confusion, people don’t necessarily have easy ways of talking to each other. One of the benefits of disciplines and, you know, operating within your discipline is that you develop a shared lingo, shared understandings, it’s easier to have conversations, there’s a compact ground of assumed knowledge that you can work with, right, so you don’t kind of starting from scratch in every conversation. And also even more, even at a higher level of abstraction, there’s just a trade off between being a generalist versus being a specialist. There’s only so many hours in a day there, you know, my brain at least is I’m keenly aware of the finite nature of the amount of information that I can hold in my head, how much time it takes me to acquire information and to learn new things. And, and we just have to, we have to make that trade off. And, you know, we you can’t be you know, a total generalist and be a specialist on absolutely everything, that’s just literally impossible, you cannot have knowledge that is maximally broad and maximally deep, just given the finite nature of our cognitive resources there, you have to make a trade off between these things, you know, so nevertheless, I’ve kind of come to think of myself over time as the scholar who does really engage in interdisciplinary projects of different kinds. So I think it is worth you know, dealing with some of these trade offs and you know, as between being a generalist and being a specialist, I tilt more towards having more of a general approach, although I do recognize that comes with trade offs in terms of my specialist knowledge that I might otherwise have, have acquired. You know, it’s a little easier for me, given my particular place in the in the university at a law school, as a, as a legal academic, there’s, it’s kind of actually a natural fit to engage in some amount of interdisciplinary thinking or to take an interdisciplinary approach to questions. You know, if there’s different ways of thinking about law schools, certainly law schools or professional schools, we prepare lawyers for legal practice and for going out in the world and doing their jobs. But in terms of how law schools are organized, as an intellectual enterprise, and you know, for the production of knowledge, what we share in a law faculty these days in the 21st century, isn’t so much a way of approaching questions or discipline is more an object of study, we’re, what we’re all interested in, or at least what we are professionally interested in, in our scholarship is the law. But at a law school, again, at least at a US law school, beginning of the 20th 21st century. Although we share that common object of study that common interest, we take very different methodological disciplinary perspectives on that object of study. So there are folks here at the University of Virginia Law School, who are economists. So they come at the question of law and legal institutions, using the tools and asking the questions that are common in the economics discipline. So doing doing data analysis, identifying what the causal factors are, that affect judicial decision making, or identifying how changes in legal regimes affect real world outcomes. Right. So that’s, those are economists, we have philosophers on the faculty here who think about the law, normatively and concerned, you know, consider questions like, you know, what are the underlying normative principles that motivate anti discrimination law? Or how do we think about, you know, retribution in the criminal justice system? We have, you know, political scientists who, you know, are interested in applying social science techniques to political institutions, voting, you know, thinking about the role of ideology and legal decision making, and the like. So, and then even more broadly, you can have anthropologists, sociologists, historians, you know, many different disciplines are engaged in the project of understanding the law historians, of course, is a huge one, I should just mention, we have a number of historians at UVA law as well. And you know, they’re they’re looking taking a different perspective and looking at the development of law over time, obviously, kind of history is embedded in this question of time, but having different methods, right, not as focused, for example, on collecting data, as the economist might be more different kinds of data, not quantitative data, but going to historical archives, for example, or reading the communications between judges and their friends or between different legal actors engaging with different kinds of materials, to understand the world in different interpretive methods, right. So the economists are very interested in causal identification and isolating causal mechanisms, and building and identifying data structures that allow them to do that. Historians aren’t going to be as focused on that, that’s just not how the field of history operates is, it would be very constraining, for historians to be as obsessed with causal inferences. Economists are these days. And so, you know, historians are encased in a different interpretive task, staying close to their materials, but, but with a kind of different explanatory motivation. So in any case, being at a law school is, you know, is is very, it’s very natural for me to have a kind of interdisciplinary orientation. And I’ve taken that into my own work. I’ve, you know, engaged with folks in the social sciences, with people in philosophy with people in computer science and natural language processing, and lots of different projects. And so I found it to be really fruitful, but it is, again, not necessarily for everybody, and it’s worth considering, you know, both. Why, why is it worthwhile to engage in interdisciplinary scholarship, or to just engage in an interdisciplinary way, and then how to do that, you know, are there you know, ways that we can do that that are more fruitful than others. And so that’s what I thought I would talk Little bit about in this in this solo episode, our questions around interdisciplinary scholarship, interdisciplinary engagement. Why do we do it? Why is it useful? You know, how can we do it in a way that’s productive? Just as a little note, I’m going to use the word interdisciplinary but within the field, there’s, there’s some different lingo that people that people favor and like for different reasons. So there are terms like transdisciplinary, cross disciplinary. And I’m just going to use the term interdisciplinary as a catch all for all of these, notwithstanding that migrate on some people, but just for the sake of simplicity, use the determinant of disciplinary to be kind of a higher level category that these other other terms fall into. And really just meeting all of the various ways that people might work with each other engage across traditional disciplinary boundaries.
Okay, so maybe to start with, it’s worth providing a little bit of a defense of disciplines, academic disciplines, not a defensive discipline, self discipline, that might, self self discipline might be great. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about academic disciplines. So why, why do we have them and and for, for purposes today, when I’m going to kind of talk a little bit about is not the historical explanation for why we have the disciplines we do? Or, you know, how, how the kind of current structure of the university came about, that’s very interesting for historians of science and historians at the university. You know, no doubt, there’s lots of interesting work on that. But what I’m thinking about is more how disciplines what a functional explanation for disciplines, you know, what value do they have? What role do they play? That’s what I’m, that’s what I’m kind of thinking about when I say why not kind of historical why, but a functional why, you know, what’s the best interpretation if you’re going to think of it as being having a goal or a purpose. And also just note that there is a relationship between academic disciplines and academic departments that can be a little confusing, right? Because economics is both a discipline and department, law, I would argue, at least is a department or actually a school here. But it’s not really a discipline properly understood. Or at the very least, there’s less people in the law school, who are not doing the discipline of law, even if there is a discipline of law. So, so in any case, there’s an overlap between these things. But I’m really, and I think, in this context of, you know, think about interdisciplinary scholarship, or interdisciplinary engagement, really not thinking just about, hey, people in different departments, and it’s just a matter of like walking across the hall to chat with somebody else who happens to just be, you know, have a different kind of departmental address than you that’s, in some sense, straightforward, something overly complicated about that. Disciplines are more of kind of intellectual structures. And as such, they create special, you know, that boundary between disciplines is more kind of real and meaningful than just simply an arbitrary bureaucratic designation. So that’s kind of what I’m, what I’m focused on. So one of the reasons, or one of the defenses that I would offer a functional defense of disciplines, and this isn’t going to be overly novel, but it’s worth getting on the table, is that they help us structure our knowledge production. Right? And so, and you can see this, when you you know, consider what the, what the actual, what are what are some kind of classic disciplines? And one question that we can ask that’s relevant here is whether the disciplinary boundaries that we see when we look at the university, or we look at kind of academia broadly, whether those will might say, carve up the world at the joints, you know, are these just arbitrary, right, just kind of, you know, created on a whim historically contingent separations of people and fields of study, or do they seem to map on to something important about the world actually, it’s not just totally, totally a matter of historic contingency, totally arbitrary, rather, there’s actually seems to be some way in which disciplinary boundaries map onto something kind of real about the world. So what are some of the ways that you know, we might we see, you know, the disciplines showing up in the, in the university? So for example, in the, in the hard sciences, at least, you see disciplines emerging, essentially at different scales. You know, one of the ways that you could talk about this is in terms of emergent phenomena, right? So that you maybe start with physics, which, of course, at the smallest, small scales, and the biggest scales, cosmology, obviously, is at very large scales, right. And so you have those kind of extreme scales, in, in physics, and then, you know, you kind of, at least from the, at the micro scale, you move up from the absolute smallest scales of, you know, particles and their interactions. And, and so, smaller than particle entities, as you move up, and then you get into, like, the field of chemistry, which is operating at a higher physical scale, larger things, molecules, and you’re looking at those interactions. You know, there’s kind of a deep question of whether you need if you had a full understanding of the, at the more, quote unquote, foundational or smaller scale, would you even need the field of chemistry, which could just be completely kind of collapsed and subsumed in? In the field of physics? And putting that question aside, we don’t really need to get to that. Because what what we do know, is, at least with our current understanding of physics, and our current ability to model, what we do understand about physics, it’s a heck of a lot easier to understand what’s going on with chemistry, by studying chemical reactions in the field of chemistry at the level of chemistry, rather than trying to model everything from the ground up. And so there are, there’s all kinds of value of constructing your models at different scales. And then, you know, we can move up, again to higher, higher physical scales, thinking in terms of biology, or ecological systems. And again, what we do in all of these, at each of these levels, is we add a scale for models, essentially, that we can say, we’re going to talk about cells. And we’re going to talk about the functioning of cells at the functioning of components of cells. And that’s this kind of scale that we’re going to talk about in a given, you know, in a given field. And that’s really useful, rather than trying to keep track of you know, every photon and electron in in a molecule and not just a molecule in a cell, which would be like a huge number. And you’re gonna write run the Schrodinger equation or something to try to understand something about these kinds of cellular dynamics, or how proteins work or whatever in a particular in a particular cell or particular context, or you’re going to think about viruses and how they interact with the cells, but it would be so computationally complex to try to run that mapping every subatomic particle. And so you don’t do that. Instead, you construct entirely different models and entirely different scales, to understand cells, and then of course, if you think about an ecosystem, forget about obviously, you’re not going to map the, you know, an ecosystem at the level of, you know, particle physics. And, you know, so not only are you buying, like a much simplified version of the world, you know, arguably, you know, these models work because they’re picking up on real phenomena that just exist at these different scales, when you could call them emergent phenomena, if we want. Obviously, the term emergent has some different uses of that term. You know, hard emergence versus soft emergence, the like, so what I’m talking about here, is really soft emergence, where hard emergence is things like, you know, where it’s kind of like impossible to understand system level dynamics based on a lower level kind of subsystem representation, and that there are subsystem level phenomena that literally can’t be modeled or understood. Not necessarily talking about that. Maybe, for purposes of today, I’m just agnostic about that. Really, it’s just that it is much much, much easier to model the system at higher higher scales is much less computationally complex, that there are macro scale phenomenon that you can capture and describe and model and predict and understand. They’ll require the finer grained representation at some lower, lower scale. So that seems real. That’s the point there, that doesn’t seem just like an arbitrary historical contingency, or, you know, some academic administrator in the Middle Ages made some decision. And you know, we’re all kind of stuck with it these days, this seems to represent real differences in the world. And of course, the carving line might be in some sense, arbitrary, maybe that’s a little bit hard to know, between, say, what we treat as physics and what we treat as chemistry, what we treat as chemistry and what we treat it as biology, and of course, they these things shade into each other with, you know, there’s the field of Biophysics, where physicists are people trained in physics or applying, you know, ideas out of their domain to biological systems. And there’s organic chemistry and, you know, is ideas out of physics, like quantum mechanics are like totally integrated into the field of chemistry. So, it’s not like there’s not porous boundaries are the discomfort of hard boundary. But there is utility in modeling the world at these different scales, there’s intellectual utility, there’s utility from the perspective of knowledge and complexity, reducing the complexity, computational complexity of your models. And so that’s real. Now, the the, again, the actual dividing lines, you know, maybe there’s some arbitrariness to that and, and so this kind of goes to one possible, you know, value of interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary engagement is, you know, in as much as those boundaries are at least somewhat arbitrary. It’s good for them to be porous, so that you can have this productive crossover where you can take tools that are developed in one domain and apply them in another domain, or you can build models at a mezzo scale, maybe you have a microscale on a macroscale, and you’re interested in the mezzo scale. And given, you know, given the nature of the world, it may well be that we can, you know, we can select lots and lots and lots and lots of different scales to build our models. And so, from a, from an institutional perspective, and from an organizational perspective, it might make sense to organize our disciplines in such a way that, you know, we have some more fixed lines, but then allow for this engagement. And then we could also, you know, the, those boundaries could adapt over time, as well as our tools get better as our understanding of the world gets better. Nevertheless, again, the point here is that those disciplinary boundaries, at least a, you know, within the hard sciences, as I’m describing them, do seem to track something important about our world, and how we come to understand our world in a very general way. And, of course, we could think about something similar happening at the, within the social behavioral sciences, you know, modeling individuals, thinking about kind of fields like psychology, cognitive science, and then you know, we can kind of start to think as in terms of aggregate, smaller aggregates, larger areas, we can think, you know, feels like social psychology, thinking about how, you know, human psychology is embedded in a social environment, fields, like sociology or economics, that are modeling, you know, big groups. You know, in the field, like economics, we are abstracted, you know, the idea is to extract away from a lot of the individual variation, that happens, you know, treat people in models as fairly simplified agents, again, for modeling purposes, it’s a heck of a lot easier to do that, rather than try to capture an enormous amount of psychological richness in an economic model, which should essentially make the model unbelievably difficult to compute, if you’re going to have, you know, a million or a billion agents interacting with each other. Very difficult to do, it’s not clear what you would buy from that in terms of helping you address the questions that economists are interested in. So that’s within the kind of the hard and the social sciences. And again, you know, we have emergent phenomena, we have, you know, structuring inquiry at different levels of phenomena that we might be interested in. Then, of course, the other kind of big divide in, in academic life is between the sciences and humanities, it’s actually worth thinking about whether that tracks anything meaningful. So that’s going to be very different, though, if it does, because we’re not talking about scales really, when we talk about the sciences versus the humanities. And another issue that I think arises here is that humanities is itself maybe not a wonderful category, or at least not a wonderful category, compared to the sciences where this does a fair amount that holds sciences together. Even if there’s a lot of differences between physics and economics, like lots and lots of differences. That is true, but there’s something that holds them together in a way that to anthropology history and philosophy of mind say, don’t have, it’s not clear what exactly hold them together, right. So. So that’s kind of a tricky thing about talking about, about the humanities versus the sciences generally. But in any case, you know, if we think about the humanities, you know, what, in the world or in how we come to know about the world, are we, you know, as we, we break off the humanities disciplines from each other, it does seem that there’s something tracked, you know, that there’s something here, although probably much more related to, to us and how we come to understand the world and something inherent in the physical world to suit the same way that like, scale, and phenomena existing at different scales, really seems to have some kind of deep, underlying reality to it. Whereas say, the difference between history and philosophy, and why we break those up into two different disciplines, is really much more about how we think about the world or how we come to understand the world. Maybe minutes, at least, seems that way to me. And so and even if, you know, something like philosophy, or field, like philosophy is really a bunch of different fields is philosophy of mine, this philosophy of language, you know, those kinds of disciplines, those kinds of, you know, folks that engaged in that work do very different stuff than people are engaged in political morality or in kind of ethics. It’s different ways in people engage in meta ethics are very different from people, you know, which are questions, of course about like, things like, you know, can you do moral statements of truth, that kind of work is very different from Applied Ethics, where you’re asking questions about, say, you know, reproductive technology, and, you know, the ethics and morality of that. So, so any case, lot of stuff that’s kind of gets clumped together in the humanities in ways that maybe are not as obviously sensible as we might think some of the organizing that happens in the sciences might be, you know, with you have, like a continental philosophy before interested in like Hegel, and, you know, it’s very different from the analytic philosophy, and that you see, in different, you know, different philosophers that are interested in that stuff. So. So any case, it’s interesting, there are ways in which the humanities does sometimes feel like a category that just lots of stuff gets crammed into it. So, you know, maybe that tells us a little something about where the state of the world is with respect to the sciences versus the humanities, in the, in the, in the in university life, you know, there’s also fields like my own, we know which kind of functionally organized along be professional lines like engineering, or law or business, were actually really those are very interdisciplinary in a lot of ways. You know, this, this could be different disciplines brought to bear in those fields, but they’re organized for educational reasons, perhaps, although also, you know, to some extent, organized along intellectual lines, for knowledge production as well. Now, just another point that’s worth considering here is a big, at least cultural distinction within different fields are, is quantitative versus qualitative disciplines. And so that’s kind of one way of looking in a rough way at science versus humanities as well is thinking okay, well, the scientific disciplines or the quantitative disciplines, and the, the humanistic disciplines to the qualitative disciplines. I’m not sure I’m particularly in love with that way of understanding the science Humanities distinction, in part because I’m actually not sure where math goes. Mathematics, I think there’s a case to be made that mathematics is probably understood as a humanistic discipline, rather than a scientific discipline, just because the the mode of inquiry in mathematics is, you know, just kind of pure logic and is not really empirical. It’s not about making theories and testing them against, you know, the data from the world in the way that science is, is the, you know, what holds scientific inquiry together, at least in my mind is exactly that is just the empirical nature of the project. And it’s not clear that mathematics is operating in the same way. And so you know, it there’s there are similarities between field like mathematics and a field like logic which you would have in a philosophy department, or even I think fields like meta ethics or theory of mind, philosophy of mind again, wish you would have more philosophy Herman now, of course, mathematics is very different from history, or anthropology. But you know, that’s the thing about the humanities is is pretty, pretty diverse. So, so, so these are so so that, all of that is just to say that the disciplines that we have, at least in some general sense, do seem to map onto either real features of the world, or, you know, big ways that we are engaged in the process of producing knowledge and thinking about the world, you know, the difference between, say, you know, historians and philosophers, they’re doing very different things. Now, again, there can be Borderlands between the two where historian might be interested in history of philosophy, or a philosopher might be interested in historical figures like Locke, of course, or Aristotle. And that certainly happens and it’s true and so there’s a lot of philosophers who are very interested in classical philosophy. But the way that a philosopher approaches Aristotle is very different from the way that historians gonna approach a figure like Aristotle, to the extent they care about a figure like Aristotle, but we’re more interested to take a more recent group like the American pragmatists, John Dewey, or William James, a historian is interested in the turn of the century or early 20th century philosophy. Philosophers are really going to be looking at those philosophers as embedded in their cultural contacts, and how they’re talking to each other. And maybe you want to read their letters. And, you know, that’s a different methodology than a philosopher who’s going to really, you know, maybe look at the letters, but again, they’re not trying to understand how these people are relating to each other on a personal level, or, you know, that kind of thing. For the most part, what they’re interested in is their distilled ideas, you might say they’re trying to distill out their ideas, and then evaluate them according to, you know, kind of principles of reasoning and logic and that kind of thing, just a very different exercise. So when I think about discipline, so all that all that hadn’t been said, when I think about disciplines as ways of structuring inquiry, and this is, again, all in the service of a defense of disciplines as at least as a starting place, is that they, you know, there are some things that matter that help us organize our, our inquiries. And some of these things that matter are like the object of study, you know, what are we studying? We’re still law, we’re interested in cells, you know, we’re interested in, you know, market interactions and commerce, right, whatever it is, we have some things that we’re studying, or were interested in, we’re interested in ethics. We’re interested in classical Greece and what happened in classical Greece, right? We’re, we’re interested in you know, the Reimann conjecture. These are things that organize that we’re that we’re going to spend our time thinking about. Okay, so these are objects of study. And then there are questions that we’re going to ask about the object to study. Right. So I’ll just take law as an example, because I’m familiar with the area. So we can ask things like, is the, you know, this are the decisions of the US Supreme Court on free speech justified on the basis of prior decision making, right, that would prior judicial opinions, that would be a very kind of legal doctrinal approach, and to the extent that there is a method to law and legal analysis? You can answer that question internal to law. You know, just the norms of how one does legal analysis, or we can ask a question like, you know, how has the change in presidents or change in politics, affected the court’s jurisprudence be more of a social science or historical kind of question? Or we could ask, you know, is the courts you know, or the way that we’ve structured speech protections, the United States kind of consistent with a good society, or with democratic norms or with norms of personal liberty or whatever, right? That’d be kind of your philosophical normative way of asking these questions. So we can have an objective setting, we have different questions that we might ask, and then we have methods for addressing those questions. Right? How do people and how do we actually once we’ve asked a question, is the free speech jurisprudence of the court consistent with, you know, a liberal democracy, right, or with or exceed human flourishing general is very general, but is this with human wellbeing? Right? Does it maximize aggregate welfare, that’d be another way to ask that question within a consequentialist moral framework? And so then, you know, again, we can kind of have ways of answering this question. So if we’re gonna ask a social science question, how has the you know the courts free speech, you know, affected Say, you know religiosity let’s just say, let’s just imagine that we could study something that’s very hard to study that stuff. But you can ask that question. And, you know, you would, as a social scientist, you would, at least in principle, have a sense of how you might try to get it. The answer to that question, right? Maybe, if somehow you could, you know, let’s let’s just say, hypothetically, you had, instead of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, that’s really hard to study, you can study state level jurisprudence, and some states adopt different free speech norms than others, or maybe it happens in different circuits at different times. And then you can, you know, and it’s kind of random, maybe, you know, because judges are assigned randomly to panels. And so you could, you could try to look at kind of differences and how the judges are assigned to cases, then, you know, that’s a little bit of a randomized process. And then you use that randomization. And just the same way you do in a random randomized control trial for like a drug or a vaccine or something like that, when you have a randomized treatment here, you know, some specific decision on on First Amendment rights. And then you say, Okay, there’s treated group and a non treated group and then try to look at differences in some outcome they are interested in like religiosity that isn’t like a study that nobody would actually do, we won’t be too complicated, and you’re way unlikely to find effects. But, you know, but in principle, you can ask the question, and you’d have a method to get an answer and different types of methods, probably more than one, actually. So so these are things that help us structure our inquiry, right? We have an object of study, we have questions that we want to ask, and we have methods for addressing those questions. And when I think of, you know, the value of disciplines, what you’re really accomplishing is you’re creating collections of people that share things like objects of studies, questions and methods. And that promotes the progressive production of knowledge over time, people start to frame questions together, they’ve refined those questions, so they make more sense. We can agree on how we might approach those questions, we can build the kinds of data that we need, or the infrastructure that we might need it for historians, then the infrastructure includes things like archives, right? If we’re economists, the infrastructure includes things like datasets that we use. And there’s also intellectual infrastructure around things like in an economics inferential models or parameter estimators, whereas in history, the intellectual pieces are kind of like how, you know, interpretive methods, you know, the appropriate timescales, what you can and can’t infer from different kinds of historical sources. And so we build the physical infrastructure, we build the intellectual infrastructure that allows us to actually answer the questions that we’ve generated in the field, we’re fine, generate more questions, and progressively produce knowledge over time.
So this is all a big, long defense of disciplines, in this in is as a setup, essentially, to talk about the value and what I find attractive of interdisciplinary study and why I engage in it and why this podcast is in a way devoted to the practice of engaging in an interdisciplinary conversation. So let’s, let’s move on to that. What is the what is the value and, you know, kind of think there’s, there’s practical level value, and then there’s a higher meta value. So the practical perspective, you know, we could think of overlaps and look lacunas right, so overlaps where fields are looking at the same thing, maybe through slightly different lenses, and then then there’s going to be areas that are missed by fields. And inter disciplinary engagement can help with both of this. So I mentioned earlier, you know, just in the context of chemistry, and physics and biology, really classic, you know, ways of carving up the world. You know, there’s, there’s really the world is kind of a continuum, there’s different, you know, different scales and different levels, where we can observe phenomenon. And so, you know, any given boundary might be arbitrary. And so there might be kind of missing, missing zone in between fields, where it’s actually useful to, to model things at that scale. And so, so that just, you know, if there is a gap like that, then it’s only going to be through interdisciplinary engagement, that you can identify that gap and then maybe engage in productive knowledge production in that in that gap. And so, you know, just to give some example, and then there can also be overlaps right where you have an in you’re interested in something, but your field only kind of takes a part of the picture. And you really need to build a group of people that have like a different lens or a different knowledge base or expertise in order to have a more complete picture of the phenomena that you’re interested in. So an example might be, you know, an economist who’s modeling fisheries, right? Maybe the economist, you know, is interested in how people respond to changes in property rights regimes. And you know, there’s some different fisheries and there’s been changes and property rights regimes in those fisheries over time. And so that creates a nice context for the economist to study, you know, to study these changes. But at the same time, it might be helpful for the economist to know something, or to at least have a team of people who know something about like fish, right? If you’re studying fisheries, or ecology, or maybe these property rights, and their changes aren’t, you know, super straightforward. And so you need people with an expertise in property rights, or the relevant regulations in order to understand the consequences of, you know, some legal changes that happened over time. And so in order to get at your, you know, question that might be of interest within the domain of economics, you have to, it might be helpful, at least for the economist to work with folks from these relevant fields. Now, in this hypo, in this setup, it’s not clear that the people from the other disciplines get much out of it. Right, if we’re interested in, you know, how changes in property rights affect, you know, something like bargaining or collaborative behavior or something like that, if you privatize rights, does that mean that you know, shared, you know, shared norms are degraded or something like that, people are less likely to just offer a helping hand if they have a more well defined property rights, who knows whatever the theory is, that can exist within economics. But that’s not something that’s interesting to ecologists, or, you know, someone who’s an expert in, in, in fish biology, right, even though you might need those expertises for the project. It’s not like the paper is gonna get published in an ecology papers in ecology journals can get published in a economics journal, because you’re asking primarily economics question. So this is one value of interdisciplinary research is to combine these different expertises. But it’s a challenge, because the questions that you’re asking might not actually be of interest to people in all the different fields, it might just be that you need to draw expertise from some fields in order to ask to address questions rather, in a given field. So that’s a challenge. It’s both a value of interdisciplinary says a really obvious one obvious case for why an interdisciplinary approach might be useful, but it’s also one where you can see putting those teams together can actually be quite a challenge, because like, what’s the reward for the ecologist or the, or the biologist or for the legal expert, and they can get paid, I guess, but, but they’re not being rewarded in the kind of currency of their fields, which is, you know, they’re not producing knowledge that’s seen as valuable in their and their domains. So that’s tricky. It’s, it’s, it’s a tricky thing to develop collaborations like that, when the rewards are kind of concentrated in amongst some of the some of the players but not everybody. You know, diamond said, he was the same project, you could, in principle, if it was, this was the right project, it could be of interest to people on all of the fields, like, you know, maybe the ecologist is also interested in the effects of fishery practices on the some of these ecosystems, either the fish themselves or the prey or whatever. And so the change in property rights, you know, then leads to a downstream change in the behavior of the fishing communities, which then further has an effect on the ecology of the other relevant in the relevant areas. And so the ecologist could, in principle, get something out of the research that she could then publish in an ecology journal. But that requires a very, very special kind of like lightning in a bottle kind of project, where the team that you pulled together, there are rewards that, you know, operate for each of the components, everybody that’s in there, like, you know, our legal expert could then write a paper that’s about those legal changes or whatever. So it’s very difficult. And this is actually, you know, I think a pretty substantial challenge to interdisciplinary collaboration is identifying projects that have these kinds of mutual rewards. It’s also not clear that we need to I mean, it’s, it’s maybe a problem that we need to have these mutual awards, like maybe the incentive structure could just operate a little bit differently. So that, you know, if you’re an ecologist and you work on a paper that’s published in a major economics journal, or you’re an economist that works on a paper that’s published in a major life sciences journal, that is seen as kind of a good thing in your field, and it’s not clear that we’re there yet. I think that you you know, in part because it’s just hard to evaluate, like, how do you know? And what was the economist contribution it was it just, I guess there’s a reason why it’s not valued as much. Because, you know, here with our, with our little toy example, the economist might be, there might be something really interesting in this context to learn about, you know how people respond to changes in property rights. And there might not be anything interesting to learn from an ecology perspective, it might just be that, you know, having an ecologist on the team is useful, and maybe even vital for the production of this economics knowledge. But the level of ecologist that you have isn’t, doesn’t have to be, it could be a, you know, someone with an undergraduate and ecology or a basic understanding of ecology doesn’t have to be like a brilliant research scholar right there. Because they’re, in a sense, they’re not doing ecology research. But you know, again, that’s tricky, because a lot of times you’re trying to work with graduate students, and if an ecology graduate student is going to be on this project that graduate is going to want to see an ecology paper. And if that ecology graduate student is then on the job market looking for a job, and it’s being evaluated in their name is on an economics paper, you know, that’s not going to count for very much, and maybe it shouldn’t count for very much because it’s not commute doesn’t communicate their ability to actually carry out ecology research. So this is just to say, it’s actually very tricky. And we can kind of bemoan the incentive structure that exists and say, it’s bad for interdisciplinary collaboration. But there are reasons why some of these things are the way they are. Okay, so then, okay, just even kind of make this slightly more complicated. We could say, you know, what about a historian, can we bring in a historian into our research team, and sometimes, you know, there are actually real incentives to that kind of thing, like the NSF, if you’re writing a grant, or whoever you’re writing a grant to, if you, you know, put historian in the team, and then you can say, Oh, this is super interdisciplinary, look at how great this is. There’s at least some areas of the NSF where that kind of thing would be really favorably might anyway lead to a more favorable disposition towards your grant. But then the question is, like, what’s, what’s your historian doing? Now, it could be that your historian is offering value to the project, and there could be something really, really interesting, in a broader engagement with the history like, you know, I mean, he, of course, had to ask who this historian is, and what their, his or her expertise is, but maybe, you know, the person knows about, you know, the fishing communities that you’re studying, you know, and, you know, knows about how they came to have the property rights arrangements that they do, knows about stories of displacement, for how the communities that are there displaced others, or how the people that were there fled from, you know, other, you know, due to other kinds of historical contingencies, just the whole contingent nature of this system, that it’s that it’s endogenous, in some way to lots and lots of other features of the world. And that can be very interesting, but it’s also very, very different. It’s not clear how it interacts with the, you know, the purposes of our imagined project, right, which, at least its initiation was about coming to a more abstract understanding of the interaction of, say, property rights and, and some kind of behavior sake collaborative behavior. If, you know, that’s what is the motivating force behind the project, then it could very well be that all this historical information is, besides the point of this particular project, which doesn’t mean it’s not interesting doesn’t mean it’s not worth knowing, doesn’t mean it’s not worth the history, you know, historical research on those questions, but it’s not clear what you get out of the aggregation of these projects. There’s also other difficulties, like the timescales involved, you know, a historian who’s interested in, you know, questions about, you know, some set of fishing communities, for example, is going to be publishing in entirely different ways. You know, maybe, you know, it’d be part of a broader book project on, you know, coastal, coastal, you know, Americans living in whatever the, the, you know, the early 20th century, right. And, and so, given the publication timelines, and the length of the projects, and, you know, all of that creates complications for people interacting with each other and trying to, in trying to build a collaborative research team, so. So any case, this is just to say that the little hypo, is a illustration of both the potential value of interdisciplinary collaborations why it’s almost like necessary in some cases to draw expertise from different areas to get at a research question, but also, you know, also the difficulty of doing it and some of the some of the challenges. There are lots of other, you know, areas that you could think of, I mean, tons just, you know, extraordinarily large number of areas where interdisciplinary collaborations are being done or could be done. You know, just to give another example, where just so I didn’t create the impression that humanities and sciences can’t work together, humanists and scientists in a productive way, you know, a bunch of research was done, on deliberation by folks in the behavioral sciences, that was motivated in part by work that was being done in political morality, political theory on in the field of deliberative democracy. So there was a whole flourishing of literature on, you know, normative theories of democracy, and like the 90s, in particular, dealing with or, you know, kind of arguing in favor of a deliberative model of democracy, sometimes for civic Republican models, of, of democracy, basically, the idea is that, prior to that, we had a very thin conception of democracy that was really about voting and aggregating preferences. And actually, a thicker conception of democracy would involve, how we come to our preferences and how we come to hold the views that we hold about how best to live together in society. And so we should fold in a notion of, you know, that that preference formation, deliberation, public discourse process into our theory of democracy, and out of that, in part out of that are motivated certainly by that line of, of work in writing in in political morality, political philosophy, social scientists became more interested in questions about how groups deliberate with each other, and, you know, research teams, collaborations between philosophers and political theorists and social scientists, political scientists, social psychologists, and the like, there’s a whole research field emerge on this question of deliberation. And in group deliberation, group dynamics, the outputs of which were actually really deflating for deliberative democracy as a theory, because it basically turns out when people deliberate, they tend to like polarize, or their views become more extreme, if they’re with members of the same group, they become more extreme deliberation and participation seem to be at loggerheads with each other, whereas the more people are exposed to ideas that are different from theirs, the less likely they are to want to engage in politics. And so it’s like, the people who get engaged are the ones who are like in their bubbles, and never have to engage with people who have different views for them. And then they get really like, you know, polarized and in and motivated to engage in politics. So there’s this like trade off between deliberation of the kind that we would want, right, which would involve engagement with people who have different political views than you do. And participation. Right. So so any case, it’s a tricky story, and, again, was this little deflationary for some of the most enthusiastic proponents of deliberative democracy as a normative model, but, but nevertheless, very useful, and a really nice example of humanity’s collaboration that was interesting for both, it was interesting for the humanists, because, you know, this political morality, in part had an empirical component to it about, you know, what, what happened in the world when people deliberate, that was definitely part of what motivated the whole movement towards deliberated democracy was, was some theories at least or some hypotheses about what would happen when people deliberate and how they would, you know, I mean, broadly, that the hope would be that they would come to a better understanding of each other’s views that would actually be reducing of tensions and that kind of thing. And then you have the empirical question of whether that’s actually true, and, and fields, social behavioral sciences, folks in those domains can help answer some of those questions. And so it’s super productive from for both the philosophical discourse. And just within the behavior of social sciences, we are the question about group dynamics and deliberation, was really motivated out of the humanities and then in the ethical and moral arguments being made there. So provided them with a set of questions, and there was an empirical component to it, and then they could they could use their tool science. So that was a really interesting example of, of interdisciplinary collaboration.
Okay, so I’m going to wrap up because, you know, it’s been, if you’re still with me, at this point, I appreciate you, your sustained concentration and willingness to stick to this to this conversation. I’m just going to end with some some thoughts both on what helps make interdisciplinary collaboration work and some final comments on what I think some motivations for it are, besides the kind of practical ones that I’ve been talking about a little bit. So in terms of things that work, obviously, maybe I’m not going to dwell too much on this. You know, obviously things like respect for each other’s disciplines and taking the time to actually understand what motivates people. I think that the the framework of understanding, at least at a high level of generality in another field, what is the object of study that they’re interested in? What are some of the questions that motivate them? How do they go about answering those questions, and really having a sense of that for the different disciplines that you’re interacting with can be very helpful and can help frame interdisciplinary projects so that they’re successful, knowing the difference between normative and empirical questions, knowing that the either the empirical predicates to your normative inquiries, if you’re in a normative discipline, or the normative predicates to your empirical inquiries, if you’re an empirical discipline is something again, that can be really helpful and can help open up areas for for cross disciplinary collaboration. The final thing I’ll just kind of point I wanted to make is that one of the kind of motivations for me personally, and I think for others who are engaged in a disciplinary engagement of various kinds, is just, it helps to facilitate the understanding and appreciation of the incredible accomplishment of people engaged in intellectual life, and scientific inquiry and humanistic inquiry and philosophy and history. And, and then the hard sciences and the social sciences, that this is just an incredible collective project that has had just huge successes, an enormous amount of collective effort has gone into it. And it’s something that, you know, is really, it’s a marvel, and it’s it’s wondrous. And having, you know, just being interested in that and wanting to appreciate it is something that I think drives a lot of interdisciplinary engagement. One of the ways I think about this is almost like an aesthetic of knowledge, the same way that, you know, we might appreciate art, or we might appreciate nature, or we might appreciate human accomplishments in other domains, like, I don’t know, sports, or technology or other domains of culture, music, can also appreciate the accomplishments of Science, and Mathematics, and philosophy, and all the different intellectual disciplines that you know, are engaged in knowledge production, and to have that aesthetic to be able to engage in that appreciation, we need to understand what the questions are, why they’re hard to answer, why they’re interesting, and why answering them or getting at them is such an incredible accomplishment. And, you know, when you have that underlying knowledge that provides you with the capacity to engage in this aesthetic appreciation of just really marveling at that tremendous, you know, a collective accomplishment, and it’s just really just, this adds to our experience of the world. You know, the reality is, life is difficult. I’m not sure it’s, it’s more difficult now than it was in the past. But, you know, there’s the first noble truth of Buddhism is, life is suffering, right? And that idea has been with us for 1000s of years. And there’s still some truth to that, or, you know, at least arguably, today, and you know, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t see, you know, what is beautiful around us. And that’s, that’s the nature of aesthetic appreciation. And there’s some way in which we can all be part of the human project of curiosity, and learning. And we just have that capacity when we come into the world. And part of the urge to interdisciplinary engagement, I think stems from this natural and innate way of being in the world that we can cultivate in ourselves, even if the motivation isn’t necessarily to produce knowledge or engage in some project ourselves, but is, you know, simply and importantly, so that we can appreciate the contributions of others. And again, this tremendous, collective, intellectual project. So at a very high level of abstraction, that’s the goal of free range is to is provide me with an opportunity to cultivate that understanding is to provide others with an opportunity as well. It’s been a fun first season. I look forward to other seasons in the future.
Free Range Podcast 